THE PATH FORWARD
Award-winning writer’s Massey Lectures event focuses on educators
Educators play a key role in Indigenous reconciliation, the Star's Tanya Talaga says in Massey lectures,
Tanya Talaga was taken aback when the CBC asked her to be the 2018 Massey Lecturer.
The award-winning Toronto Star reporter and best-selling author told a rapt audience in Toronto on Tuesday evening that she felt she didn’t have much in common with esteemed Massey Lecturers from years past, including Martin Luther King Jr., Willy Brandt, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing.
Through her research and writings, Talaga has become a recognized authority on the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples, in Canada and elsewhere.
Despite this, she said she was afraid and uncertain about whether she could pull off delivering the required series of cross-country lectures.
“But then I thought, buck up, don’t shy away from this — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach others and spread a message of understanding, of resilience of strength and of unity,” she said.
That message was well received by a standing-room only audience at Koerner Hall in the Telus Centre for Performance and Learning. Talaga was given a standing ovation following her hour-long talk, the last in the five-lecture series.
Titled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, the lec- tures have been compiled in a book of the same name. Talaga told of how she opened the book with four questions: Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I?
“All children, regardless of their racial or socioeconomic backgrounds, need to know the answers to these questions,” said Talaga, whose mother’s family is part of the Fort William First Nation just outside Thunder Bay
“This is where we are from. We have always been here,” she said.
Talaga told of how a history of oppression and abuse have led Indigenous people to believe in their own inadequacies.
But children do not ask for the circumstances they are born in, she said.
“When they are born under the weight of history, in circum- stances beyond their control, in Indigenous Nations in Canada and in the United States, in Australia and New Zealand, in Brazil and the Arctic Circle, children are caught between the past and what the United Nations calls ‘present day dynamics.’”
The Indigenous experience in all of these colonized nations is startlingly similar, Talaga said. It is marked by violent separation from the land, from families and from traditional ways of life.
In Canada, that experience has seen children removed from their homes and placed in residential schools and foster care. It has also resulted in an epidemic of youth suicides.
“When children are born into adversity, into communities without clean water or proper plumbing with unsafe housing, parents suffering with addic- tions and traumas, when they have to leave their communities to access health care and education — basic rights easily obtained by other children in this country — when they do not have a parent to tuck them into bed at night or tell them that they love them, children die,” Talaga said.
She gave high praise to educators for taking it upon themselves to learn and teach about the true history of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples.
“While education has played a huge role in damaging relations between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, it is also going to play a crucial role in reconciling that relationship,” she said.
“The educators will always lead us forward,” she said to loud applause.
Talaga has focused her investigative reporting on Indigenous issues such as suicide, health care, and missing and murdered women and girls.
Her first book book, Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, initially came out of a reporting assignment in Thunder Bay about lack of voter turnout by Indigenous people. The critically acclaimed book deals with the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples, focusing on the lives of seven Indigenous high school students who died in the city from 2000 to 2011.
The Massey Lectures are an annual five-part lecture series delivered by a noted Canadian scholar.