The Current - How Tanya Talaga found her family’s lost Indigenous history

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

When journalist Tanya Talaga's great uncle requested government documents about his mother, he was told she didn't exist. In her book The Knowing, Talaga digs into how her family’s Indigenous identity was erased, and what that tells us about Canadian history.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Tanya Talaga had driven this stretch of highway hundreds of times, past the big blue and yellow Ikea store, past the strip malls, past the high-rise buildings in Toronto. She didn't know she'd been driving past her great-great-grandmother's gravesite. Her family had been looking for Annie Carpenter for more than eight decades, and they had looked to Tanya, the journalist in the family, to solve the mystery. Tanya Talaga tells that story in her latest book, The Knowing. And in

doing so, she also recasts part of Kana's history. I spoke with Tanya Talaga in August. Here's our conversation. What did you know originally about your great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter, when you started out on this journey? What I knew about Annie was contained in a brown filing folder that my Uncle Hank had left my mom and had made its way to me when he died. And he had, for years, been looking for his mom, Liz, and his grandmother, Annie. his mom, Liz, and his grandmother, Annie. And when I say that, he was looking for why it was they were so silent, why it was they never talked about who they were, where they were from,

why they weren't proud of who they were, what had happened to them to erase identity, memory, everything. identity, memory, everything. So when he passed away, my mother gets this filing folder. She brought it over to me shortly afterwards, and she said, here, this is for you. And in this filing folder was all of these pieces of paper. It was filled with names, people I'd never heard of. There were maps of Northern Ontario First Nations with little circles around them of First Nation communities. There were baptism records, marriage records, and there was a death certificate. And there was one death

certificate of an Annie Gauthier. And Annie Gauthier was my great-great-grandmother. At the bottom, it said that she died at the Ontario Hospital. Where was the Ontario Hospital? Where was she buried? It said the Lakeshore Cemetery. It said the Lakeshore Cemetery. Where was that? I had no idea. And my mom had been searching for Annie. Annie is her great-grandma since she has been in Toronto. So when your great-uncle requested official government documents about Annie's daughter, what was he told? That she didn't exist. It sounds bananas, but that his mother didn't exist. And he wasn't just told this one time. He was told this twice. Every time he would write, and this was before the age of the internet too. This is an older man trying to find out information about his mom and about his grandma.

And so he would write letters to the Department of Indian Affairs, because that's what it was called at the time. And he would write letters to the province of Ontario, looking for his mom's birth certificate, looking for information about his mom. And he would get letters back that said, we have no Elizabeth Gauthier in our records to be born between 1900 and 1910. And that was in the Brown filing folder. And I reference it in the book because to me, it was an example of the erasure or not being registered or seen by Ontario or Canadian government authorities, which is not unusual for First Nations people, older First Nations people.

Like, we weren't running off to, you know, register a birth with your local vital statistics department. That wasn't something that we did, right? You talk about the motivation for this book, in part being, everyone wants to know where they come from, what she lived through. families, I know to be true, we were all about survival. Surviving for our children, finding our children, keeping our children, and never letting them go. But our children were gone. We all had family members that didn't come home from Indian hospitals, tuberculosis sanitaria, from quote-unquote lunatic asylums, from Indian residential schools. There was, you know, a great uncle John. Didn't he go to Shingwauk? And didn't he not come back? I don't know. We can't find his name or his information, but it's a story that's passed

through our generations. And that is also the name of the book, The Knowing. We all know of these family members. And you know, when To Come Loops happened with the spirits of the 215 sort of waking this whole country up to what we knew. In the Kamloops Residential School. That's right. That's right. This is my knowing, but it's also everyone else's. This is the country's knowing too, right? I mean, the TRC in Volume 4 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when they came out with their groundbreaking, unbelievable report,

it was all about the children that were gone. Tanya, the knowing is a very, very powerful metaphor. It's singular and different to Indigenous families, is what you're suggesting. I want to talk a little bit about the Kamloops Residential School, because you describe it in your book. Three years ago, you were covering this story, the very disturbing discovery of 215 suspected graves of children who died there. Just give me a flavor of what you experienced when you went there. You write about the canoe ceremony, about bringing the spirits of the children back. It was remarkable. You know, I remember getting an email from Rae Coy. She is at Kamloops still.

She works for Kukpi Roseanne Casimir. And she had reached out to a handful of Indigenous journalists to come to Kamloops and to write this story. And this was before, you know, everything was breaking loose all over the place with the news of the 215. And when I arrived, it was absolutely remarkable. I'll never forget those days. People were coming in from, I think there was 18 communities in the area that had children coming to the school. But they came from beside that, outside of BC. They came from all over, you know, Alberta, from the north, from parts of, which is now the States, right? Some of those nations.

I went to the Pow Wow Arbor and there were people there from all of these communities and they were drumming. We were in ceremony. It was a sacred space, and it continued like that for three days. I remember sitting on the front lawn outside of the front doors, the imposing front doors of the school, and I saw to the corner of my eye this truck come down, a couple trucks actually. And on top of the truck was this long, beautiful wooden canoe. And all of these people got out of the truck and they were dressed in their regalia. And they lifted this long canoe off and they drummed and they sang. And then they put the canoe on the lawn and they addressed us all.

And they said they were from Squaw First Nation and they said they were there to tell the children that were buried at the school that it was okay. They could leave now. It was time to come home. And their spirits were to get in the canoe and the canoe was going back with them. You're closing your eyes telling that story. You remember being in that moment,

powerful moment for you. I'll never forget it. What was remarkable to me that when I was there at Kamloops was pieces were starting to put, fall into place in my mind, in my own mind, right? About Annie, about the missing folks in my family. I mean, did Annie have more children? Was it just Liz and Louise? I found out that she was remarried when she was in her, you know, late 30s. Oh, so then that told me she must have had more children as a First Nations woman. And finding out where she'd come, the ground she had covered, and, you know, sitting there in

ceremony, it all started to come to me that this was all part of the same story. Annie represented the children as well that were gone, that were missing. Because where was Annie? What happened to her? How did she get erased and forgotten? We have no idea how come she got from where she was living at the time, which was, you know, along the shores of Lake Superior. She was in a place called Graham at the time. How she got from there, all the way, this is the bottom of Treaty 9, all the way to the Ontario Hospital, which is now Humber College, you know, for people listening from modern day Toronto. How did she get there? I actually still don't have any idea. And I've looked for the records,

I have done searches, and I've been told that those records have been destroyed. And I've been told that those records have been destroyed. And so I can't answer that question. How did she survive? I don't want to ruin the end of the book, but of course, you know that she did not. drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

The Indian Act, of course, is such a powerful piece of legislation. During the time she was alive, it was passed not long after Annie was born. What impact did you learn it had on Annie and Liz and other Indigenous women? did you learn it had on Annie and Liz and other Indigenous women? Part of the reason why I really started to hone down on Annie, other than my own family search, when I was writing this book on Indian residential schools, was because of that. When I looked at when Annie was born, we had a census from 1881 that shows that she was from Fort Albany along the James Bay coast. There she was with all of her sisters and her brothers. She was 10 years old in 1881.

All right, the Indian Act was passed in 1876. Rupert's Land, the HBC, which is such a huge part of her life, too, because her father, yes, the Hudson's Bay Company, because her father, Jean-Baptiste Carpenter, worked for the HBC as a quote-unquote servant. And so, she was born at the confluence of these two massive parts in Canadian quote-unquote history, the sale of Rupert's land to Sir John A. Macdonald, and the starting of the Indian Act. And so, when you asked me about how the Indian Act impacts my family and specifically impacted them, I say this in the book, Annie was born in the mouth of genocide.

She was. And to me, it all became clear that this is the book I had to write and what happened to the women in my family. And when you ask how did it directly affect her other than that was the fact that she was enfranchised. So that meant that when she married a white man, she was no longer seen as a status Indian or a member of her community. So she's effectively erased. And the letters I have from the Indian agents at the time, they're, you know, unbelievable. Like they say, it was like,

it's oh, it's like she graduated out of a class, you know, oh, this is so wonderful. She's no longer, you know, a status Indian. She is now a white man's wife. You know, we all grew up learning about the Hudson's Bay Company. We still see it. You say, you suggest that it's a piece of history that Canadians often, too often, romanticize. What has been left out of this story, especially as it relates to women? Well, we can have a whole other three-hour show on that, that's for sure. I think that we really need to take a harder look at our history in this country. And I'm just going to make a plug for the work of Dr. Anne Lindsay. She is an incredible University of Winnipeg professor.

She has been an incredible historian. She's done a lot of work on slavery and the fur trade. And I think this is something that we need to include in our history books a lot more than we do. How our people were viewed and why were they viewed in the ways they were? Well, when you look at the governors Those ideals of empire, of imperialism, those ideas of who is worthy, who is not, the othering of our people, I really do believe comes from that period. We have seen this talked about in the United States, but we don't see it here. We don't talk about the caste system here. I think of the work of Isabel Wilkerson, whose book Caste is incredible. It's a Pulitzer Prize winning book. She looks at how come when we're speaking

about race, we also don't talk about caste. And when you look at the Indian Act, when you look at Indian residential schools, the proof is there. You quote a number of very powerful men at the time, including the guy who ran HBC, Hudson's Bay Company at the time, Simpson. How did he describe in your research Indigenous women? That guy, that guy was a character. George Simpson, he openly referred to Indigenous women as half-breeds, as brown bits, as commodities, brown jugs.

And he ruled for decades. And not only did he rule for decades, he had at least 13 children with mothers who were Indigenous. And after the women would have his children, he threw them away. He didn't want anything to do with his offspring either. threw them away. He didn't want anything to do with his offspring either. He would try and marry off some of the women as well to his subordinates. And he said, you know, if you can dispose of the lady, it will be satisfactory, as she is an unnecessary and expensive appendage. I see no fun in keeping a woman without enjoying her charms. But if she is unmarketable, I have no wish that We romanticize this period also, too, in Canadian history with the quote-unquote country wives, right? Like all of us First Nations women were hanging around waiting to get married to European men. I can't imagine that a 12-year-old or a 13 or a 14-year-old girl during the time of the fur trade would want to leave her family, her mom,

her dad, her community, her language to go off and be a bride to some man that she doesn't know him, his culture, his language. But it was her, that girl, that made the family survive. Tanya, the breadth of your book is very broad and stunning, really, interweaving today's experience with the history of this country. How would you say what you've just described hundreds of years ago with the Hudson's Bay Company and Annie's life at the time with the experiences of indigenous women today? Annie died in 1937. That was less than 100 years ago. Our women are, they continue to disappear. They continue to die, to go missing.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish with this book was where did the trafficking of our women start where did murdered missing indigenous women and girls genocide start it started here these are the attitudes that were ingrained built in to the fabric of Canadian policy, bureaucracy, society. We are still fighting those images, those words, those feelings, those racist slurs. Today, our women are still so vulnerable. We started our conversation talking about this grave next to the Ikea in Toronto along the highway many of us drive frequently. You visited the grave with your mother. What did it look like and what did it mean to you and your mom? I have driven past that site

so many times I can't even tell you how many times, right along the Queen Elizabeth Way to get to Sherway Gardens, to get to that giant Ikea, to get to the airport or to Hamilton. And all this time, her grave site was right there. How cruel reality is, how bizarre. is how bizarre. When we first went there, we met Edward Januszewski, and he is with the Lakeshore Cemetery Project. He used to work at the Lakeshore when it was a psychiatric facility. It's now CAMH, and it was him that found the papers that showed there was a graveyard for this institution, this very large institution that's in Toronto right now. And no one knew about it when he asked people. He found the graveyard.

It was overgrown. It was a dog run. It is right off of this massive highway right in the heart of Toronto. And he started a committee to clear it and make it better. And he did. But there are 1,511 people buried in this giant graveyard that's the size of a city block. Less than 10% have markers. When we first got there, my mother and my daughter and I to go visit Annie, Ed met us and showed us this graveyard that

they have now cleaned off. And so now you can actually go there and see and it's just like this field of unmarked graves. And there was a project that the Canadian government did recently to commemorate with headstones, First World War veterans. And luckily, from those spots, I know where Annie is, because I know there's a First World War veteran near her. And so I can sort of figure out where she is. But Ed knew the exact plot. And we went there. And there's actually a little funny story about the first time we went there with Ed. And he took us. And, you know, I had my smudge bowl.

We were crying. It was a huge emotional moment. And I could see Ed out of the corner of my eye looking a bit nervous. And then he comes up to me and he said, Tanya, I'm sorry, this is the wrong spot. And so we were smudging and crying and like, you know, welcoming. Somebody was the beneficiary. Exactly. And so then we moved, we went to the right spot.

And then we did it all again. And now we visit Annie. And through the course of finding Annie, a group of us have come together from Grand Council Treaty 3, Anishinaabe Aski Nation, Anishinaabeg Nation, Kimberly Murray's office, the Office of the Special Interlocutor, and the Ontario Coroner's Office. And through Finding Annie, we have found 32 other First Nations people buried in the grave. And we also have elders on our committee too, including my cousin Victor Chappas. And we are now looking for the family members of those 32 others.

So now that you've found Annie's resting place and those others, what do you hope Canadians take from what you've written? This country, our cities, our towns are built on our bones. They're built on our loved ones. And this isn't ancient history from 500 years ago, or 300 years ago. Annie died in 1937. What happened to Annie's children? What happened to Annie's brothers and sisters' children and their children and their children? It is still happening in this country. We still have women that go missing, boys, men that go missing. We still have children dying in the waters in Thunder Bay.

This is all connected. Bay. This is all connected. We're still fighting for that equity and to be seen as the first people of this country and to be given that seat at the table, not ceremonial or something that is like, you're just doing it to have us there. No, the treaties make us partners in this land. And like at Arlampa Canada, we have to make it work. I'm going to end it there, Tanya. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. Chi-miigwech. Tanya Talaga is an award-winning author

and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Her latest book is The Knowing. You can stream the book's companion docuseries, also called The Knowing, on CBC Gem. Tanya talked about her poignant experience at the site of the Kamloops Residential School and the work she's doing now with Kimberly Murray, this special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools. Well, this week, Kimberly Murray is releasing her final report,

an Indigenous-led reparations framework. And I'll be speaking with Murray Wednesday on The Current. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.