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Indigenous materials

  • Author:
    Fontaine, Phil, Craft, Aimée
    Summary:

    “It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7000 survivor statements and five million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources. A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Research Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, gathers material from the several reports the TRC has produced to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools in a concise and accessible package that includes new materials to help inform and contextualize the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon. Survivor and former National Chief of the Assembly First Nations, Phil Fontaine, provides a Foreword, and an Afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, home to the archive of recordings, and documents collected by the TRC. As Aimée Craft writes in the Afterword, knowing the historical backdrop of residential schooling and its legacy is essential to the work of reconciliation. In the past, agents of the Canadian state knocked on the doors of Indigenous families to take the children to school. Now, the Survivors have shared their truths and knocked back. It is time for Canadians to open the door to mutual understanding, respect, and reconciliation.

  • Author:
    Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
    Summary:

    "It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer The officials have arrived and the children must go." So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7,000 Survivor statements and 5 million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources. A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), gathers material from the TRC reports to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools and inform the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon. An afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the NCTR, home to the archive of recordings and documents collected by the TRC.

  • Author:
    Budd, Robert, Vickers, Roy Henry
    Summary:

    With crisp, luminous illustrations by celebrated Indigenous artist Roy Henry Vickers, and a simple rythmic text, this sturdy board book introduces the alphabet using iconic imagery of the West Coast, creating a book that will be cherished by young readers and their families. Starting with colourful sea anemones waving in the ocean current, and closing with a sunset reflected in the tidal zone, this board book supports both early literacy and children's awareness of the natural world. Publishers Weekly described Vicker's previous collaboration with Robert Budd as 'a gorgeous glimpse of the distinctive landscapes and creatures of the Northwest, [that] will enchant residents and nonlocals alike.'

  • Author:
    Blackhawk, Ned.
    Summary:

    Blackhawk presents a history of Native America from the time shortly before the expeditions of Christopher Columbus to the present. Focusing on the Columbian Exchange, Indians and the American Constitution, American Indian Removal, the Civil War, and the modern age, Blackhawk concludes his revealing course by addressing the issues that continue to affect Native Americans today.

  • Author:
    Belcourt, Billy-Ray
    Summary:

    The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be . Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

  • Author:
    Harlick, R.J.
    Summary:

    Meg Harris’s friend has been missing for over two months, but she’s not the only one. Meg Harris returns to her home in the West Quebec wilderness after a trip. Upon her arrival she discovers that a friend’s daughter has been missing from the Migiskan Reserve for more than two months. Meg vows to help find the missing girl and starts by confronting the police on their indifference to the disappearance. During her investigation, she discovers that more than one woman has gone missing. Fearing the worst, Meg delves deeper and confronts an underside of life she would rather not know existed. Can she save the girl and others with little help and in the face of grave danger? This is the fifth book in the Meg Harris Mystery series. The next book in the series is Silver Totem of Shame.

  • Author:
    Porter, Michelle
    Summary:

    National Bestseller Finalist for the 2023 Writers' Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize Five generations of Métis women argue, dance, struggle, laugh, love, and tell the stories that will sing their family, and perhaps the land itself, into healing in this brilliantly original debut novel. Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means. Allie is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met to help her join her ancestors in the Afterlife. Geneviève is determined to conquer her demons before the fire inside burns her up, with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without. And Mamé, in the Afterlife, knows that all their stories began with her; she must find a way to loose herself from the last threads that keep her tethered to the living, just as they must find their own paths forward. This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters-including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land-heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction.

  • Author:
    Vermette, Katherena
    Summary:

    In the fourth volume of A Girl Called Echo, Echo Desjardins resumes her time travel and learns more about Métis history in Canada, including the "road allowance" land set aside by the crown, and the former community known as "Rooster Town" in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She also witnesses the trial of Louis Riel in Regina, Saskatchewan.

  • Author:
    Vermette, Katherena
    Summary:

    A graphic novel about the Northwest Resistance of 1885. In this book, the protagonist Echo Desjarlais encounters the Metis people of the Northwest Territory, including leaders Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont and Mistahimaskwa, in Batoche and other sites of the Resistance. After victories, then defeat, at the hands of the Canadian Forces, Riel surrenders. Echo travels back to the present, where she discovers her own ties to the Métis who fought there. This is Book 3 in the graphic novel series that examines the history of the Métis through an own-voice perspective. Echo, a young girl experiencing life challenges (isolation in her new home, navigating a new high school, a fractured relationship with her mother), uses the power of time travel to explore significant events of her people, the Métis.

  • Author:
    Fiola, Chantal, Vermette, Katherena
    Summary:

    Métis teenager Echo Desjardins is struggling to adjust to a new school and a new home. When an ordinary history class turns extraordinary, Echo is pulled into a time-travelling adventure. Follow Echo as she experiences pivotal events from Métis history and imagines what the future might hold. This omnibus edition includes all four volumes in the A Girl Called Echo series: In Pemmican Wars, Echo finds herself transported to the prairies of 1814. She witnesses a bison hunt, visits a Métis camp, and travels the fur-trade routes. Experience the perilous era of the Pemmican Wars and the events that lead to the Battle of Seven Oaks. In Red River Resistance, we join Echo on the banks of the Red River in the summer of 1869. Canadian surveyors have arrived and Métis families, who have lived there for generations, are losing their land. As the Resistance takes hold, Echo fears for the future of her people in Red River. In Northwest Resistance, Echo travels to 1885. The bison are gone and settlers from the East are arriving in droves. The Métis face starvation and uncertainty as both their survival and traditional way of life are threatened. The Canadian government has ignored their petitions, but hope rises with the return of Louis Riel. In Road Allowance Era, Echo returns to 1885. Louis Riel is standing trial, and the government has not fulfilled its promise of land for the Métis. Burnt out of their home in Ste. Madeleine, Echo's people make their way to Rooster Town, a shanty community on the southwest edges of Winnipeg. In this final instalment, Echo is reminded of the strength and perseverance of the Métis. This special omnibus edition of Katherena Vermette's best-selling series features an all-new foreword by Chantal Fiola (Returning to Ceremony: Spirituality in Manitoba Métis Communities), a historical timeline, and an essay about Métis being and belonging by Brenda Macdougall (Contours of a People: Métis Family, Mobility, and History).

  • Author:
    Gould, Janice
    Summary:

    A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant's work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is Brant's portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. Edited by noted Native poet and scholar Janice Gould, A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant's characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.

  • Author:
    Brant, Beth
    Summary:

    A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant's work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is Brant's portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. Edited by noted Native poet and scholar Janice Gould, A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant's characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.

  • Author:
    Wemigwans, Jennifer
    Summary:

    'A serious advance in state-of-the-art research.' Marisa Duarte, author of Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country. An essential contribution to Internet activism and a must-read for educators, theorists, and users of technology, A Digital Bundle demonstrates the great potential for digital technology to contribute to Indigenous self-determination, resurgence, revitalization, and the rebuilding of nations. Wemigwans redefines online Indigenous Knowledges as "digital bundles," grounding online projects within Indigenous traditional paradigms. She elevates both cultural protocol and responsibilities within this designation, representing new possibilities for both the Internet and Indigenous communities. Her own website was produced and created within Indigenous community cultural protocols, showing the reader a clear example of how one can respectfully follow Indigenous practices and apply Indigenous ethics in the construction of a digital site.

  • Author:
    Down, Heather
    Summary:

    "Startled, Mishbee gasped, frozen with horror. She was staring down the barrel of a musket and was familiar with the sound those weapons made. The young girl knew muskets meant death." At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Newfoundland, the Beothuks, a First Nations people, have been decimated by disease, and their numbers dwindle further as they are hunted and persecuted relentlessly by European settlers. Young Mishbee, her older sister Oobata, and Oobata’s baby struggle courageously on Exploits Island against tuberculosis, misunderstanding, and prejudice. Mishbee tries to maintain the traditions of her people as she slowly befriends a young settler named John and attempts to bridge the deadly gulf between their two cultures. But has the friendship blossomed too late? Will Mishbee and John be able to show the settlers that the Beothuks arent a threat before they disappear completely?

  • Author:
    Campbell, Nicola I.
    Summary:

    Set in the Okanagan, BC, a First Nations family goes on an outing to forage for herbs and mushrooms. Grandmother passes down her knowledge of plant life to her young grandchildren.

  • Author:
    Kahan, Fannie, Dyck, Erika, Hoffer, Abram, Blewett, Duncan, Osmond, Humphry, Weckowicz, Teodoro
    Summary:

    In 1956, pioneering psychedelic researchers Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond were invited to join members of the Red Pheasant First Nation near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to participate in a peyote ceremony hosted by the Native American Church of Canada. Inspired by their experience, they wrote a series of essays explaining and defending the consumption of peyote and the practice of peyotism. They enlisted the help of Hoffer’s sister, journalist Fannie Kahan, and worked closely with her to document the religious ceremony and write a history of peyote, culminating in a defense of its use as a healing and spiritual agent. Although the text shows its mid-century origins, with dated language and at times uncritical analysis, it advocates for Indigenous legal, political and religious rights and offers important insights into how psychedelic researchers, who were themselves embattled in debates over the value of spirituality in medicine, interpreted the peyote ceremony. Ultimately, they championed peyotism as a spiritual practice that they believed held distinct cultural benefits. “A Culture’s Catalyst” revives a historical debate. Revisiting it now encourages us to reconsider how peyote has been understood and how its appearance in the 1950s tested Native-newcomer relations and the Canadian government’s attitudes toward Indigenous religious and cultural practices.

  • Author:
    Bouvier, Rita
    Summary:

    This evocative new poetry collection speaks with a fierce tenderness of many aspects of the poet's life: a childhood spent on the banks of the Churchill River, the death of a beloved one, the struggle to try to find forgiveness for wrongs done and the weariness of trying to redress those wrongs. And, most poignantly, a beautiful rebellion reaches one hand back to Louis Riel and one hand forward to future Metis generations. The poems navigate losses that we all suffer when the world of our childhoods has altered irrevocably; they reveal the pain caused by residential schools and share despair at the lack of progress in social justice and self-determination. Rita Bouvier's work is intimate and insightful, written in inviting, open-hearted language that includes many Cree and Michif phrases and their translation. A quiet power - riverine, deep, unstoppable - flows through these poems.

  • Author:
    Robertson, David
    Summary:

    7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga originally published as a four-part graphic novel series; Stone, Scars, Ends/Begins, and The Pact. This graphic novel follows one Plains Cree family from the early 19th century to present day. For Edwin, the story of his ancestors from both the distant and recent past must guide him through an uncertain present, to the dawn of a new future. 7 Generations explores the life of Stone, a young Cree warrior, the smallpox epidemic of 1870, the residential school system of the 20th century and its familial legacy.

  • Author:
    MacKenzie Art Gallery
    Summary:

    One of Canada's most important art alliances made history by demanding recognition for its members as professional, contemporary artists at a time when they were routinely excluded from the mainstream art world.

  • Author:
    Hill, Gord
    Summary:

    "500 Years of Indigenous Resistance is more than a history of European colonization of the Americas. In this slim volume, Gord Hill chronicles the resistance by Indigenous peoples, which limited and shaped the forms and extent of colonialism. This history encompasses North and South America, the development of nation-states, and the resurgence of Indigenous resistance in the post-WWII era."--BOOK JACKET.

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