The grim reality of Canada’s residential school system and the bureaucratic processes that kept it going for more than 150 years are laid bare in The Knowing, a CBC documentary series based on the bestselling book from Anishinaabe journalist and documentarian Tanya Talaga.

The four-part series had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 12, one week after the book shot up to No. 1 on the Globe and Mail‘s bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction. It ran on CBC on Sept. 25, reaching one million viewers in its first three weeks, and has been the top docuseries on CBC Gem since its debut.

For Talaga, bringing The Knowing to the page and the screen meant relying on her co-director, Courtney Montour of the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, whose previous docuseries work includes APTN’s Skindigenous.

“Working with Courtney has been life-altering for me,” Talaga tells Playback. “It’s almost like a yin and yang; [when] I’m out there [in front of the camera], she’s the one yelling at me, ‘slow down, let’s think about a scene.’ When we put our two brains together, it’s just beauty.”

The Knowing began as a non-fiction book from Talaga, which follows her journey discovering what happened to her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter, and the subsequent discovery of her maternal family’s connections to residential schools. As her work progressed, she knew she needed to document her experiences in real-time. “Things were starting to come together and we were realizing what we had in front of us,” says Talaga.

The two first began filming in spring 2022, when Talaga was part of a three-day delegation of First Nations, Inuit and Métis to Rome, including Elders and residential school survivors, to meet with the Pope nearly one year after the discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

At the time, they didn’t have development funding, but they picked up a camera and filmed what they could. “I knew that if we missed it, it would be gone and we’d never get these opportunities again,” says Talaga.

Following the journey to Rome, the financing came into place. CBC came on board as the broadcaster, with funding flowing in from the Indigenous Screen Office, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and the Rogers Fund. It’s produced under Talaga’s banner Makwa Creative.

In 2023, while the book was coming along, Montour was one of the first to read its chapters. “That’s when we were starting to develop what the visual language of the series could be,” says Montour. “What came across very clearly in the book is we needed to grab [Talaga’s] ties to Albany [River], to the land and to the Ininiw (Cree) language.”

While researching the book, Talaga discovered familial ties to Fort Albany First Nation on Treaty 9 territory through the Carpenters, providing a direct line to her family matriarch. Part of the CMF funding helped the team film 20% of the documentary in Ininiw, a dialect of Cree, and to create a fully Ininiw version to be released next year. They brought in members of the Fort Albany First Nation to Toronto to record. Talaga says some of the speakers themselves were residential school survivors.

Montour says a critical part of the process in making The Knowing was connecting with the communities they were filming. “It was a lot of community engagement and discussion all along the way through the process,” she says, adding they spoke at length with individuals rather than “just throw a camera in someone’s face.”

In order to deliver the series to CBC on time, Talaga brought in Antica Productions president Stuart Coxe, whom she previously collaborated with on War for the Woods (2023) and Spirit to Soar (2021), as an EP. He looped in supervising producer Geoff Siskind to help handle the production schedule. “I needed somebody who could run the trains and build the scaffolding to put together a four-part series in a very short period of time,” she says.

The filmmaking process also supported Talaga’s work in the book. In one chapter, she describes a moment during a press scrum with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau where he fails to maintain eye contact with her while answering a question on bringing records on residential schools from Rome to Canada. Viewers can see it for themselves in the first episode of the documentary.

“I was so grateful to have recorded that and that we caught those moments,” says Talaga. “I knew that he couldn’t meet my eyes, but I needed to see it visually. I watched it so many times to make sure that I was dead-on accurate. That is the beauty of documenting all that we did, because I could go back when I was in the writing process and lean on those early days of filming.”

Photo by Robbie J. Harper, courtesy of CBC

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s 2024 Winter issue