It’s the twenty-fifth book by an Indigenous author that I’ve read this year and, if I had to choose only one, my recommendation would be Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing for its skillful navigation of personal and socio-political history.

It’s both the story of a great-great-granddaughter searching for her ancestor’s past, and the story of an Anishinaabe and Polish woman’s study of how colonization impacted Indigenous peoples in (the land currently called) Canada.

This is how it begins:

“Annie Carpenter lies in an unmarked grave just south of a giant blue-and-yellow IKEA, directly off one of the busiest thoroughfares in North America, the Gardiner Expressway, part of the Queen Elizabeth Way, which cuts west and east across the city of Toronto. It feels like an area you drive through to get somewhere else, not a destination.”

As a journalist, Talaga has perfected the semi-formal tone.

Her prose feels like an ordinary conversation with someone who’s stayed up all night in the archives: half just-sayin’ and half endnotes.

The Knowing feels both more intimate and more expansive than her previous books. (She’s also published All Our Relations in 2019, which has more of an international perspective, and Seven Fallen Feathers in 2017, with a closer look at Thunder Bay and northern Ontario.) That’s a testament to her experience and skill—it’s tough to balance those seemingly conflicting intentions.

It feels like Talaga knows everyone, and her ease quoting conversations and interactions (by phone, by text, meetings, etc.) gives the sense that you’re looking over her shoulder, at her reporter’s notebook, but also glimpsing not only her own efforts at storytelling, and movement towards reconciliation, but also understanding how her efforts fit into a broader context.

She shares some of the guidance and wisdom that she has witnessed and received from many other people engaged in this work. Her 2023 conversation with Murray Sinclair (Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the second Indigenous judge in Canada), for instance, clarifies how he viewed the audience for writing and speaking about Indigenous history in Canada. Talaga would be writing for three groups, he believed.

“Those who believe in what we are doing, who want to be the allies and be at the forefront of process. Secondly, there are those that will deny it and scream bloody murder, who will call the Survivors liars—they will always be there. But the group we need to be concerned with is the large group in the middle. As they become aware—there is something not quite right in what I have been taught in school, something not quite right—we need to give them knowledge to know more.”

The Knowing is written for that “large group in the middle” and not only addresses specific historical events and patterns, but also invites readers closer, into Talaga’s search for family members whose history seemed lost.

So she informs readers what historical figures like Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947), architect of the Residential School System, said about treaty negotiations while they were under way, revealing the government’s deliberate manipulation and subterfuge:

“What could they grasp of the pronouncement on the Indian tenure which had been delivered by the law lords of the Crown, what of the elaborate negotiations between a dominion and a province which had made a treaty possible, what of the sense of traditional policy which brooded over the whole?” he asked. “Nothing. So there was no basis for argument. The simple facts had to be stated and the parental idea developed that the King is the great father of the Indians, watchful over their interests, and ever compassionate.”

But she also talks about how ordinary people—members of her own family—responded to being treated like second-class citizens:

“When I was a girl, before she [her mother, born in 1944] told my brother and me that we had a sister, I never knew why she cried herself to sleep at night. She had copies of Half-Breed by Maria Campbell and In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier stashed under her bed. For a significant portion of her life, she never told anyone she was an Indian: her grandmother told her not to, that she had to fit in with Canadian society. My father wouldn’t stand for it either. If she ever tried to be herself, he’d put a stop to it, calling her names, violently belittling her existence.”

That’s all to say that, stylistically, Talaga’s work is accessible and inviting, as well as impeccably researched.

And anyone who attends to the news has read the headlines. About children’s remains being “discovered” on the grounds of Residential Schools across (what’s today) Canada, about ceremonies held to honour the trauma that was experienced and inherited by children who survived their attendance there, about the reports of these experiences gathered during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the recommendations it made, about how records of these institutions (and companies like the Hudson Bay Company) were maintained or destroyed, about the link between the institution of slavery and the fur trade in northern North American and its impact on Indigenous peoples, about the overturning of the Catholic Church’s historic Doctrine of Discovery in 2023.

But only some who read these headlines will sense that there’s “something not quite right” and will want “to know more”.

Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing would be an excellent first step on a path towards reconciliation. It’s over 400 pages long, and contains countless references to places and people that wouldn’t be recognizable to readers from faraway, but Bill of The Australian Legend has also been reading this book throughout September, and claims none of that slowed his reading. (He is planning to write about it himself before long.)

Have you read Tanya Talaga? Is there a book you would recommend as a good companion for The Knowing?