Seven Fallen Feathers (livestreamed)

Fri 6 May 2022

slq Auditorium 1, level 2, State Library

Main Festival

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

Over a span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were far away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves. Tanya Talaga puts human faces to headlines, illuminating the ways that systemic racism has shaped our responses to lives, and deaths, for decades.

Tanya Talaga in conversation with Sandra Phillips

This is an in-person event at State Library with the author livestreaming in on screen.

Proudly supported by Consulate General of Canada

#Artists

Tanya Talaga

Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. Talaga's mother's family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.

For more than 20 years, she was a journalist at the Toronto Star covering everything from health to education, investigations and Queen's Park. She's been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism and been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year.

Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.

Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward, is also a national bestseller, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Talaga was the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, the first Anishinaabe woman to be so.

Talaga heads up Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts. She holds an honorary doctorate from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.

Sandra Phillips

Raised on ancestral Country of the Wakka Wakka and also proudly Gooreng Gooreng, Sandra is a mother and grandmother. Professionally, Sandra leads cultural change as Associate Dean (Indigenous Engagement) in Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Queensland. In 2016, Sandra won the Johnno Award for outstanding contribution to writing in Queensland, after a long career in editing and publishing with Magabala Books, UQP, ASP, and freelancing. Sandra now publishes in diverse outlets, her formal qualifications are in the social sciences and creative industries, her worldview is Aboriginal, and in the simplest terms, she joins dots and makes things happen.