Tanya Talaga is an award-winning Anishinaabe journalist and author. Through her bestselling books, acclaimed documentaries and podcasts, regular columns with the Globe and Mail, and powerful keynotes, Talaga aims to amplify Indigenous voices and stories across Canada and the world. She is a born storyteller, who is passionate about education reform and sharing her hope for a more inclusive and equitable future.
Talaga is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent. She is a proud member of Fort William First Nation in the Robinson-Superior Treaty territory with her maternal family having ties to Treaty 9. Her father was Polish Canadian.
For more than 20 years, Talaga was a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail. In 2021, she was part of the Globe team that won the Michener Award in public service journalism for reporting on the Catholic Church’s efforts to avoid responsibility regarding Indian Residential Schools, and the pursuit of an apology from Pope Francis. She has also been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year while at The Star.
Talaga is the author of three national bestsellers. Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, won the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. Her second book, All Our Relations, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Talaga’s most recent book, The Knowing, retells the history of Canada through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother and her family, as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today. It is the focus of a four-part, CBC docuseries that Talaga co-directed with Courtney Montour. They were awarded Playback’s Directors of the Year in 2024.
In 2018, Talaga founded, Makwa Creative Inc., a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories through podcasts and documentary films, including the Canadian Screen Award-nominated War For The Woods and Mashkawi-Manidoo Bimaadiziwin Spirit to Soar that received the “Audience Award” for best mid-length documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. She is also the executive producer of the podcast, Auntie Up!, which is made for Indigenous women by Indigenous women.
Talaga holds five honorary doctorates. She was the 2017/2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public and, in 2018, was the first Anishinaabe woman to be the CBC Massey Lecturer. Talaga is the recipient of the 2025 Canadian Journalism Federation Tribute which recognizes media luminaries who have made an exceptional journalistic impact on the international stage.
