Transgenerational Trauma in Canada Emily Berry College

Since colonists arrived in Canada, there has been discourse between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada. Colonizers forced their way onto Indigenous land, took ownership of it, and tried to take ownership of the people too. Their attempts at assimilation of Indigenous people into European society became genocide in some cases, wiping out entire Indigenous groups. Tanya Talaga’s All Our Relations revolves around the transgenerational trauma still felt in Indigenous communities today, as well as the reasons and solutions for it. Talaga’s willingness to point fingers, her strong connections between the past and the present, and her ability to make readers understand isolation makes her call to action extremely powerful. T

he focus of Talaga’s novel is that trauma from residential schools and the colonization of Canada is still experienced by today’s Indigenous youth. What she describes is transgenerational trauma, meaning children and teens feel a disconnect from their culture, created by colonists’ attempts at assimilation. Without knowing where they come from, or practicing their cultural traditions, children do not have a sense of belonging (Talaga 2018, 220). Talaga explains that children who were placed in the...