Main content

Indigenous materials

  • Author:
    Posluns, Michael, Seeger, Pete
    Summary:

    On April 23, 1990, after a five-week journey from Hudson Bay to the Hudson River, the Odeyak landed at the Battery for Earth Day. Half-Cree, half-Inuit, the 24-foot freighter canoe, plowing across the Manhattan seascape, was a strange small vessel build in the dark Arctic winter to carry a message from two First Nations of the northern wilderness to a reclaiming of Times Square for Mother Earth. Along with the Crees’ and the Inuit’s hopes and fears for their children and for the future of their river, the Odeyak carried a simple request. The Great Whale Hydroelectric Project, the first part of James Bay II, will destroy the natural economy of the Great Whale region, killing the way of life the Crees and the Inuit have followed since time immemorial. It came to ask the people of New England and New York not to buy the power.

  • Author:
    Peers, Laura, Brown, Alison K.
    Summary:

    In 2010, five magnificent Blackfoot shirts, now owned by the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, were brought to Alberta to be exhibited at the Glenbow Museum, in Calgary, and the Galt Museum, in Lethbridge. The shirts had not returned to Blackfoot territory since 1841, when officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company acquired them. The shirts were later transported to England, where they had remained ever since. Exhibiting the shirts at the museums was, however, only one part of the project undertaken by Laura Peers and Alison Brown. Prior to the installation of the exhibits, groups of Blackfoot people—hundreds altogether—participated in special “handling sessions,” in which they were able to touch the shirts and examine them up close. The shirts, some painted with mineral pigments and adorned with porcupine quillwork, others decorated with locks of human and horse hair, took the breath away of those who saw, smelled, and touched them. Long-dormant memories were awakened, and many of the participants described a powerful sense of connection and familiarity with the shirts, which still house the spirit of the ancestors who wore them. In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of an effort to build a bridge between museums and source communities, in hopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships between the two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. Negotiating the tension between a museum’s institutional protocol and Blackfoot cultural protocol was challenging, but the experience described both by the authors and by Blackfoot contributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserve objects for posterity. Visiting With the Ancestorsdemonstrates that the emotional and spiritual power of objects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. For Blackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one that evokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot cultural heritage.

  • Author:
    Hargreaves, Allison
    Summary:

    Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action.

  • Author:
    Taylor, Cora
    Summary:

    "Victoria Callihoo was born before Canada was a nation, and was a grandmother by the time Alberta became a province.*She traveled with her family on the buffalo hunt on a Red River cart when the herds were so numerous they resembled a moving brown sea.*She embraced her Metis heritage and shared her stories with her children and her friends.*Through her stories, she inspires us with the perspective of a strong woman in the early days of our country.*She gives us a window onto the world of the Metis and provides us with an image of what it was like to be a woman during the time of the buffalo hunt."--

  • Author:
    Sanderson, Douglas, Sniderman, Andrew Michael Stobo
    Summary:

    A heartrending true story about racial injustice, residential schools and a path forward. Divided by a beautiful valley and 150 years of racism, the Waywayseecappo reserve and the town of Rossburn have been neighbours nearly as long as Canada has been a country. Their story reflects much of what has gone wrong in relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. It also offers, in the end, an uncommon measure of hope. In the town of Rossburn, once settled by Ukrainian immigrants, the average family income is near the national average and more than a third of adults have graduated from university. By contrast, the average family on the Waywayseecappo reserve lives below the national poverty line and less than a third of adults have graduated from high school, with many living in the shadow of the residential school system. Valley of the Birdtail is about how these two communities became separate and unequal--and what it means for the rest of us. The book follows multiple generations of two families and weaves their experiences within the larger story of Canada. It is a story with villains and heroes, irony and idealism, racism and reconciliation. A story with the ambition to change the way people think about Canada's past, present, and future.

  • Author:
    Flaherty, Louise, Williamson, Karla Jessen
    Summary:

    This richly illustrated Inuktitut book makes the story of Uumasuusivissuaq accessible to Inuit everywhere. This important story from Inuit cosmology tells how a powerful woman has filled the world with marine life, and continues to ensure the natural world is cared for. This book also talks about the importance of the ancient taboos that must be kept to ensure this woman is respected and not angered.

  • Author:
    Sewell, Anna Marie
    Summary:

    What wilderness seethes beneath the skin? Knowing your wild potential, is it possible to live a life both urban and urbane? 'Urbane' continues the stories of the people, human and otherwise, we met in 'Humane', Anna Marie Sewell's best-selling first novel (Stonehouse, 2020). Hazel LeSage and her lawyer friend Shanaya set out to find Hazel's ex-husband and renegotiate the terms of their divorce, in which Hazel unjustly lost her land. Exploring Hazel's former home, they stumble into a deadly conspiracy entangling the rural lands surrounding their home city of Amiskwaciy. Meanwhile in Amiskwaciy, Hazel's pregnant firebrand daughter Missy struggles with all-day morning sickness and wild mood swings. Father-to-be Maengan struggles with their child's possibly monstrous heritage. Missy's cousin Devin, shaken to the core by the violent events recounted in 'Humane', has gone to ground in an unlikely lair. To emerge whole, like all of them, he must come to grips with the primal wildness of his soul. Devin's mentor Father Efren is no help; he's fallen in love, and that primal wildness might, for the second time in his life, cost him everything. Welcome back to Amiskwaciy, where the mythic has its feet up on your coffee table, and what you see might not be all you get.

  • Author:
    Saunt, Claudio
    Summary:

    In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt's deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in US expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many US citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation's values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.

  • Author:
    Regan, Paulette, Alfred, Taiaiake
    Summary:

    In 2008, Canada established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that created Canada's notorious residential school system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation. Settlers must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers a new and hopeful path toward healing the wounds of the past.

  • Author:
    Summary:

    The development of the Canadian criminal justice system has been central to the dispossession of Indigenous populations and the safeguarding of colonial relations of power. Through the mechanisms of surveillance, segregation, and containment, the justice system ensures that Indigenous peoples remain in a state of economic deprivation, social isolation, and political subjection. Contributors to this volume examine historical expressions and ongoing reinforcement of settler colonialism with a view to illuminating how it manifests in contemporary police actions and criminal proceedings. Using an anti-colonial lens, alternative conceptualizations and practices of justice are explored. The volume includes testaments from Indigenous people currently in federal penitentiaries across Canada that show current penal and carceral arrangements for Indigenous people.

  • Author:
    Manuel, Arthur, Klein, Naomi, Derrickson, Ronald M.
    Summary:

    Unsettling Canada is built on a unique collaboration between two First Nations leaders, Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ron Derrickson. Both men have served as chiefs of their bands in the B.C. interior and both have gone on to establish important national and international reputations. But the differences between them are in many ways even more interesting. Arthur Manuel is one of the most forceful advocates for Aboriginal title and rights in Canada and comes from the activist wing of the movement. Grand Chief Ron Derrickson is one of the most successful Indigenous businessmen in the country. Together the Secwepemc activist intellectual and the Syilx (Okanagan) businessman bring a fresh perspective and new ideas to Canada's most glaring piece of unfinished business: the place of Indigenous peoples within the country's political and economic space. The story is told through Arthur's voice but he traces both of their individual struggles against the colonialist and often racist structures that have been erected to keep Indigenous peoples in their place in Canada. In the final chapters and in the Grand Chief's afterword, they not only set out a plan for a new sustainable indigenous economy, but lay out a roadmap for getting there.

  • Author:
    Mackey, Eva
    Summary:

    "Unsettled Expectations is a critical multi-site ethnography that examines conflict over Indigenous land rights in Canada and the United States as a lens through which to understand historical and ongoing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in settler colonies. The goal of the research is to try to understand the lived practices and discourses of people defending and countering indigenous land rights--as a grounded point of departure to examine the limits and possibilities of decolonization. It uses an interdisciplinary approach including: ethnographic interviews with participants in land claims in Ontario and New York state; historical analyses (not only of the Enlightenment philosophies on which "settler certainties" depend, but also of the legal systems that derive from these philosophies); and theoretical analysis drawn especially from settler colonial studies, on the foundational ideologies--and illusions--on which settler states are built and by which Indigenous peoples and ways of being are discredited. The goal of the book is to invite readers into a rethinking of the legal and philosophical assumptions that feed conflicts between settlers and Indigenous peoples over the rights of (living on) the land. It hoped to generate understandings of where the widespread assumption of settler certainty comes from, why it is ultimately a doomed fantasy, and why a self-reflexive engagement with uncertainty is necessary to any process of decolonization."--

  • Author:
    Wente, Jesse
    Summary:

    Part memoir and part manifesto, Unreconciled is a stirring call to arms to put truth over the flawed concept of reconciliation, and to build a new, respectful relationship between the nation of Canada and Indigenous peoples. Jesse Wente remembers the exact moment he realized that he was a certain kind of Indian—a stereotypical cartoon Indian. He was playing softball as a child when the opposing team began to war-whoop when he was at bat. It was just one of many incidents that formed Wente's understanding of what it means to be a modern Indigenous person in a society still overwhelmingly colonial in its attitudes and institutions. As the child of an American father and an Anishinaabe mother, Wente grew up in Toronto with frequent visits to the reserve where his maternal relations lived. By exploring his family's history, including his grandmother's experience in residential school, and citing his own frequent incidents of racial profiling by police who'd stop him on the streets, Wente unpacks the discrepancies between his personal identity and how non-Indigenous people view him. Wente analyzes and gives voice to the differences between Hollywood portrayals of Indigenous peoples and lived culture. Through the lens of art, pop culture, and personal stories, and with disarming humour, he links his love of baseball and movies to such issues as cultural appropriation, Indigenous representation and identity, and Indigenous narrative sovereignty. Indeed, he argues that storytelling in all its forms is one of Indigenous peoples' best weapons in the fight to reclaim their rightful place. Wente explores and exposes the lies that Canada tells itself, unravels "the two founding nations" myth, and insists that the notion of "reconciliation" is not a realistic path forward. Peace between First Nations and the state of Canada can't be recovered through reconciliation—because no such relationship ever existed.

  • Author:
    Summary:

    This is Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge) in the flesh, co-editor and translator Jaypeetee Arnakak writes in his introduction to this volume of traditional Inuit stories. The underlying events of a story are perfect spots to encode advice, explanations, and landmarks: the medium is the message. Inuit legends and stories are not mere superstitious musings. What they contain is far richer and more profound than what a superficial glance can grasp. This rich volume contains thirty-three versions of traditional stories, transcribed and edited from oral recordings of ten Inuit elders from two High Arctic communities, Arctic Bay and Igloolik.

  • Author:
    Qamaniq, Uvinik, Widermann, Eva, Christopher, Neil
    Summary:

    Experience the exciting world of arctic giants through traditional tales from around Nunavut. Based on elder interviews from more than one hundred years ago, these stories reveal the fearsome giants that once stalked the arctic. From enormous beings strong enough to pick up a walrus with one hand, to massive creatures that towered over mountains and could carry humans on the lace of one boot, these Inuktitut language stories will introduce readers to a vast array of arctic giants.

  • Author:
    Lang, Paul, Opolahsomuwehs, de Varennes, Hélène
    Summary:

    Joséphine regarde son grand-père et se demande s'il est sérieux. Lui qui aime tant rire ! Un poney n'a ni volant pour le conduire ni fauteuil pour s'y asseoir... Comment pourra-t-elle rester assise sur un poney et le guider jusqu'à l'étang ? La célèbre collection Wabanaki se transforme ! Composée de six contes traditionnels trilingues des Premières Nations de l'Est du Canada, la collection Wabanaki s'enrichit d'une première publication en langue wolastoqey. Ancré dans le présent, reflétant la réalité quotidienne des familles d'aujourd'hui, cet ouvrage s'inscrit dans le renouvèlement des relations entre communautés autochtone et allochtone, auquel Bouton d'or Acadie est fière de contribuer.

  • Author:
    Boan, Selina
    Summary:

    Selina Boan's debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, considers the various ways we undo, inherit, reclaim and (re)learn. Boan's poems emphasize sound and breath; they tell stories of meeting family, of experiencing love and heartbreak, and of learning new ways to express and understand the world around her through Nêhiyawêwan. As a settler and urban nehiyaw who grew up disconnected from her father's family and community, Boan turns to language as one way to challenge the impact of assimilation policies and colonization on her own being and the landscapes she inhabits. Exploring the nexus of language and power, the effects of which are both far-reaching and deeply intimate, these poems consider the ways language impacts the way we view and construct the world around us. Boan also explores what it means to be a white settler-nehiyaw woman actively building community and working to ground herself through language and relationships. Boan writes from a place of linguistic tension, tenderness and care, creating space to ask questions and to imagine intimate decolonial futures.

  • Author:
    Qitsualik, Rachel A.
    Summary:

    Food quickly grows scarce, during the long winter months for those who cannot hunt. In these difficult time, the grandmother of an orphaned boy wishes aloud for the qallupaluit, strange monsterous creatures that live under the sea ice, to take her grandson away forever. The grandmother quickly regrets her hasty words when her grandson is snatched away and taken to the monsters' underwater lair.

  • Author:
    Sheinkin, Steve
    Summary:

    When superstar athlete Jim Thorpe and football legend Pop Warner met in 1904 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, they forged one of the winningest teams in American football history. Called "the team that invented football," they took on the best opponents of their day, defeating much more privileged schools such as Harvard and the Army in a series of breathtakingly close calls, genius plays, and bone-crushing hard work. But this is not just an underdog story. It's an unflinching look at the persecution of Native Americans and its intersection with the beginning of one of the most beloved and exploitative pastimes in America, expertly told by nonfiction powerhouse Steve Sheinkin. From the Compact Disc edition.

  • Author:
    Panagos, Dimitrios
    Summary:

    In 1982, Canada formally recognized Aboriginal rights within its Constitution. The move reflected a consensus that states should and could use group rights to protect and accommodate subnational groups within their borders. Decades later, however, no one is happy. This state of affairs, Panagos argues, is rooted in a failure to define what aboriginality means, which has led to the promotion and protection of a single vision of aboriginality – that of the justices of the Supreme Court. He concludes that there can be no justice so long as the state continues to safeguard a set of values and interests defined by non-Aboriginal people.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Indigenous materials