The Knowing

“A masterwork by one of our most essential storytellers.” —Jesse Wente, author of Unreconciled

From award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga comes a riveting exploration of the dark history of residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums

For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being consigned to 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 is the unfolding of history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of Canada 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.

Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unraveling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.

“Harrowing, illuminating and necessary reading.” —Carol Off, author of At a Loss for Words