Reading Seven Fallen Feathers was tough. Not only because it engages with the history and present of colonialism and genocide, or because of its methodical attention to the ways the Canadian state continues to underfund education on reserves in ways that replicate structures of residential schools (isolation from family and community), but because it drove home for me how completely I’ve been avoiding doing any of the work of reconciliation I need to be doing.
I’ve long thought “oh I should read the compete text of the TRC report” or “I should find out more about rates of I incarceration of indigenous people,” or or and or. And I haven’t. Not for a good reason and certainly for bad reasons: I’ve thought it wasn’t my responsibility. Or not my priority. Or that I’d missed an earlier opportunity and now it was too late and – and I’m ashamed to say this – that I was too proud to admit how very much I don’t know. Like I wanted people to think I was suitably progressive and to say all the right things and be a good lefty social justice human without doing any of the work to actually live those ideals out.
Reading this book hasn’t changed much of this feeling. It does offer an impressively comprehensive and synthesized consideration of the intersections of many threads: missing and murdered indigenous women, the Indian Act, residential schools, treaty rights and intergenerational trauma. And I have some greater understanding as a consequence, but for me what it did best was to call me in to the living present of colonialism and my contribuatory role. Of not letting me get away with shifting responsibility or pretending not to know (or care).
So yeah. I have some work to do. And if you’re reading this with any resonance with my feelings pre-reading, I can’t urge you with enough pep to read this one.
Literary Vice 