Uncovering Truths: Tanya Talaga’s journey to reclaim family history

Tickets for the Changemakers Speakers Series event featuring Tanya Talaga on September 17 are available online.

Award-winning journalist and author Tanya Talaga is a voice for truth and reconciliation. Talaga is coming to Victoria this September as part of Royal Roads University’s Changemakers Speakers Series. The event, The Knowing: One Family’s Journey, references Talaga’s book of the same title where she shares her deeply personal journey of uncovering the life of her great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter. 

Talaga’s search for Annie began with a brown file folder passed down from her uncle, Hank Bowen, who spent decades searching for records of his mother, Liz, and his grandmother, Annie. His research, primarily conducted prior to the internet and amassed over the course of thirty years, contained a myriad of photocopied documents, including maps of Northern Ontario where his maternal ancestors lived. 

His search faced many roadblocks.

“The Government of Canada actually said his mother, Liz, didn’t exist as a human being in Ontario,” Talaga says. “Multiple vital statistics reports were checked and there was no record of her, which was ridiculous considering he was raised by her, and he was born. So, he knows that she was a person.”

There was also no information about Annie. In 1930, she was taken away from where she was living just outside of Ignace, Ontario and put in a hospital in Toronto.

The family never saw or heard from her again.

“It’s actually not that long ago in generations, you know?” Talaga says. “When she disappeared in 1930, she was just a little bit older than me.”

Talaga’s mother urged her to take up the search. “She said to me, it’s your job to find Annie. I want to know what happened to her. I can’t rest ‘till I know.” 

Drawing on her investigative reporting skills, Talaga began piecing together the fragments of her family’s past. 

“My Uncle Hank didn't know anything about his mother's background. She refused to talk about where she was raised. She refused to speak her language, which we later confirmed was Cree. She had been to Indian residential school and came out of it hating everything about herself, hating everything Indian and loving the Queen and British Canadian culture,” says Talaga. 

Historical documents proved inaccurate or incomplete, with many more being inaccessible, including those from residential schools, which are held at the Vatican in Rome.

Despite the obstacles, Talaga remained committed to her search and to sharing the story of looking for her family’s missing loved ones. It’s a story that many Indigenous families know all too well, but some Canadians are just learning. 

“If every person was to open up about that and just learn the truth and push for the truth to be taught in schools in our elementary and our secondary schools that would be huge,” Talaga says. 

Tickets for the Changemakers Speakers Series event featuring Tanya Talaga on September 17 are available online.