The Knowing
How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today
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- 109,00 kr
Publisher Description
***Winner of the Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book!***
***Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards!***
***Shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize!***
“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 Anishinaabe 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 history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of her 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Talaga (Seven Fallen Feathers) offers a haunting, meditative exploration of the atrocities Indigenous people faced for generations in Canada and the U.S. at the hands of both church and state institutions. Talaga juxtaposes centuries' worth of history with a more personal story: her own efforts to learn about her great-great-grandmother Annie—"the first of five generations of Anishinaabe and Ininiw women in my family to live under yoke" of Canada's Indian Act of 1876. The array of abuses makes for harrowing reading, but Talaga has a graceful sense of when to pull back and give the reader time to process. Throughout, she reckons with the difficulty of revisiting the past through official records—"a State that is set on destroying you does not keep accurate records with proper spellings of names"—and uses photographs to express ineluctable gaps in the archive (one particularly chilling image is a photo taken by Talaga of the word "HELP" carved into a brick wall behind the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Ontario). In later chapters, Talaga chronicles efforts by the Catholic Church to make amends with Indigenous communities, but also unsettlingly finds that several U.S. residential schools remain operational to this day (a discovery that "shocks" but "does not surprise" the author). The result is a searing rumination on a still unresolved historical trauma. Corrction: An earlier version of this review included the wrong title for the author's previous book.
