by Tanya Talaga
Recommended by Monia Mazigh
Seven Fallen Feathers tells the stories of seven First Nations students who were attending high school in the city far away from their homes and families.
In this book, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga looks at each of their lives and their situations while they were living in Thunder Bay, as well as the circumstances of their disappearances and deaths.
Talaga collects stories from their families and communities, as well as details from police and coroner reports, in order to try and understand not only what happened to these youth, but also how Canadian society had failed each of them.
Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that is representative of the long history of human rights violations against Indigenous peoples across Canada.
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About Monia Mazigh
Monia Mazigh is a Canadian author and academic best known for her efforts to free her husband Maher Arar from a Syrian prison. Her memoir Hope and Despair: My Struggle to Free My Husband, Maher Arar (McClelland and Stewart 2008, translated by Patricia Claxton and Fred Reed) documents her ordeal after her husband was arrested and how she campaigned to clear his name. With her latest book, Hope Has Two Daughters (Anansi 2017), translated by Fred Reed), Mazigh weaves a bracing and vividly-told story set against the backdrops of the Tunisian Bread Riots in 1984 and the Jasmine Revolution in 2010. Mazigh’s other works include Mirrors and Mirages (Anansi, 2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award in the original French, and Random Thoughts About Feminism, a story that appears in Resilience and Triumph: Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories (Second Story Press, 2015). Born and raised in Tunisia, Mazigh immigrated to Canada in 1991. She holds a PhD in finance from McGill University and taught at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC. Mazigh lives in Ottawa with her husband and two children. She is a regular blogger in English and French on her website https://moniamazigh.wordpress.com.
About the Author
Tanya Talaga
Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe writer who grew up in Toronto but spent part of each year in the area around Thunder Bay, the traditional territory of her mother’s family. An investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, Talaga has written on many issues of concern to Amnesty International, including the national tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Talaga has been part of two investigative teams that each won project of the year National Newspaper Awards. Nominated four times at the Michener Awards for public service journalism, she was named the Atkinson Fellow for public policy in 2017. Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City won the RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction in 2018.
