The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today

“The Knowing is everything we’ve come to expect from a Tanya Talaga book – meticulous research, impassioned advocacy, searing prose."—Duncan McCue, author of Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities

From award-winning and bestselling Ashinaabe author Tanya Talaga comes a riveting exploration of the dark history of residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums, for readers of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Rediscovery of America

For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being consigned to 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.

The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country 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 unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.