Walk with Tanya Talaga on a journey through the Seven Grandfather Teachings that guide Anishinaabe life
Love, respect, honesty, bravery, humility, wisdom and truth. These are the seven truths taken from the Seven Grandfather Teachings handed down orally through generations of Anishinaabe elders. They are guideposts, directions and, as Tanya Talaga explains, they’re how the Anishinaabe see the world and themselves in it.
Tanya Talaga is an award-winning author and journalist and she was also named one of the top 50 influential Torontonians of 2020 by . In the new Audible Original , she takes listeners on a journey to learn about these seven teachings. With each new episode, Talaga examines a different one through contemporary stories about the lives of Indigenous people today. She’s also joined by Sam Achneepineskum, someone Talaga refers to as her elder and an elder at the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations students in Thunder Bay. He is present throughout the series to explain the truths in his own language, Anishinaabemowin. Talaga’s aim is to show how each lesson provides guidance and strength to Indigenous people who are still fighting for basic human rights.
Hard Truths in a Northern Town
Talaga’s byline has appeared with Canadian news outlets like the Toronto Star and Globe & Mail for over 20 years, where she’s fought to bring Indigenous issues to the mainstream long before many newsrooms made space for them. She’s been nominated for the Michener Award five times for public service in journalism and she was a Massey Lecturer in 2018. Raised in Toronto, Talaga is Ojibwe with roots in Fort William First Nation.
Her journalism reached new acclaim with , an incisive investigation into the deaths of seven First Nations students in Thunder Bay over a period of 12 years. They had all come to Thunder Bay from places kilometres away to attend high school. Far from home at a young age, they faced racism and loneliness. Ultimately, Seven Fallen Feathers is a history and critique of institutional racism and colonialist policies, and how that legacy led to the deaths of seven promising youths.
With her follow-up, Seven Truths, Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if conditions have changed for the Indigenous community in northwestern Ontario and across Canada.
“Seven Words, Seven Ways of Life”
When Talaga returns to Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, she’s guided by 17-year-old Kaiden, who has moved 500 kilometres from home, leaving behind his family and community for the chance to graduate from high school. Every morning he faces a foreign, hostile city to do so.
Indigenous students from northern communities with no access to a high school education travel hundreds of kilometers to attend DFC. Some are as young as 13 when they have to leave their families behind to pursue their diploma, and it’s where some of the students whose stories Talaga told in went to school. In one episode of , she speaks to today’s students to see if anything has changed for them, and to explore the teaching of bravery. According to her, students at DFC are some of the bravest people around:
