THUNDER BAY – Prize-winning journalist Tanya Talaga (Seven Fallen Feathers) explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples — in Canada and elsewhere —in her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures “All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward.”
Tanya Talaga’s Massey Lectures are based on her reporting as the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, exploring issues of Indigenous youth suicide in communities in Canada and beyond. In the Massey Lectures, she will also explore the wider legacy of genocide against Indigenous peoples, how that legacy has led to forced disconnection from land and language, and the need for Indigenous self-determination in the social, cultural and political arena. Many Indigenous communities, both in Canada and abroad, find that the road back to a relationship with land and language are keys to celebrating life and to community healing — to what in fact it means to be Indigenous.
The tragedy of Indigenous youth suicide is where these lectures start; in Northern Ontario, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States. The similarities among the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startling and disturbing, but this is not where the lectures end. As the subtitle of the lectures suggests, “finding the path forward” is the real focus: a challenge to make a better, more equitable world for Indigenous people.
