Published in 2025
15 hours and 16 minutes
Tanya Talaga is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and was born and raised in Toronto. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her mother was raised on the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation and Treaty 9. 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. A finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the novel was also 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 and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer. She is also 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. Tanya Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories.
What is this book about?
“A masterwork by one of our most essential storytellers.” —Jesse Wente, author of Unreconciled
From award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga comes a riveting exploration of the dark history of residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums
For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being consigned to a coordinated system devised to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is an open secret, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.
The Knowing is the unfolding of history unlike anything we have ever seen before. Tanya Talaga retells her story 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 unraveling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.
“Harrowing, illuminating and necessary reading.” —Carol Off, author of At a Loss for Words
