Tanya Talaga’s Exercise in Self-Erasure

The Knowing, Presents a False and Dystopian View of Canada and its Relations with Aboriginal Peoples.

Tanya Talaga’s book The Knowing. Image from The Cedar Basket

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By Peter Best

Too many young historians enter the profession aiming at activism rather than truth…By giving in to the zeitgeist and writing lop-sided narratives in order to score social media points with activist peers, these historians feed the public’s susceptibility to sensationalism and unreason. Their books contribute to the unraveling of democratic society and the debasement of the scientific method…It is fine and good to criticize the West, but it is another thing to distort the past to such an extent that we no longer recognize the true origins of the blessings we enjoy or the institutional foundations that sustain them. – Historian Jeffery Fynn-Paul.

Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing is, in so many ways and on so many levels, so mean-spirited, shallow, ill-informed and dishonest that a reviewer of it does not know how or where to start his review.

The problem is trying to rationally deal with the all-fronts, blitzkrieg assault against reason, facts, common knowledge and common sense that the book represents.

The Knowing discredits not only Tanya Talaga, but as well, her profession of journalism, her employer, The Globe and Mail, and Harper Collins, its publisher.

The Knowing epitomizes and puts on full display the benignly racist, seemingly intractable status quo governing, and poisoning, Canadians’ relationships with our Aboriginal peoples.

The Knowing is filled with virtual hate speech against white people, dead and alive, and thus, given George Eliot’s self-evident dictum that “nothing comes from blame but evil tempers”, is an enemy of any real kind of “reconciliation.”

Ms. Talaga has little, successful formal education. She admits in the book that she spent four years taking Arts at the University of Toronto, “scraping by…with horrible grades” before she “flunked out” because, as she wrote, I “could not wrap my head around what the major British authors, (such as George Eliot -writer), were saying”.

Her self-admitted, weak analytical ability is demonstrated throughout her book.

Talaga writes in a most confusing and scattered fashion about her Aboriginal ancestors, which is strange given the “blood memory” theme of her book – the thoroughly racist idea, perfected in the 20th century by Nazi Germany, that family, clan and blood “national” identity and knowledge, (when the “nation” is racially exclusive), can be passed down the generations through a select, racially exclusive bloodline and a racially exclusive, “special” connection to “the soil”, or in the parlance of Canada’s Aboriginal mythmakers, “the land.”

The reader, after much flipping back and forth effort, concludes that in 1944 her grandmother Margaret, who we are told was half Cree and half Anishinaabe, gave birth out of wedlock to Talaga’s mother, Sheila.  Margaret, who “could not handle caring” for Sheila, gave her to her mother, Liz, Talaga’s great-grandmother, to raise.

The Knowing is purportedly about Tanya’s efforts to discover and trace the life of great-grandmother Liz’ mother, Annie, Tanya’s great-great grandmother, who, we learn, spent the last years of her life being cared for in a Toronto mental institution, died and was buried  there in 1937, and whose otherwise seemingly difficult and anonymous life is all, according to Ms. Talaga, the fault of the genocidal, colonialist malpractices of white people.

Before she married her husband David, Tanya’s mother Sheila had an illegitimate daughter, Donna, and put her up for adoption when she was one year old. She was adopted by a white couple from Manitoba.

Sheila later married Polish Canadian David Talaga, and they had two children, one of whom was Tanya.

Tanya was raised and educated in a thoroughly “white” fashion, in the Toronto area. She writes that her father, David Talaga, discouraged Sheila from telling anyone that she was “Indian”. Her parents split up when she was in her early twenties, which was about the time that Tanya “flunked out” of the University of Toronto.

(Inexplicably, after admitting that she “flunked out”, she writes elsewhere in the book that her parents split up at the time when she was “just graduating” from university! This is telling and indicative of Ms. Talaga’s indifferent approach throughout the whole book to the sacrosanct, literal meaning of words.)

By Talaga’s benignly racist, mystical, “blood” standards as revealed in this book, she is one-quarter Anishinaabe, one-half Polish, and one-quarter God knows what- a melange probably of her father’s unknown European, Polish antecedents, her unnamed grandfather, possibly “white”, who, with Margaret, produced Sheila out of wedlock, and her grandmother Margaret’s imprecise Cree antecedents.

This makes it all the more unreal, dishonest and grating that throughout the book, in a brash and spectacular act of at least three quarters cultural and racial identity erasure Ms.Talaga, in a equally brash and spectacular act of cultural and racial identity misappropriation, in substance describes herself as full Anishinaabe, as being in effect a full-blooded “Indian”. For instance, she writes, when Donna and other “lost” relatives came back into Sheila’s and her life: “We were Indian again”.

This phony neo-Pretendian, “Partindian” schtick prevails throughout The Knowing, just as it has contaminated for years her preachy and factually indifferent Globe and Mail articles.

On the very first pages of the book, referring to her allegedly full and fully belonging Indianness, (a word blessed by the Supreme Court of Canada), she writes mawkish, dreamy things like “our peoples”, “the soil remembers our footsteps”, “the sweet sound of ten thousand generations of our families”, “our knowledge”, “our singing”, “we moved around the land, taking care of it”, “our way of life”, our very being is tied to it”. (As to “the soil remembering” and “our very being is tied to the land”, Joseph Goebbels couldn’t have said it better.)

This all makes it doubly and sadly ironic that “erasure” and “othering”, a big part of the dark “genocide” theme of her book, as in Euro-Canadians having allegedly tried to culturally and physically “erase” Aboriginals from Canada, allegedly including her great-great grandmother Annie, and as in “Christianity, the fur trade and the policies of a growing Canada had held us for generations, in a vise”, supposed constituting  “othering of us”, Ms. Talaga “erases” and “others” at least three quarters of her own “racial” history and personal and “racial” identity!

She also virtually erases the natural and healthy multi-racial history and reality of her family, starting with great-great grandmother Annie herself, whose second husband was “white”, and continuing with her own “white” Polish father, David Talaga, (of whom she clearly disapproves), and with the barely mentioned “white” father of her own two children, David Ellis, and the identity, racial and otherwise, of the possibly “white” man Margaret came together with to produce out of wedlock her mother Sheila. (Does she not have access to her own mother’s birth certificate, which might disclose the identify of her grandfather on that side of her family?) And she only mentions in passing the reality of her mother Sheila’s second marriage to “Alfred, a wonderful man who immigrated from Guyana in the 1960’s”.

So, instead of The Knowing being a book based on the author’s own major family reality – racial intermixing, which hopefully is the positive, universalist, ubuntu future trend of Canadian and world history – the author, in willful, erasing denial of her own multi- racial makeup and background and how it made her the lucky, successful, totally assimilated, Westernized person she is, and deliberately fabricating and trying to project a false racial identity of pure “Indianness”, writes this backward-looking, ungrateful, history-falsifying, history-omitting, illiberal, country-disparaging, anti-“white”, self-centered and race-obsessed shambles of a book.

In addition to the underpinnings of The Knowing being so false and untenable, so are most of its main assertions. To detail and deconstruct them all would be impossible, so only a few will be dealt with, as examples of the whole.

On the cover of The Knowing, and in several places in the book, is Aboriginal artist Kent Monkman’s high-quality propaganda painting depicting his artistic view of residential schools as instruments of genocide: The Scoop.

Portraying his view of Canada and Aboriginal Canadians as deserving of retribution for this alleged genocide, Mr. Monkman also painted the well-known, homoerotic painting depicting an Aboriginal male chief, who, having apparently just sodomized an RCMP constable in front of a laughing audience of Aboriginal women, (who is shown lying on his stomach with his pants pulled down), with  help of numerous no-doubt “aunties”, is about to similarly sodomize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

 Both The Knowing’s and The Scoop’s theme of genocide are historically false, and, like Monkman’s Trudeau sodomy fantasy, morally repugnant.

 In fact, residential schools were absolutely necessary to enable Aboriginal youth to acquire the life skills necessary to survive and hopefully thrive in the new industrial age they found themselves in. They were mainly beneficial.

 Nobody was “forced to attend” residential schools, (students’ parents had to apply for them to attend one), and nobody “vanished” from them.  

Given their similar, distorted views on historical facts and artistic honesty, a Monkman painting well matches Ms. Talaga’s narrative.

After labouring through the whole book, the reader realizes that the creepy, sort of horror film title, The Knowing, is actually a misnomer, because the contents of the book reveal nothing but calculated misrepresentations, ignorance and superstition: in summary, a great unknowing.

For Ms. Talaga, the “knowing” is several things.

It’s supposedly “the surviving children from Kamloops telling stories of being woken up in the middle of the night to dig graves in the apple orchard…and friends that disappeared.”

It’s supposedly babies being thrown into incinerators while “they made someone’s little sister go and watch.” (!)

Ridiculous and sick.

Even the chief fraudster in this scam, Chief Rosanne Casimir, has finally admitted, albeit in reluctant, gaslighting fashion, that after three years of lying to Canadians, only “anomalies” showed up on an ineffective, ground penetrating radar scan, which to date, no one has been allowed to see. Not one parent has ever complained of a missing child from any residential school. There’s a death certificate for every child at every school who died, usually of the same disease that was ravaging Indian reserves to a worse degree-tuberculosis- just as it was ravaging the country generally.

These lack of bodies and “anomalies” truths were well known and publicized before The Knowing went to press, so this so-called “Knowing” should be re-named “The Knowing Lie”. Shame on Talaga, the Globe and Mail and Harper Collins for this.

“The Knowing” is supposedly every Indigenous family knowing a family member who has “vanished at the schools, at the Indian hospitals or sanatoriums, in lunatic asylums or from the streets…entire branches of family trees that are unknown or erased.”

This is ridiculous and insulting, for the same general reasons. As stated above, there are no deliberately “vanished” or “erased” or “murdered” Aboriginal people, despite Talaga’s numerous, dark, evidence-free speculations, which litter the book, to the contrary.

Give us one name of a murder victim, Ms. Talaga!

“The Knowing” is the supposedly wrongfully “denied claims of residential school “Survivors”.

Ridiculous. The federal government was, and still is, handing money out like candy to any Aboriginal with only a remotely credible story of “abuse” suffered at a residential school or of suffering “intergenerational trauma” as the result of a parent or grandparent attending one. Any rare Aboriginal who was denied compensation must have been patently undeserving of it. “Intergenerational trauma” caused by someone attending a residential school is largely a myth.

“The Knowing” is supposedly knowing that:

 “Our eggs hold our secrets. Passed down through our mothers. Through the womb, regenerating, carrying forward the lines of our families, whichever corner of the earth they come from. They also carry our lived experiences, our love and pain. Eggs travelling like beavers swimming in the rivers, moving gently but purposefully before stopping and deciding that this is where they should make their homes…”

This is ridiculous, benignly racist, magical-thinking drivel, like “the soil remembering”, which permeates the entire book. Soil doesn’t remember. Eggs don’t have consciousness. Duh!

This drivel echoes mystic, Nazi, Aryan “blut und boden” race theory.

“The Knowing” is supposedly knowing the “seven Grandfather Anishinaabe Teachings…love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, wisdom and truth.”

This is incredibly banal and commonplace. This is merely a list of virtues extolled by all cultures the world over, dressed up with the word Grandfather and with capital letters to appear as Aboriginal racially and morally superior exceptionalism.

Ms. Talaga writes that her personal “knowing” comes from “the (family) legacies of the dual branches of genocide, one on Turtle Island and one far off in eastern Europe”.

There was no genocide of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, ever. As stated, this is a disgusting blood libel against the ancestors of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Again, shame on Talaga, the Globe and Mail and HarperCollins publishers.

There’s no indication that Talaga’s husband was Jewish. Only Polish Jews (and other “aberrant” individuals like socialists, homosexuals, the disabled etc.) were Polish Holocaust victims. Poland’s Catholic population’s complicity in the Holocaust is notorious. The Polish branch of David Talaga’s family was more likely to have been enablers of the Holocaust than victims of it.

Ms. Talaga’s deliberate conflation of train transportation being used as a means of Aboriginal children travelling to their residential schools, with Nazi Germany using trains to transport Jewish children to death camps is repellent and disgusting. She, her employer, The Globe and Mail, and Harper Collins should publicly apologize to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. This is a form of true “denialism”. (Paraphrasing Joseph Welch’s exasperated outburst at Senator Joseph McCarthy: “At long last sirs and mesdames, have you no decency?”)

The whole basis of the title of Talaga’s book is a combination of “little learning”, benignly racist superstition, juvenile magical thinking, and crass, cynical careerism.

Not content with the intellectual childishness of Ms. Talaga’s iterations of “The Knowing”, she further burdens the reader’s tolerance levels with another creepy-sounding phrase, “the taking”, referring to at-risk Aboriginal children being taken out of dysfunctional and dangerous Aboriginal homes, or being voluntarily delivered by their mothers, (as her grandmother Margaret did, who “could not handle caring” for Sheila, and has Sheila herself did, who, as a teenage unwed mother, could not handle caring for Donna), placed in government care and eventually, the Aboriginal home situation not having improved, put up for adoption.

Eschewing all Aboriginal human agency and personal responsibility for this, and constantly portraying Aboriginals as if they existed in a pre-Fall, Edenic state of nature before European migrators arrived, (when the opposite was the case), she blames “the state” for “viciously” allowing this to happen, apparently forgetting what she wrote in her previous book, Seven Fallen Feathers, about the social danger and dysfunction inherent to life on  remote Indian reserves.

The picture of reserve life she set out in Seven Fallen Feathers– rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual abuse, violence, primitive living conditions, marital and family dysfunction, mental illness, anxiety, unresolved grief and almost total unemployment, is chilling and shocking- totally unamenable to remedy by money. The youth there are experiencing, she wrote, “the highest suicide rate in the Western world” and a school dropout rate at the poorly equipped and maintained reserves schools of over 75%.

The Knowing is prefaced by a bizarre quote from the late Aboriginal lawyer and writer Harold Johnson:

“They just made this whole thing up, the entire thing. A fiction that is absolutely made up and it shapes the world.”

The Knowing, over its next 466 pages, fails to explain to the reader just what the hell he was talking about.

(In any event, it’s certainly a statement that legitimately applies to The Knowing.)

Nevertheless, just as Talaga had in Seven Fallen Feathers, Mr. Johnson did have, during his lifetime, a lot of cogent things to say about the hopelessness, despair and poor life choices and outcomes guaranteed by remote, Indian reserve life.

One of his last books , Peace and Good Order- The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada, presents a harrowing and depressing description of the terrible physical, social and psychological conditions of a typical remote reserve.

He describes the “clan justice” system typical of many reserves, where clan and family ties and the risk of clan and family retribution influence the reporting of crime, law enforcement and legal outcomes.

He describes the reserve RCMP themselves, developing mental health issues because of what they see happening on their reserves, which they are essentially helpless to control or prevent.

Like Talaga’s, his descriptions of the constant and excessive consumption of alcohol, horrific sexual assaults, (many against children and many related to alcohol), drugs, “extreme violence” and child neglect, (also closely related to alcohol), school dropout rates, sense of hopelessness, PTSD and other severe mental health issues existing on the reserves, are searing and heartbreaking.

Indeed, in a previous book written by him, Firewater – How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours), Mr. Johnson states that the death of about half of all Treaty Six residents is due to alcohol!

He describes the populations of these reserves as “traumatized.”

There was indeed the “taking” of at-risk Aboriginal children away from dangerous and dysfunctional families Indian reserves and placing them in safe government care, but only by responsible, caring, child welfare workers, acting pursuant to legislation, for the best interests of the child.

There was no “scooping” as Ms. Talaga irresponsibly parrots.

The reasons for the “taking” were centered on Aboriginal parental child neglect, usually stemming from alcohol abuse – Harold Johnson’s “firewater”.

Retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht, in empathic and scholarly manner, writes about this tragic phenomenon in The Untold Story of Indigenous Child Neglect and Alcohol Abuse -The Firewater Complex. This profound reality- a reality essential for any proper understanding and discussion of the entire “taking” issue- a tragic reality which must explain the disappearances of so many of Talaga’s ancestors and which The Knowing irresponsibly  fails to confront.

This irresponsibility is in keeping with the willful blindness shown towards this tragic reality by the shallow and propagandist Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Murdered and Missing Women and Girls Commission.   

Alcohol was a prime aspect of the cultural catastrophe which tragically befell Canada’s Aboriginal peoples as the result of contact with “modern” European culture. The same “worlds colliding” phenomenon was happening the world over at the time. It was all tragic, as most of history is, not intentional. As in so much of tragic life: “No villain need be: Passion spins the plot.”

The Knowing omits all of the above- in fact it eschews entirely all nuance, complexity and context- thus making it an essentially worthless read in terms of either understanding our past or ameliorating the situation of Aboriginals in Canada today.

Tragically for our Aboriginal peoples, trendy influencers like Ms. Talaga, in onanistic fashion, are content to spill their influence onto the ground, wasting it, as she did in Seven Fallen Feathers, by not affording Aboriginals human agency, and thus infantilizing them, and by blaming everything, including everything tragic or untoward that happened to them, and to her Aboriginal ancestors, on, as she wrote in Seven Fallen Feathers:

“…the whiteface, who wears button-down shirts, eats at the Keg, and lives in a cookie-cutter house in a brand-new subdivision with a Kia parked in the driveway”,

 and thusly, at the same time, engaging in the same dehumanizing racial stereotyping that she hypocritically decries in her books.

And she wastes her influence by offering no solutions, except money, to ameliorate problems that are unsolvable with money.

Radical structural change is required, and that means abolishing the reserve system, the root of all the social diseases that she, Harold Johnson, retired Judge Giesbrecht and so many others describe. (But there’s no money, power or fame in that, only the small matter of putting the best interests of Aboriginal Canadians ahead of all, so that’ll never happen.)

A significant fact that one learns from The Knowing is the extent of Ms. Talaga’s personal involvement -and that of her employer, The Globe and Mail- in the reckless and irresponsible reporting that led to the perpetuation of the fraud on the Canadian people by the Kamloops Indian band in relation to their so-called “discovery” of the mass graves of 215 Aboriginal children. This led to a mass Canadian hysteria, the lowering of the Canadian flag to half mast for six months, the lowering of Canada’s reputation in the world, the rushing into law of UNDRIP, and the cynical use of it by China to create a false equivalency between this so-called “genocide” and China’s genuine genocidal actions against their Uyghur population.

As stated, instead of engaging in a mea culpa about this in The Knowing, by refusing to acknowledge what the Kamloops band has now acknowledged -that “there’s actually nothing there, folks”- Talaga, throughout The Knowing, in effect repeats the lie. And the Globe and Mail, by refusing to retract and apologize, and by continuing to publish her columns, a recent, richly ironic one being about, of all things, “denialism”, it continues to embarrass and degrade itself and deservedly lose the trust of Canadians.

Ms. Talaga seems to have no general knowledge of Canadian history with which to check or place in context any of her wild, amateurish, historical assertions.

For example, in attempting to buttress her preposterous historical assertion that Aboriginal “human slavery” was a fundamental part of the operation of the Hudson Bay Company, she points to the fact that contracts for service with the Company denoted a worker as a “servant” – and “servant” as she says, “was a loaded term that signified unfreedom, and an inability to chart one’s own destiny”.

(So unreal! Who the heck in this world, except a few multi-billionaires, has the untrammeled ability “to chart one’s own destiny”? We’re all prisoners of our obligations.)

In fact, “servant” was the standard word used for centuries to denote an employee, which is something that, in previous, more educated and literate eras of journalism, is the kind of “stuff” that journalists who had columns in national newspapers would automatically have known.

The very fact of the existence of Hudson Bay contracts, which imply the voluntary meeting of the minds of two willing persons, is antithetical to the ridiculous notion of Hudson Bay Company “human slavery.”

Talaga approves of the stupid term, “the tentacles of assimilation”, implying that assimilation is a negative, destructive monster of a force.

In fact, assimilation is good and necessary. It’s the driving force of creative change. All human activity is affected by and is the product of assimilative forces. Cultures that don’t assimilate die. Aboriginal culture today, to the extent that it exists, only exists because of its assimilative integration with and life support derived from Euro-Canadian culture and institutions.

In The Knowing Talaga describes herself, all in the name of pursuing her Aboriginal causes, (which, other than getting fame, money, having some excitement and promoting her career, the exact details of which the reader is unsure of), as always texting, emailing and phoning, constantly flying here and there, renting cars, and meeting well-fed Aboriginal leaders and activists in expensive restaurants in expensive hotels.

All this would be impossible but for the “tentacles of assimilation” with “Western” ways.

Even the Cree syllabic interpretation of The Knowing on the cover of her book, the product of a benevolent Euro-Canadian wishing to help Aboriginal people preserve their language and culture – wishing to help them fight against the natural, erasing nature of time which only writing, and a written language, can do – is a product of “the tentacles of assimilation”.

The physical book, The Knowing, is itself a product of the “tentacles of assimilation.”

This seeming lack of awareness of, and gratitude for, this assimilative reality, on both her part and on the part of all the Aboriginal race-purists, activists and professional complainers that she consorts with, undermines both her book and the credibility of those mainly Canadian taxpayer-funded purists, activists and complainers.

Tanya Talaga’s friend, Jesse Wente, another totally urban, three quarters “white”, Partindian, who, for career purposes, has similarly erased his white-majority personal reality, and who now falsely and brashly asserts himself, because of his one-quarter Aboriginal “blood quotient”, to be a full-blooded Aboriginal, has provided written praise of The Unknowing in the book’s beginning pages.

At only about the mid-point of his life this ex-CBC film reviewer felt that he had accomplished enough of interest in his life to justify him writing his autobiography, Unreconciled, a harsh, dark and ungrateful screed against the supposed, colonialist racism of his country and his fellow Canadians, past and present- a screed against “his own kind”. In fact, it’s very similar to Talaga’s The Knowing in this regard.

He writes in his praise of The Knowing:

“At a time when journalism is in crisis, Tanya Talaga shows us the power of rigorous and thorough reportage and in so doing honours the survivors and their descendants with the gift of truth. This may be my favorite book ever.”

Journalism is indeed in a state of crisis. The Unknowing contains no truth whatsoever. There’s no sense emanating from it that truth even matters. It offers a        dishonest, propagandist view of our honourable Canadian past.

As well, it offers neither solutions nor hope for Aboriginal Canadians or Canadians in general going forward. One gets no idea from The Knowing what reforms Talaga would propose to make things better for Canada’s Aboriginals. It’s a mean-spirited, narcissistically self-indulgent book.

 Like Monkman’s book cover illustration, it is civic pornography, satisfying only the writer and her small, elite coterie of race-obsessed, Canadian nay-sayers, and serving no broader purpose.

The Unknowing, extolling “my truth” feelings over facts, illustrates the depth and intractability of the crisis in journalism, and the crisis in Canadian letters and scholarship generally. The Unknowing is a symptom of these crises, not any part of a much-needed cure for them.

There are negative forces in the human psyche “forever in collision with beauty, virtue and the gentle uses of life.” (George Eliot again, a major British author whose wise and highly relevant writings Ms. Talaga would profit from (perhaps again) trying “to wrap her head around”.) We all have to wage a daily fight against these negative forces. 

The Knowing reflects these dark and divisive forces. It doesn’t lift a finger to fight them. Instead, tragically for Canada, it amplifies them.

(This post originally appeared on Peter Best’s There Is No Difference website where he prolifically publishes his excellent fact-based analysis of Canadian Indigenous issues).

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read The Supreme Court Strips Charter Rights of Indigenous Canadians

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