With The Knowing, Tanya Talaga tells a tale that all Canadians should know

• Title: The Knowing
• Author: Tanya Talaga
• Genre: Non-Fiction
• Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
• Pages: 423

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In the decades since my birth, I have read a lot. In particular, I’ve had a fondness for horror novels. In fact, I even wrote one. But few things truly terrify my soul as deeply as the malevolent mechanisms of the detached bureaucracy embedded in the colonial system.

“In 1840, Herman Merivale, who would become the British permanent undersecretary at the colonial Office, had declared that there were four basic approaches an imperial power could take in its relations with Indigenous Peoples; It could exterminate them, enslave them, separate them from colonial society, or assimilate them.”

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With that, welcome to Tanya Talaga’s new book, The Knowing. In 423 pages, Talaga, an Anishinaabe woman and a columnist with The Globe and Mail, takes the reader on a dark and complex journey to find her Indigenous great-great-grandmother, who was originally from Northern Ontario and disappeared almost 100 years ago.

The book, her third, follows her search through the labyrinths of church and government documents (many of which are suppressed), as she travels from Kamloops across the ocean to places in Europe where segments of Canadian Indigenous history are hoarded in dark basements. Along the way she meets the Pope and several unexpected relatives. The title itself refers to the unrecognized knowledge the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc had of friends and family missing and buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, knowledge made public with the discovery of unmarked graves in 2021.

It’s hard to read a book like this and not get emotionally involved on a personal and much deeper level. Not only does Talaga share the personal frustration of her family, but she also explores the larger culpability of Canada and the church in manipulating the lives of generations of Indigenous people. Tens of thousands of First Nation, Métis and Inuit youth were plucked from loving families and effectively institutionalized in residential schools across the country. The results of that policy were and still are frequently tragic.

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Genocide is a word Talaga uses frequently in the book – if not resulting in the death of the people directly (though that could be argued), definitely the spirit and the culture of the dozens of Nations that were here when Europeans began their migration. The Indian Act, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, all axes that whacked away at the tree of Indigenous existence. This book is not an easy read. At least if you have a conscience.

Talaga’s search meanders across a good chunk of Canada and its history, offering up a detailed and comprehensive look at how Canada went about systematically sweeping away generations of people in a mind-blowing belief that isolation, dispossession, inadequate food, religious intolerance and physical abuse were the best ways to pull a people into the 19th and 20th century. In some ways, it’s a textbook for colonization. That may not be what Talaga had in mind.

Putting down this book, I felt a similar anger as when I read, a thousand years ago, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, and more recently Clearing the Plains by James William Daschuk. All searing accounts of the dark side of domestic history. Paraphrasing Socrates, an unexamined history is not worth living.

I don’t know if members of the dominant culture would feel that same anger but if they care about Canada, they should. There’s a saying, you can’t know where you are going unless you know where you’ve been. This book lets Canada know what their predecessors were up to.

There’s also a teaching amongst many First Nations called the Seven Generations. It tells us that any action or decision we make will have reverberations for the next seven generations. So, we should all endeavour to make good and wise choices. The abuse Talaga writes about is multigenerational. It just might take seven generations for the decisions Sir John A. Macdonald and Duncan Campbell Scott implemented to properly heal. Feel free to double check that in another hundred years.

Several decades of writing have honed Talaga into a brilliant non-fiction storyteller, walking that edge between the dissemination of objective information, and the impact such information would have on her and her readers. The Knowing is a tale Canada should know.

In the end (spoiler alert), Talaga does find her great-great grandmother, Annie Carpenter, in, of all places, an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Toronto, thousands of kilometres from where she’d been born to a proud people. Mysteriously, she’d spent the last chunk of her life at a nearby insane asylum. Possibly one of the best metaphors for Indigenous people trying to understand how all of this was for their benefit.

Warning: This is not a book to read at the beach … unless you’re in Normandy.