Spirit to Soar

Tanya Talaga and Michelle Derosier

In 2017, Tanya Talaga published Seven Fallen Feathers, her award-winning book about the deaths of seven Indigenous students in Thunder Bay who had come from isolated communities in the north to go to high school. In Spirit to Soar, Talaga revisits Thunder Bay, this time cinematically, retelling the original stories and digging deeply into insights about the multi-layered environment and cultures of the city. As the principal narrator of the film, she also reveals how this material has personally changed her, and how she has come to know herself with newly felt connections. The weakness of the film is that it doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already learned from her book, or her followup national speaking tour for CBC. A camera follows her everywhere, even from an overhead drone when she drives outside of Thunder Bay to visit an area where her mother grew up, only to discover the area is now a clear-cut in the forest. The film features many direct, first person interviews, including current students at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, one of whom says gently, with a smile and a genuine welcoming tone: “Get to know us, get to know what we’ve been through.”

- Michael Sobota