Tanya Talaga learned about how Indigenous women were erased by discovering her own family's history
Talaga’s family searched for their matriarch for over 80 years before she took over the investigation
Warning: This story makes reference to racial slurs used toward Indigenous women.
When Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga set out to understand more about her own great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter, she never expected to find her buried in a forgotten cemetery near a busy highway in Toronto.
"I have driven past that site so 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," Talaga told The Current's guest host Susan Ormiston. "How cruel reality is."
Talaga's family knew Carpenter — a Cree woman originally from the James Bay Coast — had ended up in Toronto, though they didn't know how, or where she was buried. Her family searched for answers for more than 80 years before Talaga herself inherited the investigation.
Her search for answers about her own family, which Talaga tells in her new book The Knowing, uncovers truths about Canadian history and colonization — especially the treatment of Indigenous women, who were married off to white settlers and stripped of their Indian status.
Talaga spoke with Ormiston about what she learned of her own family, how Indigenous women have been mistreated and erased throughout Canadian history, and how those attitudes remain today. Here is part of their 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 he had for years been looking for his mom, Liz, and his grandmother, Annie. And he was looking [to understand] why it was they were so silent. Why it was they never talked about who they were, where they were from. What had happened to them to erase identity, memory, everything.
In this filing folder was all of these pieces of paper. It was filled with names [and] people I'd never heard of. There were maps of northern Ontario First Nations with little circles around them. There were baptism records, marriage records.
We are still fighting those images, those words, those feelings, those racist slurs. Today, our women are still so vulnerable.- Tanya Talaga
And there was one death certificate of an Annie Gauthier … 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? At the Lakeshore Cemetery — where was that? I had no idea.
You talk about the motivation for this book, in part being everyone wants to know where they come from, who their ancestors are. What did this erasure look like in your personal life?
A silent mother. A grandmother who had so much that she kept inside, but I could see it on her face, what she lived through. The women in my mother's family, and many First Nations families, we were all about survival. Surviving for our children. Finding our children. Keeping our children.
But our children were gone. We all had family members that didn't come home from Indian hospitals, tuberculosis sanitaria, from Indian residential schools.
The Indian Act, of course, is such a powerful piece of legislation. What impact did you learn it had on Annie … and other Indigenous women?
[It] 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 was effectively erased.
And the letters I have from the Indian agents at the time, they're unbelievable. They say it like she graduated out of a class ... like, "Oh, this is so wonderful. She's no longer a status Indian. She is now a white man's wife."
You quote a number of very powerful men at the time, including the guy who ran the Hudson's Bay Company, [George] Simpson. How did he describe … Indigenous women?
That guy was a character. George Simpson. He openly referred to Indigenous women as "half breeds," as "brown bits," as commodities.
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. He said, "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."
We romanticize this period in Canadian history with the "country wives" (Indigenous women married to men connected to the fur trade), 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 14-year-old girl during the time of the fur trade would want to leave her family, her community, her language to go off and be a bride to some man. ... She doesn't know him, his culture, his language. But it was her, that girl, that made the family survive.
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, [connects] with the experiences of Indigenous women today?
Annie died in 1937. That was less than 100 years ago. Our women … continue to disappear. They continue to die, to go missing.
One of the things I wanted to accomplish with this book was [to figure out] where did the trafficking of our women start? Where did the [Missing and Murdered] Indigenous Women and Girls genocide start? It started here.
These are the attitudes that were ingrained, built into 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Interview with Tanya Talaga produced by Dawna Dingwall