Tanya Talaga

Despite it lasting 90 days in 1974, there is only eight minutes of footage about an Indigenous youth-led armed occupation in Kenora, Ontario. The documentary Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising tells that story of Indigenous resilience and power.

Acclaimed journalist Tanya Talaga brings her evocative storytelling from the page to the screen with her search for a long-lost matriarch named Annie, solving an 80-year-old family mystery. With lush cinematography and evocative storytelling, Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga embarks on a deeply personal search to find out what happened to her great-great-grandmother in The Knowing. Co-directors Talaga and Kanien’kehá:ka filmmaker Courtney Montour (Mary Two-Axe Earley: I Am Indian Again) use archival footage and intimate interviews to piece together the unknown story of Talaga’s family member, Annie Carpenter. In the first two parts of the four-episode docuseries, they skillfully illustrate how hard it is for Indigenous families to get answers from authorities, especially about those who have entered the residential school or Indian hospital systems. ...

Between 2000 and 2011, seven First Nations high school students in Thunder Bay died. Five were found in rivers surrounding Lake Superior. All were forced to leave their homes in order to attend school. Anishinaabe/Polish Canadian journalist Tanya Talaga brought international attention to this tragedy through her award-winning non-fiction book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City. Talaga returns to Thunder Bay and her ancestral roots to talk with the family members, Indigenous community leaders and youth whose resilience in the face of unjust colonial systems provide a path forward.