From Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, comes a riveting exploration of her family’s story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada

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.

TANYA TALAGA is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and was born and raised in Toronto. Her mother was raised on the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation and Treaty 9. Her father is Polish Canadian. Tanya is a proud member of Fort William First Nation.

She is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award; was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Award for Non-Fiction; and was CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book.

Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer and is the author of the national bestseller All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. For more than twenty years she was a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail.

Talaga's third book, The Knowing, based on her family's experience in residential schools, will be published in late summer, 2024.

Tanya Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories through documentary films and podcasts. In 2021, she founded the charity, the Spirit to Soar Fund, which is aimed at improving the lives of First Nations youth living in northern Ontario. Talaga has five honorary doctorates.

Tanya Talaga's profile page