The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today

Journalist Talaga (Seven Fallen Feathers) offers a haunting, meditative exploration of the atrocities Indigenous people faced for generations in Canada and the U.S. at the hands of both church and state institutions. Talaga juxtaposes centuries’ worth of history with a more personal story: her own efforts to learn about her great-great-grandmother Annie—“the first of five generations of Anishinaabe and Ininiw women in my family to live under [the] yoke” of Canada’s Indian Act of 1876. The array of abuses makes for harrowing reading, but Talaga has a graceful sense of when to pull back and give the reader time to process. Throughout, she reckons with the difficulty of revisiting the past through official records—“a State that is set on destroying you does not keep accurate records with proper spellings of names”—and uses photographs to express ineluctable gaps in the archive (one particularly chilling image is a photo taken by Talaga of the word “HELP” carved into a brick wall behind the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Ontario). In later chapters, Talaga chronicles efforts by the Catholic Church to make amends with Indigenous communities, but also unsettlingly finds that several U.S. residential schools remain operational to this day (a discovery that “shocks” but “does not surprise” the author). The result is a searing rumination on a still unresolved historical trauma. (July)

Corrction: An earlier version of this review included the wrong title for the author’s previous book.