“The rest of the country is waking up to what First Nations people have always known”: Tanya Talaga on her new book, The Knowing

Tanya Talaga is the author of Seven Fallen Feathers, All Our Relations and now, The Knowing, an intimate exploration of her family’s experience with residential schools. A member of Fort William First Nation in Northern Ontario, Talaga spent nearly 25 years as a reporter for the Toronto Star covering city hall and Queen’s Park; now, she writes a column on issues like treaty rights and police discrimination for the Globe and Mail. We caught up with Talaga to talk about retelling history from an Indigenous perspective, her time at Queen’s Park and getting Indigenous stories in front of wide audiences.

What was your process for writing this book? A lot of late nights and research. It’s so important to verify the facts, and that’s not easy when you’re dealing with residential schools and records that are sometimes missing or stolen. I worked with many organizations—the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation; Kim Murray, the special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves; Ottawa archivist agency Know History. It took an army.

You’ve been writing about Indigenous issues for a while. How is it different when it’s your own family history? Yeah, it’s hard. Before my uncle Hank Bowen died, he gave our family a file folder full of all these notes. There were maps of Ontario with little First Nations circled and letters he had written to the governments of Canada and Ontario trying to find his mother, who was sent to a ­residential school, and his grandmother, who was taken to an asylum in Toronto. That folder made me really sad for a long time. I would open it and just not know where to start.

Where did you eventually start? I tried to find my great-great-grandmother Annie. I felt like she held the key to our history, but all I had was a death certificate saying she was buried in Toronto. I spoke to Ryan Shackleton, who runs Know History, and he offered to help. With the assistance of Ryan and his staff, I discovered Annie, her children, her siblings, their cousins and their children. When I set out to write a book about residential schools, I didn’t know which way it was going to go. But what I saw was the story I was writing about: it’s all of our families. If you’re a First Nations person, your family has been touched in some way by residential schools. You can’t escape it.

Do you see this book as being part of the same project as your other writing on the subject, including your two previous books, Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations? They’re all part of the same project, but they do different things. All of my writing starts with where my mother’s family is from and what my experience is and trying to figure out how we got here. How did Canada let this happen? How did a country that professes to be so kind, genteel and welcoming do this to the people who were living here when they arrived? It’s always perplexed me and broken my heart. It’s also about wanting to tell the stories of my people from the North and the families I know. I see patterns of strength and beauty and love in those families. I wanted Canada to see us for who we are, not as we’ve traditionally been portrayed.

Has it been easier in recent years to get stories on residential schools published? Yes and no. I’ve been lucky to have a column in the Globe and Mail. It’s important to put our stories in front of people who wouldn’t necessarily be reading them otherwise. We have First Nations journalists in the Globe newsroom—Willow Fiddler is amazing. We have news platforms like CBC Indigenous and IndigiNews now, and APTN is growing in leaps and bounds. Times are changing, but they haven’t changed enough.

What else needs to happen? There was just a change to the Broadcasting Act, which now includes Indigenous languages along with English and French. That’s a huge step. But now we have to catch up in print and digital media. It’s not enough to just be the writers—we have to be the decision makers in boardrooms and managing editors’ offices. That’s when we’ll see major changes.

Once upon a time, you were a Queen’s Park reporter. Any nostalgia for that beat? I cut my teeth there. I worked with incredible journalists like Michelle Shephard, Jim Rankin, David Rider and Robert Benzie. I spent four years at the pink palace, learning how to yell at politicians. The province is a great, wonderful beast. I loved it.

The title of your book refers to the knowledge First Nations’ people have about what really happened at residential schools. Can you elaborate? It’s what we’ve always known in our hearts and heads and spirits. We all knew there were people in our families who didn’t come home—who were just gone. And why was that? Where did they go? My knowing is everyone else’s knowing. Every First Nations family knows, or at least knows of, someone who is gone. Now the rest of the country is waking up to what we’ve always known.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.