Tanya Talaga

As an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker, Tanya Talaga has helped to give Canada’s Indigenous people a voice. Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, with its examination of the deaths of seven young Indigenous people in Ontario, sent shockwaves through the country and was awarded two of its most eminent literary awards: the RBC Taylor Prize and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize. CBC also named it their Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Talaga herself is of both Polish and Indigenous descent. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation, a reserve in Ontario; her great-grandfather was a member of the Ojibwe people, whilst her great-grandmother was a survivor of the notorious Indian residential schools of the 19th century — a brutal system responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indigenous children.

As a journalist and columnist, Talaga is best known for her work with the Toronto Star, with which she has been associated with for over twenty years. She has been nominated for the Michener Award in public service journalism — the premier Canadian journalism award — an astonishing five times. She has also spent time as the Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy for The Canadian Journalism Foundation. In 2018, Talaga had the distinction of being chosen to deliver the Massey Lecture series, an honour she shares with the likes of Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, and Margaret Attwood. Talaga’s lectures were entitled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. Their success led to the publication of her second book, which shares its name with the lectures.