NEWS PHOTO JEREMY APPEL Author, journalist and lecturer Tanya Talaga delivered a talk on reconciliation at Medicine Hat College Wednesday.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
It was a packed theatre at Medicine Hat College on Wednesday as author, Toronto Star columnist and CBC Massey lecturer Tanya Talaga delivered a talk on reconciliation to around 450 students, faculty and community members.
“I speak in circles,” Talaga cautioned the audience at the beginning of her lecture, which touched upon her personal life, residential schools, Indigenous disenchantment from the political process and the connection between Indigenous issues across the globe.
There’s no simple solution to matters of reconciliation, she emphasized.
“There is no quick fix or quick answers as to why our children are dying,” Talaga explained, placing the plight of Canada’s Indigenous peoples in an international context.
“Children do not ask for the circumstances they are born in and when they are born under the weight of history and circumstances beyond their control in Indigenous nations, not just here in Canada, but also in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the Arctic Circle.
“The Indigenous experience in all of these colonized nations is startlingly the same. It’s very similar. It’s an experience marked by the violent separation of people from the land, the separation of families, the separation of people from their traditional ways of life.”
Talaga was referring to residential schools, the last of which in Canada closed as recently as 1996, as well as “the process of scooping up children and placing them in the homes of non-Indigenous families.”
Talaga, who was born to an Ojibway mother and Polish father, said she received inspiration for her award-winning 2017 book “Seven Fallen Feathers” when she was a political reporter for the Star during the 2011 federal election.
She wanted to do a story on why First Nations people don’t tend to vote.
“Keep in mind this was 2011. Keep in mind this was before the Truth and Reconciliation Report was released. This was before Idle No More. This was before CBC Indigenous. It was before APTN was everywhere. It was quite a different time,” said Talaga. “This was only nine years ago.”
Her editor thought it was an “exotic idea,” so the paper sent Talaga up to the reserves surrounding Thunder Bay to speak with Nishnawbe Aski Nation grand chief Stan Beardy.
She asked him, “Why is it that Indigenous people don’t vote in elections?” to which he responded, “Why aren’t you doing a story on Jordan Wabasse?”
“I thought I must be mumbling, so I asked my question again and he said, ‘Jordan has been missing for 70 days,'” recalled Talaga.
She continued asking questions about Indigenous participation in elections, such as why they don’t band together to create a voting bloc, but Beardy continued returning to Wabasse, who was 15 when he went missing.
“We did that for about 15 minutes until I finally realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I had to put my manic Toronto journalist self aside and realize where I was and who I was, and that I was sitting in front of a grand chief and he was trying to tell me something,” said Talaga.
“It was then that I like to think that I opened my ears and listened to what he was actually saying and that’s when he told me Jordan was the seventh student to die or go missing in Thunder Bay since 2000.”
She began writing these student’s stories as articles in the Star shortly after her trip north.
“I knew in my heart that it would be a book one day, because I knew I couldn’t tell the history of our people in a newspaper article so confined,” said Talaga. “I knew I had to do something differently in a book form, where I had more room.”
