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In Seven Fallen Feathers, Ojibwe author and journalist Tanya Talaga reports on the deaths of seven Indigenous Canadian high school students who traveled to Thunder Bay, Ontario to attend boarding school in the city. The seven students, who died between 2000 and 2011, were from remote First Nations reserves. Five of them were found in the city’s rivers, and many had bruises and burns on their bodies that could indicate foul play. Yet the deaths received scant media coverage, and the Thunder Bay Police insisted that in each of the seven cases, “no foul play” was involved.

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Talaga roots the 21st-century tragedies in Canada’s long history of colonialism and cultural genocide. French and English settlers colonized Canada from the 15th century onward. But in 1876, with the passage of the Indian Act, the Canadian government enforced laws meant to sequester Indigenous adults on their reservations while forcing Indigenous children 16 and under to attend one of the country’s 139 residential schools. The schools were created to assimilate Indigenous children into white Canadian culture—but the schools were hotbeds of violence, physical abuse, sexual assault, malnutrition, disease, and even forced medical experimentation. The 150,000 survivors of the residential school system were forever traumatized by their experiences in the schools—and, Talaga asserts, the generational trauma created up until the schools’ closures in the 1970s still affects Indigenous communities in the present day. Alcoholism, cycles of abuse, and the government’s punitive lack of funding for Indigenous communities has left hundreds of thousands of people traumatized and isolated.