Thunder Bay: Local news is important for conversations on reconciliation

[Paragraphs 1 to 3] The Ontario city of Thunder Bay is in the headlines these days for all the wrong reasons. Canada’s highest rates of murder and violent crime. The highest number of hate crimes per capita. Systemic racism embedded in shoddy police investigations. The deaths — many unexplained — of Indigenous students who come to the city for education not available in their remote northern communities. For years these troubles and the inequitable relationship between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in the city festered. Then in the spring of 2011, the Toronto Star began publishing reporter Tanya Talaga’s stories about the deaths of seven young Indigenous students over the previous decade. What had been a local story vaulted into national headlines. Talaga’s reporting became the basis for her 2017 award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City.