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 Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the novel 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 bestsellers The Knowing and 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. Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories.
A little-known story of a youth-led Indigenous land reclamation in a northwestern Ontario park comes to light in Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising. For 38 days in 1974, 150 people took over Anicinabe Park in Kenora in protest over the ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people. Their issues included illegal land purchases, poor housing conditions, a lack of employment opportunities, and the failings of the Canadian federal government and the Department of Indian Affairs.
Led by the charismatic and eloquent Louie Cameron, leader of the Ojibway Warriors Society, the protest reached all the way to the nation’s capital and beyond—it even caught the eye of the American Indian Movement, whose members joined the cause.
Despite only having eight minutes of archival footage of the armed occupation to work with, director Shane Belcourt—collaborating with acclaimed author and journalist Tanya Talaga (TIFF ’24’s The Knowing) who also serves as co-writer and producer—crafts a captivating documentary that honours the legacy of the protest and identifies its ramifications down to the present day.
Utilizing an immersive set to welcome those who took part in the standoff for impactful present-day interviews and drawing on Cameron’s own unpublished manuscript about the events (read by his son), Belcourt foregrounds the voices of those who were there. The result is a timely and important film that celebrates the power and resilience of Indigenous people.
From Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, comes a riveting exploration of her family’s story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada.
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.
The full Imaginairium schedule will be announced on Aug. 18, 2026.
Co-hosted by Michael Christie & Tanya Talaga
Starring Portia Elan, Tayari Jones, Canisia Lubrin, Harriet Alida Lye, Joss Richard & Tanya Talaga. Hosted by Pam Rocker
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
We’d love to be able to connect directly with you. Sign up here to receive exclusive weekly updates and new show announcements. We promise to make every email newsworthy and entertaining (and by signing up, you help us avoid having to pay to advertise our events on social-media channels).
Join our email list to receive a reminder when shows go on sale.
