In her latest book, The Knowing, Tanya Talaga retells her family story to explore Canada's history with an Indigenous lens.

The Knowing starts with the life of Talaga's great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and charts the violence she and her family experienced for decades at the hands of the Church and the government.

Talaga is an author and journalist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and a member of Fort William First Nation. In The Knowing, she will share both a personal and well-researched account of the oppression of Indigenous people and its continued forms and reverberations.

"Every Indigenous family shares part of the same story. We all have been touched by Indian Residential Schools, Indian Day Schools, Indian Hospitals and sanitariums — we've had family, community members or friends who were taken away or forced to attend," said Talaga in an email.

"We have all heard of someone who didn't come home — this is The Knowing. It is Canada's shame. If every Indigenous person looked for our missing family, found out what happened to them, we could change the narrative of the story of Canada. Family by family. Truth by truth."

Talaga is the also the author of Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. Her book, All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, was the basis for the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures.

The Knowing's cover is illustrated by artist Kent Monkman, an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist and a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory. He is known for his work that challenges colonial perceptions of Indigenous people and history. His painting and installation works are held in the public collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Hirshhorn Museum; National Gallery of Canada; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; Art Gallery of Ontario; and La maison rouge, Paris.

Monkman is also the co-author of The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle with Gisèle Gordon, which blends history, fiction and memoir to tell the story of Turtle Island.

The Knowing will be released on Aug. 27, 2024. Talaga will embark on a book tour stopping in 22 cities across the country including Toronto, Thunder Bay, Montreal, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Halifax and Whitehorse. The tour dates will be available here once they're confirmed.

Mental health counselling and crisis support are also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week through the Hope for Wellness hotline at 1-855-242-3310 or by online chat.