Ep. 49: Unlearning the Colonial Lies, Reclaiming the Knowing with Tanya Talaga

In this gripping episode, Dr. Candace Manitopyes sits with award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker Tanya Talaga, whose work has become a lifeline for truth in a country still wrestling with denial. From the moment they begin, the conversation feels less like an interview and more like two Indigenous women pulling back the curtain on generations of silence, survival, and spiritual return. Tanya shares her path from being the lone Indigenous journalist in mainstream newsrooms of the 1990s (where stories of Indigenous suffering were dismissed as repetitive or “not news”) to becoming one of the most vital Indigenous voices in Canada. She speaks about the spiritual rupture created by Christianity’s imposition on Treaty 9 families, the generational fear of ceremony, and what it means to finally question beliefs handed down in the name of survival. The conversation deepens as Tanya describes “the knowing”—the ancestral intuition that lives in Indigenous people, the sense that something is missing, the unspoken grief. She recounts sitting with survivors in Kamloops during the discovery of unmarked graves and how their words struck her like a freight train: “We always knew.” That knowing becomes the backbone of her work and the spiritual compass that guides her truth-telling. Candace and Tanya explore the cost of telling the truth, the courage it demands, and the liberation it creates for everyone who has been waiting to breathe. - Relentless Actions1. Revisit one belief you inherited—not from your spirit, but from survival. Choose a belief handed down through family, school, or church about identity, ceremony, or “rightness.” Write down where it came from, and whether it still belongs to you. Release what no longer aligns.2. Have one truth-centred conversation this week. This could be with a friend, a family member, or even your own journal. Name something you’ve been avoiding, such as a question, a discomfort, a story. Let truth, gentle or sharp, be medicine.Relentless Reflections1. What truths have I been carrying quietly because I was afraid of what they might disrupt, and what would it mean to finally speak them?2. Where does “the knowing” live in my body, and how often do I silence it to fit into spaces that were never built for me?Relentless Resources1. The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, book2. Debunking the “Mass Grave Hoax”: A Report on Media Coverage and Residential School Denialism in Canada, report Send Us a Text with Your Thoughts or Questions!Join the RIW Patreon Community RIW WebsiteMusic Produced by Award-Winning Anishnaabe DJ Boogey the Beat