Tanya Talaga is Rewriting Canadian History Her Way

Tanya Talaga has made a career of telling the unvarnished truth about Canada, to Canada. In her bestselling books, Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations, Talaga, a Globe and Mail columnist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent, turned her incisive eye on systemic problems like racism in policing and the suicide epidemic among Indigenous youth. But when it came to the personal, to her own family, Talaga always found more questions than answers.

In The Knowing, her third non-fiction book, out August 27, Talaga runs toward, not from, her history, filling in the gaps in her own ancestral line. It’s a lineage severed several times, as her First Nations relatives were forcibly sent to government- and church-sponsored residential schools, asylums and new families entirely as part of the Sixties Scoop. After years spent digging into the past, she’s learned a few things: about her grandmothers, about Canada’s past and that, when it comes to family, you can never really know the whole story. 

The Knowing revisits the colonial history of Canada, as well as the history of your own matriarchal line. What made you decide to weave in your own  family details? 

All Indigenous families share the same history; we all have people who are missing. I didn’t want to write a trauma porn book, talking about everyone else’s pain. Elder Sam Achneepineskum from Marten Falls First Nation once gave me some advice: our ancestors need to know who’s speaking. We need to tell people who each of us are, so everyone can understand what happened. 

Your uncle Hank Bowen kick-started your book research with his own amateur ancestry work. What did he give you?

After he died, my mom inherited Uncle Hank’s brown accordion folder filled with paper clippings, dot matrix printouts and a map of Ontario First Nations with circles around them. He spent his whole life, much of it before the internet, trying to find his mom, Liz, and her mom, Annie Carpenter—my great-great-grandmother. Every time he wrote to the federal government, he was told they didn’t exist. 

Was it interesting for you to go, oh, that’s where my journalistic instincts came from?

Do you mean: are we all detectives? Maybe. 

Many of your relatives pop up in The Knowing, but the story’s central mysterious figure is Annie. What was the first detail you discovered about her life?

My mom’s family is from Fort William First Nation in northern Ontario, at the bottom of Treaty 9 territory. But Annie’s death certificate said she was buried in Toronto, where I live. I was like, what is a matriarch doing here? I found out that she was in an unmarked grave right off the Gardiner Expressway, one of the busiest highways in the city. Not only that, she was once a patient in the nearby Ontario Hospital, a provincial asylum.

Wouldn’t you have driven past that site all the time? 

Yes. When I go to Sherway Gardens mall. To the airport. To Hamilton. It’s bizarre. It’s in a field just south of a giant IKEA. Then my research became: what the hell happened to her? And to her siblings and children? Did her husband just no longer want to be married to her? It’s interesting why women were put into asylums: speaking their Indigenous language, having an affair, not conforming in some way. I had to work backwards. It was hard, and I had industrial-level help: from Library and Archives Canada; from Know History, an archival research firm. You name it.

So were you able to track down any government records?

Yes, but the Ontario government made things hard. Annie was in that hospital as of 1930, not even 100 years ago, and all the records are gone. In those that do exist, First Nations last names are often spelled incorrectly. It makes for crazy-making, needle-in-a-haystack research.

Did your search reveal any finer details, like personality quirks about Annie or the others? It’s one thing to know where a grandparent was born and buried, but another to have a recording of their laugh or know that they loved Frank Sinatra.

Sadly, no. The only thing we have that Annie ever touched was her marriage certificate from St. Thomas’ Anglican Church at Moose Cree First Nation. Weirdly, though, we have pictures taken by the poet Duncan Campbell Scott when he attended the signing of Treaty 9 at Mishkeegogamang in 1905. Annie was there with her family, but we don’t know which person she is. Scott sometimes didn’t identify who he was photographing—it was like, “Random Ojibwe woman holds plate of food.”

As journalists, we’re expected to maintain a critical distance. Did it feel impossible to separate your emotions from this project?

We’re always taught to report the black and white. Two sides. No bias. But Indigenous people live this story; it’s not abstract. I left journalistic objectivity behind many years ago. I became a columnist because I have a side. Look at Connie Walker’s Gimlet podcast series Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, or Duncan McCue’s memoir, The Shoe Boy. Our voices weren’t heard for over 150 years, so we’re injecting ourselves in stories now.

You talk in the book about attending glitzy, self-congratulatory human-rights fundraisers. What is it like to be in those rooms in 2024, when living conditions in some First Nations communities are still terrible?

Sometimes I worry, did I say too much there? But those are my feelings! I always wonder why those events focus on what’s happening outside of our borders, when we should be looking inward, too. Why aren’t we raising money to give water to Neskantaga, the northern Ontario community with the longest boil-water advisory in the country? What about making sure our children have high schools? Or roads they can drive on? The lack of empathy amazes me.

How has your life changed since you started writing books? I hear author life is a bit... slower.

I love talking to people, but I also like being alone in my house with my tea for long periods of time. There, I’m in my best place: working for myself, exploring stories that live in my head. Sticking out my elbows, saying, “I’m making space for this.”

You now also co-run Makwa Creative, an Indigenous-owned production company. I listened to your podcast Auntie Up!, which is basically a better version of The View, featuring some straight-talking aunties.

My co-hosts Jolene Banning and Kim Wheeler and I realized that, as Indigenous women of a certain age, we needed our own show to talk about the important shit—everything from the politics of beading to who’s got the best bannock recipe. In season one, we did a video episode, which has, like, three hits on YouTube. Jolene is actually baking bannock as we’re talking. 

You’ve got a 22–city book tour coming up. What are you most looking forward to?
I love getting together with people to discuss books—especially ones I’ve written. People will tell me things about my book that even I didn’t think of, like, “Oh, you must’ve meant this when you were writing it,” and I’m like, “Oh, that’s good. Maybe I did mean that!” There’s just something about a book crowd; they’re my people.

It sounds like you met a bunch of new connections—new family—through writing The Knowing, even if you weren’t able to unearth all the missing pieces. 

Figuring it all out, the how did we get here—that helps me a lot. It’s reclamation. One person I met, Paula Rickard, is a professional genealogist who lives in Moose Factory, Ontario. She’s built out a family tree of the James Bay coast that now has something like 12,000 names. When I was just starting out, I messaged her Facebook page, and she responded with, “You know we’re related, too, right?”

Are there any details about your grandmothers you’re still hoping to track down?

I’d really love to see Annie’s face.  

What do you think she’d make of the work you’re doing, if she could see you now?

I hope she’d be proud. And not mad.