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Talaga debuts Massey Lecture series in Thunder Bay

Indigenous cultural genocide has been happening globally for centuries and the world still hasn't been able to put an end to it, says the author of Seven Fallen Feathers in the first of five lectures.
Tanya Talaga
Tanya Talaga on Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018 delivers the first of five CBC Massey Lectures talks, debuting at the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium, an event sponsored by Nishnawbe Aski Nation. (Leith Dunick, tbnewswatch.com)

THUNDER BAY – In her introductory Massey Lectured speech, Tanya Talaga says governments around the world have failed Indigenous children.

The Toronto Star reporter and author of Seven Fallen Feathers, a book detailing the deaths of seven Indigenous youth in Thunder Bay, on Tuesday night began her five-part lecture series, All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, following in the footsteps of the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, in front of an overflow crowd at the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium.

The series focuses on cultural genocide against Indidgenous people in Canada and around the globe.

Talaga’s message hit home hardest when she talked about an epidemic of suicides that have plagued northern Ontario First Nations, pointing out that between 1986 and 2017, 588 people took their own lives in Nishnawbe Aski Nation, an area the size of France with a population of just 49,000.

Too many children are still born into poverty, with no access to fresh water, health care, education or safe housing, forced to travel hundreds of kilometres from their home communities to attend school with little or no adult supervision.

It’s shocking it’s still happening in 2018, Talaga said.

“These are basic rights, easily obtained by every other child in this country that is not living in a remote First Nation. These kids, they’ve experienced all of this. They are born in these circumstances, and probably one of the hardest things for them is at night they don’t have a parent or loved one that can tuck them in and tell them that they matter,” she told her hushed audience

Talaga, whose mother was raised in Ontario's Far North, pointed to the dire situation in Wapekeka First Nation and Poplar Hill First Nation, where a recent suicide pact took the lives of seven youngsters, who she proceeded to name, one by one, pausing between each girl’s name for dramatic effect.

“The Canadian health care system is failing our kids, just like the education system is failing our kids. But it didn’t have to be this way,” she said, noting that in 2016 the Wakapeka First Nation chief sent a letter to the federal government looking for immediate assistance in the form of $376,706 to help pay for mental health workers to stop the spate of suicides.

The answer he got back was absolutely shocking, and in hindsight, blindingly infuriating.

“That request was denied and why was that request denied?” Talaga asked. “It was an awkward time in the budget cycle.”

Talaga, who purposefully circled back and forth between topics during her one-hour presentation, said it doesn’t help the Indigenous psyche of how they’re portrayed in history books and in Hollywood, mentioning the myth of the noble savage.

It does nothing to help the healing process in the aftermath of a residential school system that saw Indigenous children preyed upon for generations, their shattered remains left to raise future generations.

“Those misconceptions, those ideals and beliefs, they were written in history books, they were played out in movies. Think of Burt Reynolds as Navajo Joe ... No Indigenous person sees themselves in those characters,” Talaga said, adding that North and South America were home to burgeoning 90-million-strong societies before First Contact, a fact that has conveniently left out of the modern narrative.

“There was a rich culture here. There were many rich nations here and those weren’t learned in the history books,” she said.

Talaga’s Massey Lectures series continues on Thursday in Halifax, on Oct. 23 and Oct. 24 in Vancouver, on Oct. 26 in Saskatoon and wraps up on Oct. 30 in Toronto. The lectures will be broadcast on CBC’s Ideas during the week of Nov. 12.

A book of her lectures has also been published and is available through House of Anansi Press.



Leith Dunick

About the Author: Leith Dunick

A proud Nova Scotian who has called Thunder Bay home since 2002, Leith is Dougall Media's director of news, but still likes to tell your stories too. Wants his Expos back and to see Neil Young at least one more time. Twitter: @LeithDunick
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