The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today, Tanya Talaga (Review by Stacey Lorenson)

Rating: 4.0/5 Stars

Tanya Talaga has written an engrossing historical, nonfiction novel that addresses Canadian indigenous genocide, intergenerational trauma, and Indian residential ‘schools’ bridged by painstaking research of government records, family interviews, historical documentation and personal accounts. Talaga, is Anishinaabe descent and Polish, member of Fort William First Nation. She is an acclaimed international best-selling author of two previous novels, in addition to a twenty-year career as a journalist.

Talaga delves into the mystery of her great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter. Annie was a young child, forced to attend one of the more notorious government- church run Indian schools. Records show that she was admitted to a state-run mental asylum in adulthood but was ‘lost’ in the system. Talaga’s quest to find Annie, led to a deep dive into Canada’s disturbing history of residential schools, “Indian hospitals,” asylums, and unmarked mass grave sites at many, of the now shuttered, residential campuses.

The Indian Act, legislation that continues to exist today, controlled every aspect of indigenous life. In 1876, cultural expressions of art, dance, and their native language was outlawed. Assimilation by forced reeducation was mandated for all indigenous children. Multiple generations of children were forcibly taken, placed far away from their homes in residential schools designed to train them for domestic and farm work. An unprecedented number of those children never returned home.

The Knowing connects past oppression and mistreatment of indigenous peoples to the present crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and the trauma still experienced by the survivors of the residential schools. It is impossible not to see the correlation of how these families were systematically destroyed and the current U.S. immigration/deportation crisis in the United States. The similarity of separating and destroying the family unit while inflicting lasting trauma reveal a familiar, haunting agenda. The Knowing is a sobering novel that enlivens the mind and wrenches the heart as it informs readers of past atrocities, giving a voice to survivors, showcasing their vigilance and resilience.