Tanya Talaga, author of The Knowing, says Canadian history needs to be rewritten

The beginning of Anishinaabe writer Tanya Talaga’s book The Knowing is also its ending.

“Annie Carpenter lies in an unmarked grave just south of a giant blue-and-yellow IKEA, directly off one of the busiest thoroughfares in North America, the Gardiner Expressway, part of the Queen Elizabeth Way, which cuts west and east across the city of Toronto. It feels like an area you drive through to get somewhere else, not a destination,” writes Talaga, who lives in Toronto.

Annie Carpenter, a Cree (Ininiw) woman who was born in Fort Albany in 1871, was Talaga’s great, great grandmother. She disappeared one day in the early 1930s.

Carpenter’s story is sadly not unique. In this seminal unravelling of centuries of oppression, Talaga masterfully retells the history of Canada through her great, great grandmother’s story and stories of subsequent generations of Indigenous people who lived through years of government and church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.

“First Nation voices need to be heard. We need to rewrite those history books. This is the truth of what happened, and didn’t happen, 300 years ago or 500 years ago,” said Talaga. “It’s actually recent history, and we need to hear our voices. And we need to set the record straight in Canada.”

Talaga is one of the 120-plus authors taking part in this year’s Vancouver Writers Fest, which runs until Oct. 27. Talaga will join Niigaan Sinclair for Knowing Who We Are (And Who We Can Be) on Oct. 24 at at 5:30 p.m. on the Granville Island Stage. The following evening, Talaga will be discussing The Knowing with journalist and associate UBC professor Candis Callison at 7:30 p.m. at the Granville Island Stage.

For Talaga, the story of what happened to Carpenter begins with a thick brown file folder full of information that Talaga’s late Uncle Hank Bowen, Carpenter’s grandson, had compiled over the years as he tried to uncover what happened to his grandmother.

“I had it for years,” said Talaga, whose previous work includes the award-winning books All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, and Seven Fallen Feathers. “I think I said in the book I would open it every once in a while, and then I would close it because it was totally depressing. I didn’t know what to do. Where do I go? How do I access all these archives and records? And where do you really start?”

Pressure from her mother finally set Talaga in motion.

“She’s been asking me for years, and I just kind of always had something else to do. And it was, well, I’ve got to stop ignoring my mom, she is 80 now, and I’ve got to do this for her,” said Talaga. “She kept saying, you’re the journalist in the family, get it done. And so I did, with all this help.”

Right around this time, Talaga went to Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops) in May 2021 where ground-penetrating radar located the remains of 215 children who were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

“The community invited in a handful of First Nation journalists including myself. And it was there at Kamloops that I started realizing that ‘the knowing,” they were talking about, that the survivors talked about, about always knowing about children that didn’t come home from Indian Residential School was the same knowing in our communities, so it was all connected,” said Talaga.

“There are two giant narratives running through the book — Kamloops and what’s happened since Kamloops, and my personal family story of Annie,” said Talaga.

The research for The Knowing, which has also been adapted into a four-part docuseries available on CBC Gem, was arduous to say the least.

“A country that has tried to destroy Indigenous people is not really keen on keeping accurate records, so that’s part of the problem. We are the mercy of the record takers. Who were the record takers? Were they understanding what our ancestors were telling them, what our family members were telling them?” said Talaga adding that a lot was lost literally in translation. “You had Inuit, you had Cree, you got Anishinaabe, and you have English and French people taking these records down so there are mistakes…but I had an army helping me.”

The 25-year veteran investigative journalist included in that army the help of professional archivists and members of various First Nations communities.

What was discovered was Carpenter’s final unmarked resting place in the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Cemetary. A total of 1,511 people are buried in the cemetery and Carpenter is one of 33 First Nations people in unmarked graves.

“Here is where she died. Here is where she spent the last seven years, eight months and 28 days of her life. It wasn’t the best circumstances, to say the least,” said Talaga. “She was five years old when the Indian Act came into force in Canada. She lost almost all of her children just gone. She was fighting for survival, and then she is put in a lunatic asylum. Why? We have no idea.

“She is in an unmarked grave, what the hell happened? That of course, is the strongest emotion and that is the thrust of the book because Annie’s story represents all of our people that didn’t come home from Indian Residential Schools, Indian hospitals, tuberculous sanitoriums, asylums.”

Finding Carpenter, Talga says, was both “bittersweet and comforting.”

“We’ve held ceremony there since then. We’ve brought people, other family members there, so she’s not forgotten,” said Talaga.

Talaga hopes readers of The Knowing will be compelled to re-think and question the Canadian history they know.

“Murray Sinclair (former member of the Canadian Senate and First Nations lawyer who served as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) told me that he wrote the volumes of the TRC in order to arm the reasonable. To reach that group of sort of the money middle of Canadians, that know a little bit but don’t really know a little bit about the true history of this country,” said Talaga. “This is why they did the TRC, to capture survivors’ voices. To safeguard those voices, to hold a mirror up to Canada. That’s why the TRC happened. And I’m doing the same thing. I’m holding a mirror up to Canada. And, hopefully, people grasp it, understand it, and will teach it.”

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