Review of The Knowing by Tanya Talaga

I won’t mince words: The Knowing is essential reading for all non-Indigenous Canadians, and it should be required reading for teachers like myself. Tanya Talaga has written a history that is at times painful, at times healing, yet always powerful and true. After her impressive work in Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations, her latest takes a far more personal approach to the story of Canada, reminding us that residential schools are not “in the past.” For a history book, The Knowing is remarkably grounded in the present. It is a book that should put to rest for all time the question of why we cannot just “move on” from the legacy created by colonization.

Content warning in this book, and therefore my review, for discussions of residential schools and colonization in Canada. Please take care while reading.

Put simply, The Knowing is an account of Talaga’s research into her great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter. Talaga was picking up where her Uncle Hank left off, attempting to learn more about Annie and her descendants. She enlists historians and knowledge keepers from communities across northern Ontario. She and others trawl through endless records from the government. She traces Annie’s movements across Ontario, and then she follows Annie’s descendants—many of them going into the residential school system. At the same time, she chronicles the discovery of unmarked graves in Kamloops (and then across Canada) on the sites of former residential schools, discussing it from her perspective as a journalist who was present for several key events.

I’ve read a lot about residential schools. That’s not a boast, just a fact I wanted to establish to underscore what I say next: this is the hardest book about residential schools that I have read. It is not the most explicit in terms of discussing the abuses that happened or the experiences of Survivors. It is not the most complete in its chronology of the system or its architecting by Macdonald, Scott, and others. But it is the hardest. In her retracing of Annie and her descendants, Talaga manages to portray the chaotic destructiveness of the various systems the federal and provincial governments created to dispossess and assimilate Indigenous peoples.

Here are two important takeaways: it’s all about the records. First, how hard they are to find. The government does not make it easy to access their records. Some records are in the hands of various churches or Churches, and again, they are not always forthcoming. So historians, journalists, and everyday people looking for answers must navigate a byzantine bureaucratic system. This is, in part, what stymied Uncle Hank for all those years (his residence in an “Indian hospital”—another way of institutionalizing Indigenous people—didn’t help either). Second, what the records, once you find them, reveal.

The disdain that drips from the letters between Indian agents responsible for various reserves. The irritation they feel that Indigenous people dared to move, to migrate and roam as their ancestors did, instead of staying on the reserve of their birth as allocated to them by the government. The way this inconveniences their administration of the government’s Treaty payment largesse—a whole $4 a year. It’s tempting to point to these artifacts and say, “See how these bureaucrats didn’t see Indigenous people as human, as equals?” as if this is an attitude of the past. Yet Talaga reminds us this attitude is still present today, whether we’re talking about social or housing workers or just everyday members of the public who question genocide and unmarked graves.

The Knowing is a complex story because the truth is a complex story. History is a complex story. When you try to sweep it all aside, to say, “That’s in the past. Move on,” you ignore the river cut into the rock by the flow of the past. The water moving down that river is coming at you now, in the present, and if you aren’t careful, you are the one who will be swept away.

I’m going to keep this review short. I don’t think I can do this book justice by diving deep on everything Talaga discusses. I don’t think I need to convince most people to read this book—I only hope that if you’re on the fence, maybe my review sways you. At times uncomfortable, at times unbearable, this is a story that must be borne so that we can carry it into the future and make something better from it.