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Indigenous materials

  • Author:
    Boyden, Joseph
    Summary:

    It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to bring Xavier home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Ontario, their respective stories emerge—stories of Niska’s life among her kin and of Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.

  • Author:
    Johnston, Aviaq
    Summary:

    After a strange and violent blizzard leaves young shaman-in-training Pitu stranded on the sea ice--without his dog team or any weapons to defend himself--he soon realizes that he is no longer in the word that he once knew. The storm has carried him into the world of the spirits, a world populated by terrifying creatures. As he tries to find his way back home, Pitu is plagued by black wolves with red eyes, ravenous and constantly stalking him, water-dwelling creatures that want nothing more than to snatch him and pull him into the frigid ocean through an ice crack, as well as beings less frightening, but equally as incredible, such as a lone giant who can carry Pitu in the palm of her hand and keeps caribou and polar bears as pets. After stumbling upon a fellow shaman who has been trapped in the spirit world for many years, Pitu must master all of his shamanic powers to make his way back to the world of the living, to his family and to the girl that he loves.

  • Author:
    Meili, Dianne
    Summary:

    The reader will experience first-hand the personality, characteristics, and sometimes remote environment of these healers, visionaries, storytellers, and spiritualists through Dianne Meili’s faithful re-telling of the interviews she conducted with each during the two years she spent travelling throughout Alberta.

  • Author:
    Johnston, Aviaq
    Summary:

    Haunted by the creatures of his past, Pitu tries to return to normal life as his new role as shaman, but soon he learns he must travel to the bottom of the ocean to appease Nuliajuk, the vengeful sea goddess.

  • Author:
    Belcourt, Billy-Ray
    Summary:

    Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to 'cut a hole in the sky to world inside.' Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems and essays upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where 'everyone is at least a little gay'.

  • Author:
    Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri
    Summary:

    Explore the past 150 years through the eyes of Indigenous creators in this groundbreaking graphic novel anthology. Beautifully illustrated, these stories are an emotional and enlightening journey through Indigenous wonderworks, psychic battles, and time travel. See how Indigenous peoples have survived a post-apocalyptic world since Contact.

  • Author:
    Armstrong, Juliana
    Summary:

    It's been said when teachings are passed down from one generation to the next, good things can happen. Language is learned, knowledge is shared and culture is practiced. In this story of language preservation, author/illustrator and Anishnaabemowin language teacher Juliana Armstrong illuminates a number of Anishnaabemowin words along with their cultural connections, passed down from her Ojibway ancestors. Knowing our culture means knowing who we are. When we know who we are, we can walk in a good way.

  • Author:
    Deerchild, Rosanna
    Summary:

    These are poems about what it means to be from the north ; a town divided along colour lines ; and a family dealing with its history of secrets. At it's core, this collection is about the life of a Cree girl and the places she finds comfort and escape .... Rosanna Deerchild is Cree from South Indian Lake, Manitoba.

  • Author:
    Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake
    Summary:

    2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist. This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.

  • Author:
    Tardif, Marie-Josée, Rankin, Dominique
    Summary:

    Born on the banks of the majestic Harricana River, in the Abitibi region of Quebec, young Dominique Rankin was intended to succeed his father as Hereditary Chief and Medicine Man. But colonial encroachment on Indigenous Lands and efforts by the Canadian government to assimilate Dominique's people radically changed the course of the boy's life. Torn away from his parents and his culture at a young age, he grew up in a boarding school for Indigenous youth--one of many such establishments operating within the notorious Canadian residential school system--before regaining his freedom and reconnecting with his people and his origins. In this memoir, the former Grand Chief of the Algonquin Nation bares all--the light and the dark alike--to share the wisdom of an Oral Tradition that dates back millennia, and to offer a vibrant testimony on respect, forgiveness, and healing. Known for his great sense of humour and boundless energy, former Algonquin Grand Chief Dominique Rankin has taken on another role these last years--that of spiritual leader in the Anicinape tradition. A seasoned leader, teacher, and communicator, he has participated in a number of commendable ventures, including museology projects, developing and protecting ancestral sites, and promoting the revival of Indigenous traditions. Journalist and apprentice Medicine Woman Marie-Josée Tardif has become well known in the media as a television and radio news anchor, and has worked closely with Vivre magazine for several years. Twice, in 2007 and again in 2015, she was presented a Peace Pipe by Algonquin Elders, a great gesture of recognition and respect. She has since devoted her efforts to accompanying those who wish to walk the path of self-knowledge.

  • Author:
    Waldron, Ingrid
    Summary:

    In There's Something In The Water, Ingrid R.G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities. Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi'kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova Scotia and Canada, Waldron opens a space for a more critical dialogue on how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context. Waldron also illustrates the ways in which the effects of environmental racism are compounded by other forms of oppression to further dehumanize and harm communities already dealing with pre-existing vulnerabilities, such as long-standing social and economic inequality. Finally, Waldron documents the long history of struggle, resistance, and mobilizing in Indigenous and Black communities to address environmental racism.

  • Author:
    Orange, Tommy
    Summary:

    "Groundbreaking. Extraordinary. Tommy Orange has written a tense, prismatic book with inexorable momentum."--Janet Maslin, The New York TimesFierce, angry, funny, heartbreaking--Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen, and it introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. There There is a relentlessly paced multigenerational story about violence and recovery, memory and identity, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. It tells the story of twelve characters, each of whom have private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and unspeakable loss. Here is a voice we have never heard--a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with stunning urgency and force. Tommy Orange writes of the plight of the urban Native American, the Native American in the city, in a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. An unforgettable debut, destined to become required reading in schools and universities across the country.

  • Author:
    Clewes, Rosemary
    Summary:

    The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring. The poems weave women’s igloo art, a community’s grief for teenage suicides, the immensity of landscape, and the tension between the Elder’s intuition and the outsiders’ science. Shifting between mythic tale-telling and the vibrancy of town life, these poems will speak to those for whom body, soul, and naming are not divisible.

  • Author:
    William, Gerry
    Summary:

    A magical landscape as close as your own backyard, populated by the spirits of the animals and people, The Woman in the trees is a mythical exploration of the first contact between the Okanagans (the syilx) and early settlers, between orchardists and ranchers, between dream time and real time.

  • Author:
    Donovan, Natasha, Huson, Brett D.
    Summary:

    In the fifth book of the Mothers of Xsan series, award-winning author Hetxw'ms Gyetxw (Brett D. Huson) introduces young readers to a pack of grey wolves. New pups have just begun to open their eyes, one of which is a striking black female. Every day, her ears grow larger, her eyesight gets sharper, and her legs stretch farther. As she learns to hunt, play, and run with her pack, instinct pulls her to explore beyond her home territory. Will the young wolf's bold spirit help her find a new pack of her very own? Learn about the life cycle of these magnificent canines, the traditions of the Gitxsan, and how grey wolves contribute to the health of their entire ecosystem.

  • Author:
    Smith, Douglas
    Summary:

    A shapeshifter hero battles ancient spirits, a covert government agency, and his own dark past in a race to solve a murder that could mean the end of the world. Cree and Ojibwe legends mix with current day environmental conflict in this fast-paced urban fantasy that keeps you on the edge of your seat right up to its explosive conclusion. With an introduction by Charles de Lint. The Heroka walk among us. Unseen, unknown. Shapeshifters. Human in appearance but with power over their animal totems. Gwyn Blaidd is a Heroka of the wolf totem. Once he led his people in a deadly war against the Tainchel, the shadowy agency that hunts his kind. Now he lives alone in his wilderness home, wolves his only companions. But when an Ojibwe girl is brutally killed in Gwyn’s old hometown, suspicion falls on his former lover. To save her, Gwyn must return, to battle not only the Tainchel, but even darker forces: ancient spirits fighting to enter our world… And rule it. “An immersive and enjoyable reading experience. Readers will delight in learning more about Native American mythology, which is skillfully woven throughout the story. Smith’s novel is both well paced and deftly plotted—leaving readers curious about what comes next for the Heroka in the modern world.” — Publishers Weekly “What makes THE WOLF AT THE END OF THE WORLD such an engrossing read are the characters and Doug’s wonderful prose, a perfect blend between matter-of-fact and lyricism. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that spoke to me, so eloquently, and so deeply, on so many levels... I’ll be rereading it in the future because it’s that sort of book. Richly layered and deeply resonant. An old friend, from the first time you read it.” — Charles de Lint, World Fantasy Award winner

  • Author:
    Hood-Caddy, Karen
    Summary:

    In Karen Hood-Caddy's third inspiring novel featuring environmentalist heroine Jessie Dearborn, Jessie is concerned about the health of the water in her northern town. Harley, Jessie's Ojibway partner, declares he wants to move further north to where the real wilderness is. She is torn between her allegiance to Harley and her devotion to the land. The Guerrilla Grannies, a group of feisty seniors, start a door-to-door campaign to raise environmental awareness. Trouble erupts when Jessie and Elfy, one of the more cantankerous seniors, get into a scrap with a local hockey hero and end up getting arrested. But this is also the story of Dan Goreman, whose life is in disarray from a bitter divorce. He decides to to accept a job his father has arranged for him at a water-treatment plant near Jessie's home town. Dan falls in love with Meagan, whose family owns a resort in the area. Dan becomes very attached to Meagan's six year-old son, but she is concerned about Dan's unresolved past and asks him to see a therapist. Begrudgingly, Dan agrees and meets Jessie, who challenges him to be more truthful about his past. When the resort's sewage lagoons burst and some of the waste gets into the town's water, Dan makes a fatal mistake that could kill someone that he loves. Now Jessie has many more problems to solve in her quest to save Elfy from a jail term, help protect the lands and lakes which she loves and begin to understand the patterns in her own life.

  • Author:
    Bruchac, Joseph
    Summary:

    14-year-old Saxso, a member of the Abenaki tribe in 18th-century Quebec, must set out to rescue his family from British soldiers that attacked his village and took his mother and two sisters prisoner.

  • Author:
    LaDuke, Winona
    Summary:

    Winona LaDuke's Chronicles is a collection of stories of Indigenous communities from the Canadian subarctic to the heart of Dine Bii Kaya, Navajo Nation. Stories range from visits with Desmond Tutu, front line Indigenous leaders, to restored Indigenous farming, and the ability of this society to move from a Tipi to a Tesla. This book tells of the need and the ability to make an elegant transition to a post fossil fuels economy. Chronicles is a book literally risen from the ashes--beginning in 2008 after her home burned to the ground--and collectively is an accounting of Winona's personal path of recovery, finding strength and resilience in the writing itself as well as in her work.

  • Author:
    Groulx, David
    Summary:

    In this poetry book, David Groulx seamlessly weaves the spiritual with the ordinary and the present with the powerful voices of the past. He speaks for the spirit, determination, and courage of Aboriginal people, compelling readers to confront cruel reality with his sincere and inspiring vision. Author's poetic power renders an honest and painful perception of Aboriginal life with strong voice against prejudice and injustice.

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