November 18, 2024
The Knowing, by Tanya Talaga
As opposed to “The Knowing”—which Tanya Talaga explains in her book of the same name is a sense among Indigenous people of the truth as to what happened to themselves and their relations as part of the genocidal residential schools system in Canada—there is the fact that I knew nothing. Not an excuse, a plea for absolution, just a fact, and so I came to this book most humbly, a book that began with Talaga’s journey for the details of what happened to Annie, her great-great-grandmother, buried in an unmarked grave off the QEW expressway in Toronto, on the former grounds of a psychiatric hospital. Through her own research, in conjunction with the work of so many others, Talaga is able to piece together the story of Annie and her family, one of colonization, subjugation, but also survival (though sometimes not), and her quest for facts and records is its own thread in this many-threaded work, the obstacles in her way (poor record keeping, destroyed documents, other unavailable, and more) telling their own story of colonial power which continues to this day.
