Tanya Talaga (Nadya Kwandibens)

Award-winning Anishinaabe journalist and author Tanya Talaga’s forthcoming book is being released alongside a documentary series.

The Knowing will be published on August 27 by HarperCollins Canada. In the new book, Talaga returns to familiar subject matter but from a deeply personal perspective; at the request of her mother, she began to use her investigative reporting skills to find out what happened to her great-great-grandmother. The story of Annie Carpenter and her family also retells the story of Canada through an Indigenous lens.

As she researched the book, Talaga realized the story needed to be told beyond the page.

“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.,” Talaga said in a press release.

The resulting four-part documentary series (also called The Knowing) produced by Talaga’s production company Makwa Creative, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, and will be broadcast on CBC and available on CBC Gem on September 25. A Cree-language version of the series will be available on CBC for the 2024-2025 broadcast season.

Talaga, who was a journalist at the Toronto Star for more than 20 years, now writes a regular column in The Globe and Mail. She will be travelling to more than 20 cities for her book tour this fall.

Talaga’s first book, 2017’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City (House of Anansi Press), won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the fifth annual Indigenous Literature Award. That first book told the stories of seven Indigenous high school students who died in Thunder Bay between 2000 and 2011.

In 2018, she was the CBC Massey Lecturer, presenting All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward.