Alicia's Reviews > Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI and fictional stories like The Round House and others that focus on the missing or killing of Indigenous women without so much as a finger lifted by police has its ante upped with this true crime story of a handful of teens who all died in a specific Ontario region, many of which were found submersed in the water/bank of a river though they were competent swimmers.

The ineptitude of the investigators quick to share that the dead were heavily intoxicated only scratches the surface of the injustices visited upon the families who were already sending their teens away for school to be boarded or fostered for a better education only to fall into despair, depression, and sometimes alcohol. Talaga details these deaths along with the discriminatory practices in how the deaths were handled included even sharing the death with next of kin. Systems were/are broken but how can it be better? It needs to get better.

Using "seven fallen feathers" as the analogy of seven lives lost under this larger umbrella has hard truths delivered.