The Knowing
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER | SHORTLISTED FOR THE TORONTO BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE SHAUGHNESSY COHEN PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING | SHORTLISTED FOR THE RODERICK HAIG-BROWN REGIONAL PRIZE | WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS’ OF CANADA BRASS KNUCKLES AWARD | SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDS
From Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, comes 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.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This arresting autobiographical story reveals the lives of Indigenous Canadians who vanished from their homes into residential schools, hospitals, sanatoriums, and other racist state institutions. Journalist Tanya Talaga recounts the history of Canada’s brutal residential school system through the lens of her family history, attempting to piece together the life of her grandmother, from her abduction in central Canada to her death in a brutal Toronto asylum and anonymous burial. A magnificently intimate chronicle, the book stitches together First Nations folklore, Talaga’s family story, and raw historical facts about Canada’s vicious past into an incredibly beautiful and tragic read. Talaga’s deeply personal approach gives her room to eloquently ponder the large-scale traumatic impact of these mass forced separations, as people like her grandmother were routinely sent to unfamiliar lands thousands of kilometres from home. If you want to understand Canadian First Nations history from those who directly lived it, you won’t regret picking up The Knowing.
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.
