All Our Relations: Indigenous Trauma in the Shadow of Colonialism

"Tanya Talaga has written an urgent, passionate book, which is about the legacies of colonialism in the most naked, raw sense. Of all the books, this is the one that proves how much the chaos and disorder and misery is still unfolding for living people. The book opens with these terrible child suicides among the Canadian First Nations. These are young kids from their early teens through into their 20s, taking their own lives in horrifying numbers. It’s like an epidemic. These are the children of peoples who are stuck in this apparently immovable situation, their lives are cramped and conditions create dislocation and despair. She takes this as a point of departure for an analysis of what actually happened to these people. She shows how brutal colonial policies were in Canada. The First Nations people were hardly ever aggressive—it’s not as if they were Comanches on horseback or anything like that—they were just trying to hold onto their ground. And yet, their kids were taken away and put in boarding schools, away from their families, in order to try to make them proper ‘westerners.’ It wasn’t just that people were mistreated and their land was stolen, but there was this whole policy of disruption of community; the state was used to try and destroy their culture. That’s what happened. Talaga picks up on this very strongly. She shows how the process continues, in many ways. You’ve got a situation where young people are completely cut off from their roots and they just have this sense of an absence in their lives, even when they’re not also facing the extreme social injustice in other ways, like the poverty, the alcoholism among the men. “Of all the books, this is the one that proves how much the chaos and disorder and misery is still unfolding for living people” We should surely know these stories from the past, but this book reminds us that they’re still active, and by no means just in Canada either. Talaga goes to Finland and Norway and looks at the Sami people, who are having very similar experiences. She goes to Brazil, where the expropriation is still going on in the most brutal way in the rainforest and elsewhere. She talks about the Australian experience too. Talaga writes with a sense of urgency as one who knows the story from the inside. One of her parents is Polish. The other is indigenous. So she’s got her own mixed experience and doesn’t only know the situation as a journalist. She wants us to recognise the urgency of the problem and she wants us to do something about it, to change things. She’s gone to the history as a way of explaining where the problem comes from and to help us to understand what we’re faced with. She’s not, though, writing primarily as a historian. This is a campaigning book, so it’s a different kind of book than the one about the Lakota nation, even though it’s dealing with the same history. I think she’s trying to inform us and through that to put pressure on existing governments and powers. A citizenship that knows about this is surely better than one that doesn’t, and is also more likely to do something about it. The other thing reading this book raised in my mind is the sense that we live in a world where we have state institutions that have very often absorbed liberal, progressive and democratic values. The people who have taken salaries to run the parts of the state that relate to education and various other forms of aid to these indigenous worlds—I’m sure they all believe in diversity. The state apparatus has learned the language of democracy and justice, but for whatever reason the practice doesn’t always work: after all these decades of attempted redress, it’s still failing on the ground. That’s what’s particularly shocking to me. With Trudeau in power, you’d like to think that in Canada this would all be in hand and that enlightenment would prevail—but that is not the story we find here. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This problem of public administration is also important in other fields. Those of us who live in Western democracies do live with states that—challenged as they may be in some places, including America right now—give you a feeling that the language of public thought and public administration understands how things should be. But the reality out on the street is still intractably unchanging, in many cases. So I think that’s one of the useful challenges in this book: don’t just speak the language, look at the consequences, look at what’s actually there and think about what must be done, because the problem with state-based public programs is that once they’re up and running they can go on forever, whatever is happening outside the office window. They just have a bureaucratic logic to them. The funding for these sorts of programs is, as Talaga shows, constantly challenged. It’s constantly being scraped back. The funding is one thing, but I suspect it is also this problem of administration, where people talk a language and really believe it, but somehow don’t manage to make things on the ground move. The case for a more participatory approach that works from within the communities in question seems pretty compelling. That’s right, but I think enlightened societies are often very challenged by the idea that anybody wouldn’t want to join their way of life. It’s almost an insult, isn’t it? So I think sometimes even in the more enlightened places, you will find a kind of impatience that develops against people who decide they want to carry on living as they were and keep their distance, land use and traditions. But we mustn’t be too subtle about this. Often the damage is done through mining corporations and other commercial extractors who may not even be pretending to do better by the affected people. I was impressed by the parallels Talaga finds between different indigenous worlds: where power moves, it tends to do so in an all too recognisable way."