Tracey Lindberg
Tracey Lindberg, a woman of Cree-Métis ancestry from northern Alberta, is a professor of law and an Indigenous-rights activist. She has a doctoral degree in law as well as law degrees from the University of Ottawa, Harvard Law School and the University of Saskatchewan. She was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal, the most prestigious award given to a doctoral student in humanities (other past recipients include Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Robert Bourassa and Gabrielle Roy). She has been professor of law at the University of Ottawa and is currently at Athabasca University, where she is Chair of the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and the Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, Legal Orders and Laws.
Professor Lindberg has published many legally based articles in areas related to Indigenous law and Indigenous women, and she is also a fiction writer, with stories published in a number of literary journals, as well as a blues singer. As she describes herself, she is next in a long line of argumentative Cree women. This is her first novel.
Books (2)
Synopsis:
Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from wounds of the past, informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions. Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, seeking to understand the messages from The Frugal Gourmet (one of the only television shows available on CBC North) that come to her in her dreams. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns, who played Jesse on The Beachcombers, because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Bernice heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers but they are not the ones she expected.
With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Bernice finds the strength to face the past and draw the lessons from her dreams that she was never fully taught in life. Part road trip, dream quest and travelogue, the novel touches on the universality of women's experience, regardless of culture or race.
Educator Information
This book is also available in French as Birdie.
Additional Information
288 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"
Synopsis:
Bestselling author of Birdie, Tracey Lindberg, and renowned artist George Littlechild join together in a stunning collaboration of story and art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience.
In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond.
Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of “all my relations.”
Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly.
Additional Information
224 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | 20 full-color photos of paintings | Hardcover
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