Tanya Talaga has made a career of telling the unvarnished truth about Canada, to Canada. In her bestselling books, Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations, Talaga, a Globe and Mail columnist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent, turned her incisive eye on systemic problems like racism in policing and the suicide epidemic among Indigenous youth. But when it came to the personal, to her own family, Talaga always found more questions than answers.
In The Knowing, her third non-fiction book, out August 27, Talaga runs toward, not from, her history, filling in the gaps in her own ancestral line. It’s a lineage severed several times, as her First Nations relatives were forcibly sent to government- and church-sponsored residential schools, asylums and new families entirely as part of the Sixties Scoop. After years spent digging into the past, she’s learned a few things: about her grandmothers, about Canada’s past and that, when it comes to family, you can never really know the whole story.
The Knowing revisits the colonial history of Canada, as well as the history of your own matriarchal line. What made you decide to weave in your own family details?
All Indigenous families share the same history; we all have people who are missing. I didn’t want to write a trauma porn book, talking about everyone else’s pain. Elder Sam Achneepineskum from Marten Falls First Nation once gave me some advice: our ancestors need to know who’s speaking. We need to tell people who each of us are, so everyone can understand what happened.
...Figuring it all out, the how did we get here—that helps me a lot. It’s reclamation. One person I met, Paula Rickard, is a professional genealogist who lives in Moose Factory, Ontario. She’s built out a family tree of the James Bay coast that now has something like 12,000 names. When I was just starting out, I messaged her Facebook page, and she responded with, “You know we’re related, too, right?”
KEEP READING : https://www.macleans.ca/culture/tanya-talaga-is-rewriting-canadian-history-her-way/
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