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.
I sat down with Talaga to talk about The Knowing, her third non-fiction book, out today. In the book, 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, Talaga has 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.
—Katie Underwood, managing editor
