Active Voice with Tanya Talaga
Active Voice: featuring writer and journalist Tanya Talaga
Join us for a morning of reading and conversation with award-winning author and journalist Tanya Talaga and master storyteller Ivan Coyote. Active Voice brings global voices to the Yukon and fosters intimate and authentic discussion between artists and communities. This event is facilitated in partnership with Yukon University, the Yukon Arts Centre and hosted by YukonU’s Specialist in Creative Engagement and Expression, Ivan Coyote.
This event takes place on November 26 at 10:30am at the Yukon Arts Centre and is open to high school students, Yukon University students and faculty.
Afterwards there will be a meet and greet with Tanya and Ivan in Classroom C1530.
There will also be an evening show at 7 pm that is open to the public.
Tanya Talaga is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and was born and raised in Toronto. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her mother was raised on the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation and Treaty 9. She is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. A finalist for the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the book was also CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 book. Talaga was the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer. She is also the author of the national bestseller All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. For more than 20 years she was a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail. Tanya Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories.
The Knowing, Tanya Talaga’s latest book
For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.
The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.
Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.