Makwa Creative, HarperCollinsCanada and CBC bring Tanya Talaga’s deeply personal and piercing story, THE KNOWING, to audiences everywhere this fall.
Journalist, filmmaker, and award-winning Anishinaabe author, Tanya Talaga, is on a quest to find the truth of what happened to the women in her maternal family, revealing a story intertwined with Canada’s Indian Residential School system. Through her own unique lens, Talaga’s multi-platform narrative unfolds the impact of centuries-long oppression that continues to reverberate in Indigenous communities today.
What began with her mother’s appeal for Talaga to use her investigative reporting skills to find out what happened to her great-grandmother, grew into a book that uniquely unravels Canadian history. The discovery of rare visual archives and personal stories of Survivors she meets, help drive the narrative and events surrounding the historic Papal apology in Rome and in Canada.
“While researching and writing The Knowing, the book, I realized we needed to visually document the rapid events unfolding around us – from my mother’s maternal family’s story to the first anniversary of the finding of Le Estcwicwéy̓, the missing, two years ago in Kamloops B.C.,” said Talaga. “Makwa Creative, my production company, jumped on the chance, grabbing cameras and running to document this epic story.”
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.
The Knowing will be published by HarperCollinsCanada, available wherever books are sold on August 27th.
ABOUT THE DOCUMENTARY
THE KNOWING is a four-part narrative docuseries that follows journalist Tanya Talaga and her family’s eight-decade long search for family matriarch Annie Carpenter, revealing a story deeply intertwined with Canada’s residential school system. Using sweeping imagery of the land, blended with rare archival footage, Ininiw poetic narration and deeply personal conversations with Survivors, knowledge holders and newly found family, Talaga takes us on an emotional journey of both familial reclamation and an exploration of Canada’s true history.
THE KNOWING will premiere on CBC and CBC Gem at 8 pm (8:30 NT) on September 25. Adapted from Talaga’s book of the same name, the documentary series is produced by Makwa Creative, in association with CBC. Directed by Tanya Talaga and Courtney Montour, the executive producers are Tanya Talaga and Stuart Coxe. The supervising producer is Geoff Siskind and the co-producer is Jordan Huffman. For CBC, Sally Catto is General Manager, Entertainment, Factual, & Sports; Jennifer Dettman is Executive Director, Unscripted Content; Sandra Kleinfeld is Senior Director, Documentary; and Nic Meloney is Executive in Charge of Production, CBC Docs.
A Cree-language version of the documentary series, narrated by James Bay Cree Community members, will be available later in CBC’s 2024-2025 broadcast season.
TANYA TALAGA is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and was born and raised in Toronto. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her mother was raised on the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation and Treaty 9.
She is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. The book was also CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer. She is also the author of the national bestseller, All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward.
Talaga is the President and CEO of Makwa Creative, a production company focused on Indigenous storytelling. She is the Director and Executive Producer of Mashkawi-Manidoo Bimaadiziwin Spirit to Soar, a documentary in both English and Anishinabemowin-language versions, available on CBC Gem, and Executive Producer for Auntie Up! a podcast series from Makwa Creative.
For more than twenty years she was a journalist at The Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at The Globe and Mail.
EVENTS
Tanya Talaga will be traveling across the country this fall, visiting over 20 cities for THE KNOWING. To see if she will be visiting a community near you, please visit https://www.harpercollins.ca/the-knowing/ for all event details.
