Tanya Talaga – författare

From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, an urgent exploration of the residential school system It is believed that nearly 20,000 Indigenous children have been lost on Turtle Island: neglected, medically experimented on, abused, murdered. This is one of Canadas greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. Generations of Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many after being sent to residential schools,Indian hospitals and asylumsa coordinated system designed to destroy who First Nations, Mtis and Inuit are.The system, fuelled by Church and state, committed the most heinous of crimes: sexually, physically and emotionally abusing children over decades, many of whom died and were buried on the grounds of the schools. In 2021, the discovery of 215 graves believed to house the bodies of Indigenous children on the land of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School made international headlines. Canadas quiet horror became its very loud, public disaster, as all eyes turned to a country long seen as a model of justice and equality, a country quick to condemn the human rights violations of others, now exposed as not only having failed to stop genocide but actively pursuing it as government policy. In The Knowing, award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga, one of Canadas top investigative journalists, retells the history of this country as only she canthrough an Indigenous lens, by tracing the life of her great-great grandmother and family as they lived through this government- and Church-sanctioned genocide.

Winner, 2017 Shaughnessy Cohen Writers' Trust Prize for Political WritingWinner, 2017 RBC Taylor PrizeWinner, 2017 First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/AdultWinner, 2024 Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize, for the whole of her workFinalist, 2017 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for NonfictionThe groundbreaking and multiple award-winning national bestseller work about systemic racism, education, the failure of the policing and justice systems, and Indigenous rights by Tanya Talaga.Over the span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning author Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.