The journalist in a family is typically the clan’s historian, cobbling together faded documents and ancestral lore to burnish the family tree, and to pen obituaries and eulogies. With her searing new book The Knowing, veteran Toronto investigative reporter Tanya Talaga has taken that to its apex, solving the 80-year mystery of her missing great-great-grandmother Annie Carpenter. Along the way, she illuminates the generational havoc wreaked by government, church and institutional policies on First Nations, Métis and Inuit families across the land.

“Every Indigenous family is missing loved ones,” writes Talaga. “Everyone knows of a brother or sister, an aunt or uncle, a friend, grandparent or great-grandparent who has vanished at the schools, at the Indian hospitals or sanatoriums, in lunatic asylums or from the streets. There are entire branches of family trees that are unknown or erased.”

A member of Fort William First Nation, Talaga, 53, was born in Toronto to an Anishinaabe mother and Polish father. The Knowing began with a file folder “full of letters, inquiries, death certificates and baptism records” from the personal effects of Talaga’s maternal great uncle, Second World War vet Hank Bowen, who died in 2011. It represented his efforts to confirm the Indigenous ancestry of his mother Liz Bowen and her mother, Annie Gauthier (née Carpenter), who was born in Rupert’s Land, as the expansive Hudson Bay watershed was known, and disappeared around 1930. After her first husband died, Annie married a white French Canadian man named Joseph Gauthier. It nullified her Cree status, thanks to the contentious 1876 Indian Act, which which still governs First Nation lives today, despite several amendments. 

“I seem to wind up with a lot of people’s things when they pass away: dishes, old coats, clothes, photographs,” says Talaga in a video interview from the dining room of her Toronto home, about receiving Hank’s dossier from her  mother, Sheila Bowen. “I’ve always had a huge bent toward history, about stories from the past and how they shape the future.

“And then my mom was raised by Liz, so she wanted to know, and she really couldn’t let it rest. She’s 80, and in the last several years, she’d been coming to me saying, ‘Would you please find Annie for me? Please get this done.’ And so I did.”

It was a painstaking, three-year endeavour. Talaga, award-winning author of the national bestsellers Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, buttressed records that were “rare, inconsistent, full of holes” with help from genealogists, professional archive hunters, interviews with elders and residential school survivors, Ancestry.ca and Facebook. 

“I had a lot of help researching the book,” she said, “because I also knew that in this age of denialism and hate, lateral violence, it had to be pretty bulletproof.”

Talaga had just started sifting through Hank’s files when news broke in May 2021 that ground-penetrating radar had found the remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C. In reporting on that tragic discovery for her Globe and Mail column, she realized how Annie’s story meshed with the catastrophe of residential schools, and was introduced to the phrase that became the title of the book.

“The surviving children from Kamloops tell stories of being woken up in the middle of the night to dig graves in the apple orchard,” writes Talaga. “They remember their friends that disappeared. For years they told the stories, but few listened, and certainly no lawmakers or governments. They called this knowledge “the Knowing.”

Armed with an incomplete 1937 death certificate, Talaga managed to locate Annie at age 10 on an 1881 census in Fort Albany, Ont., where the girl’s father was a Hudson’s Bay Company employee. Through treaty pay lists and subsequent censuses, she tracked the matriarch through two marriages and at least seven children, but the trail went cold in 1929. 

According to family legend, great-great grandpa Gauthier dropped Annie off at the Thunder Bay hospital because she seemed unusually preoccupied with her youngest children; from there, she was sent to the provincial lunatic asylum in Toronto. Some relatives suspected he wanted her out of the way because he had a mistress.

Sadly, Talaga’s meticulous search ended near a highway she routinely traverses. Annie, who settled in Lac Seul First Nation near Sioux Lookout, Ont., had come to rest 2,500 kilometres away in an unmarked grave at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Cemetery, south of the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto. The scribe and her mom were relieved, but heartbroken by the horrible fate that befell Annie and so many First Nations foremothers who “were at the bottom of the social hierarchy.”

“If you want to destroy a nation, you destroy the women,” she writes. “That is what the lawmakers, governments, churches and institutions have been complicit in doing through harmful legislation, through policies that made Indian women property and that aided and abetted Indian residential schools. These foundations set the stage. … This was the beginning of the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls crisis we live with today.”

Talaga’s journey as an acclaimed chronicler of Indigenous life began at the Toronto Star, where we were colleagues for two decades, and where she ascended to become a rare Indigenous journalist writing about her community. “For a long time our editors didn’t want those stories,” she recalled. “I would pitch stories and I’d be told, ‘Oh, no one wants to read that; aren’t those stories all the same; what’s the outcome?’ And I was just happy to be in a newsroom and having a job, right?” Eventually seniority and a perch at Queen’s Park yielded more freedom to report on environmental and institutional issues affecting First Nations. But the turning point in Canadian-Indigenous relations and the media was the 2015 release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report on investigation of the residential school system, she posits. 

Talaga has expanded her storytelling expertise with Makwa Creative (makwa means black bear in Ojibwe), the production company she founded to focus on Indigenous chronicles. She is the co-writer and co-director of the four-part adaptation of The Knowing that will premiere at TIFF on Sept. 12, before heading to CBC and CBC Gem on Sept. 25. 

“I could tell our stories our way and not be confined by other people that had the decision-making power over me,” Talaga explains about the impetus to create her “own newsroom.” 

“We need to really tell our stories, because the First Nations narrative has not been told in Canada to the extent it should be. We’re starting to see glimpses of it now, things are changing, but curriculum still hasn’t fully changed across Canada. 

“The fur trade does not define us. If every one of us were able to look into our families and stand up and say who we are and where we’re from, people would see we’re beyond the Indian Act.”