Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing coming to shelves, screens, and communities across Canada this fall
The Knowing, a deeply personal look at Canada’s Indian Residential School system by award-winning author Tanya Talaga, will be published August 27 by HarperCollinsCanada. The companion documentary series will make its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. The full four-part series THE KNOWING, expanding Talaga’s story, will premiere September 25 on CBC and CBC Gem.
TORONTO (August 14, 2024) —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 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 27.
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 Indian 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 Anishinaabemowin versions, available on CBC Gem, and Executive Producer for Auntie Up! a podcast series from Makwa Creative.
She was a journalist at The Toronto Star for more than 20 years 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.
CONTACTS
For more information about the book or to request an interview or review copy, please contact:
Lauren Morocco, HarperCollins Canada
Lauren.Morocco@harpercollins.com
For more information about the documentary series or to request a screening copy, please contact:
Tanya Koivusalo, CBC PR
tanya.koivusalo@cbc.ca
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About Makwa Creative
Makwa Creative is a fully Indigenous-owned production company. We focus on sharing Indigenous stories from a creative perspective, and to support Indigenous creators to reach a wider audience in TV, documentaries, podcasts, and digital media. We direct and produce film and TV series which respect the powerful truths and knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples from Canada. Makwa means bear in Ojibwe with many stories about its roles and contributions on Turtle Island. Makwa Creative was started to give voice and stage to Indigenous creators sharing about the resilience of Indigenous peoples.
About HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Known worldwide for the quality of its list, HarperCollinsCanada is the proud home of many bestselling authors, including Thomas King, Zoe Whittall, Esi Edugyan, Michelle Good, Heather O’Neill, Lawrence Hill, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Mark Sakamoto, Catherine Hernandez, Emily St. John Mandel, Tracey Lindberg, Tara Westover, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Rachel Cusk, David A. Robertson, Uzma Jalaluddin, Kim Fu, Karen McBride, Jordan Tannahill, Jael Richardson, and Emma Donoghue, among many more found at harpercollins.ca.
HarperCollins Publishers is the second-largest consumer book publisher in the world, with operations in 17 countries. With 200 years of history and more than 120 branded imprints around the world, HarperCollins publishes approximately 10,000 new books every year in 16 languages, and has a print and digital catalogue of more than 200,000 titles. Writing across dozens of genres, HarperCollins authors include winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and the Booker Prize. HarperCollins, headquartered in New York, is a subsidiary of News Corp (Nasdaq: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) and can be visited online at corporate.HC.com.
About CBC/Radio-Canada
CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada’s national public broadcaster. Through our mandate to inform, enlighten and entertain, we play a central role in strengthening Canadian culture. As Canada’s trusted news source, we offer a uniquely Canadian perspective on news, current affairs and world affairs. Our distinctively homegrown entertainment programming draws audiences from across the country. Deeply rooted in communities, CBC/Radio-Canada offers diverse content in English, French and eight Indigenous languages. We also deliver content in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Punjabi and Tagalog, as well as both official languages, through Radio Canada International (RCI). We are leading the transformation to meet the needs of Canadians in a digital world.