Speaker Tanya Talaga
You are not currently viewing the most recent Banff World Media Festival. Go to Banff World Media Festival 2025.
Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. Talaga’s mother’s family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.
Talaga is an award winning journalist and currently a columnist at The Globe and Mail.
Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.
Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward, is also a national bestseller, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, the first Anishinaabe woman to be so.
Talaga heads up Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts. Makwa's first documentary, Spirit to Soar, will be aired on CBC and CBC Gem this fall. In 2021, Makwa established the Mashkawi-manidoo bimaadiziwin Spirit to Soar charity, which supports Indigenous youth programs in Thunder Bay.
Talaga holds three honorary doctorates.
Speaking on: Booming doc market: what’s next for high-end factual features and limited series?
.png)
