Warning: This story makes reference to racial slurs used toward Indigenous women.
When Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga set out to understand more about her own great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter, she never expected to find her buried in a forgotten cemetery near a busy highway in Toronto.
“I have driven past that site so many times … right along the Queen Elizabeth Way, to get to Sherway Gardens, to get to that giant IKEA, to get to the airport or to Hamilton. And all this time, her grave site was right there,” Talaga told The Current‘s guest host Susan Ormiston. “How cruel reality is.”
Talaga’s family knew Carpenter — a Cree woman originally from the James Bay Coast — had ended up in Toronto, though they didn’t know how, or where she was buried. Her family searched for answers for more than 80 years before Talaga herself inherited the investigation.
Her search for answers about her own family, which Talaga tells in …