An urgent exploration of the residential school system
It is believed that nearly 20,000 Indigenous children have been lost on Turtle Island: murdered, neglected, medically experimented on, abused. This is one of our greatest open secrets, and an open wound that until recently lay in hidden shame. Generations of Indigenous people have known that their children have disappeared, many after being sent to Residential schools, a system designed to destroy the culture and families.
But the system, fueled by church and state, accomplished a much more heinous crime: sexually, physically, and emotionally abusing the children over generations, with many children dead and buried around the schools and the orchards on their grounds. But this is not only a Canadian problem. The United States was also home to its own Residential schools, its own grave injustices.
In The Knowing, award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga explores this government- and church-sanctioned genocide as only she can, inspired by her great grandmother’s lived experience, framed by Indigenous beliefs and traditions, and deeply explored at the deft hand at one of Canada’s top investigative journalists.
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On sale September 15, 2023
TANYA TALAGA is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent from Fort William First Nation. She is the acclaimed author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which was the winner of 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 Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction; CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and a national bestseller. Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, and author of the national bestseller All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward. For more than twenty years she has been a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail. She has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. She lives in Toronto.