The Knowing

with Tanya Talaga

Hosted by Joy SpearChief-Morris

In Person Streaming Politics Non-Fict History Memoir Free

General Admission

Free

Monday

Sep , 2024

7:00pm

Eastern

Library and Archives Canada

395 Wellington Street • Ottawa

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Tanya Talaga · Photo by Nadya Kwandibens

“As Tanya Talaga investigates the story of her great-great grandmother's fate, she lays bare the dark history of a nation. This is about a Canada that you do not know, but one we all must confront. The Knowing is harrowing, illuminating and necessary reading.”

Carol Off

Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library and Library and Archives Canada.

The event will livestream for free from this page – no ticket or reginstration required.

We are honoured to present an evening with Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers. Her new book, The Knowing, is a riveting exploration of her family’s story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada.

For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.

Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.

Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.

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The Authors

Tanya Talaga

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.