The Knowing by Tanya Talaga

A charting of Canadian history through a personal lens

Image | The Knowing by Tanya Talaga

(HarperCollins)

For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, "Indian hospitals" and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada's greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.
The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.
Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today. (From HarperCollins)
Tanya Talaga is a writer and journalist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward was the basis for the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures.

Books by Tanya Talaga

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Interviews with Tanya Talaga

Media Audio | Ideas : Massey at 60: Tanya Talaga on what Canada can learn from the stories of Indigenous peoples

Caption: <p>2018 Massey Lecturer Tanya Talaga reflects on the legacy of cultural genocide, and on how the stories of Indigenous peoples offer lessons for Canada today. <em>*This episode is part of a series of conversations with — and about — former Massey Lecturers to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the CBC Massey Lectures.</em></p>

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Media Audio | The Sunday Magazine : Complicated questions surrounding Indigenous identity in Canada

Caption: Following an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate that found that genealogical records and historical research contradict celebrated singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie's claim that she is a Cree woman from Saskatchewan, Piya Chattopadhyay speaks with three public thinkers on Indigenous life – Niigaan Sinclair, Tanya Talaga and Drew Hayden Taylor – about the fallout and broader implications for Indigenous communities.

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Media Video | Ideas : 'This is where I am from:' Tanya Talaga explains why land connects her to all the women in her family.

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Media Video | Ideas : Why Tanya Talaga wanted to begin the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures in Thunder Bay

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Media Video | Power & Politics : 'This is not ancient history, this is something that we are still living with now' | Tanya Talaga

Caption: Author and columnist Tanya Talaga joins Power & Politics to discuss the path forward after a First Nation says it found the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the site of a former residential school

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