Indigenous Studies
Synopsis:
Immerse yourself in Indigenous Voices, an inspiring volume of quotations by Indigenous thought leaders, activists, politicians, and scholars illustrated with stunning artwork by Indigenous artists.
This captivating book weaves together the timeless wisdom of Indigenous people from various nations and regions through a mosaic of more than 60 quotes, words, and stories by elders, leaders, activists, scholars, and influential contemporaries spanning all walks of life. Discover the diverse and unique heritage of extraordinary people like:
- Shina Novalinga – A member of the Inuk living in Montreal, Canada, Shina Novalinga is a content creator, singer, and activist who shares her Inuk culture across social media, of which an important aspect is traditional throat singing with her mother.
- Natali Segovia – A member of the Quechua, Natali Segovia is the Executive Director of the Water Protector Legal Collective and a human rights attorney. Her advocacy focuses on defending Water Protectors and human rights defenders facing repression for their activism.
- Corrina Gould – Of the Ohlone, Corrina Gould is the chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, the Co-Director for the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, and the lead organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change.
- Elias Not Afraid – A member of the Apsáalooke (Crow), Elias Not Afraid is a mega-award-winning queer beader and fashion designer. He says, “When people think of native beadwork, they think trinkets and good luck charms and dream catchers but it’s far from it. I create wearable art that is durable and can be used daily and last over a lifetime and be used as a family heirloom.”
- Lily Gladstone – An American actress from the Blackfeet Reservation, Gladstone is of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and European heritage. They earned critical acclaim for portraying Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who survived the Osage Indian murders in Martin Scorsese’s film Killers of the Flower Moon, among other important roles in film and television.
- Kola Shippentower – A member of the Umatilla, Shippentower is the first Native American player for the Oregon Ravens, a tackle football team for women and non-binary players.
- Shiloh Maples – Of the Odawa, Maples is a citizen of the Little River Band of Indians based in Michigan. Through her interest in Indigenous food systems and her own Ojibwe and Odawa heritage, she developed the program Sacred Roots for the American Indian Health and Family Services in Detroit, where she taught cooking classes and promoted dishes using traditional, seasonal, and local ingredients in a way that improved participants’ health while connecting them with their culture.
- Alvera Sargent – Sargent, of the Akwesasne Mohawk, worked with the Akwesasne Freedom School, one of the oldest Indigenous language schools in North America. “My hope for our tribal community at large is that more of our people come back to our traditional space. I am grateful that our time has come as Indigenous people are being recognized for their traditional knowledge systems. The community is recognizing that Indigenous people do have the wisdom of our ancestors to share, which helps all areas of our society.”
- And more!
Indigenous Voices offers a unique opportunity to connect with ancient traditions, refresh your perspective with modern insight, and gain awareness and understanding that resonate across cultures and generations.
Additional Information
192 pages | 7.5" x 8.6" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Indigenous Peoples in Canada have experienced coerced sterilization under eugenics legislation since the 1930s, and the violence has never stopped, even though eugenics fell into disrepute. In The Genocide Continues, Karen Stote traces the historical, political, economic and policy context informing the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women from 1970 onward. She shows how a powerful idea paved the way for the expanded violations of Indigenous People’s bodies and futures. That idea was population control — a concern with who occupied land and how resources were distributed — and it was a central thread guiding public health interventions from eugenics to family planning.
The Genocide Continues offers new insights to show how federal, provincial and corporate activities intersected to criminalize and regulate Indigenous reproduction. Saskatchewan, which first established family planning policies in the 1970s and is now the province with the highest number of Indigenous women coming forward with experiences of coerced sterilization, is Stote’s case study to demonstrate why family planning activities consistently targeted Indigenous women.
Stote weaves compelling archival evidence with principled storytelling to connect violence against Indigenous bodies to violence against Indigenous lands. Unless and until colonialism, extractivism and dispossession are addressed, a genocide against Indigenous peoples will continue.
Reviews
"Karen Stote has skillfully woven archival documents with evidence in policy, philanthropy, and medicine to show the repulsive side of Canada’s health care system as an assimilation tool. This book recounts the reasons why forced and coercive sterilization of Indigenous Peoples happened and is still happening." - Karen Lawford, Queen's University
Additional Information
288 pages | 6" x 9" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A vital account of the life and many names of Robert Cree, and his plan for a peaceful, sincere, and just path to reconciliation in an angry and chaotic world.
His mother called him “Bobby Mountain.” Elders called him “Great Man.” His people called him “Chief.” Oil men called him “Mr. Cree.” But the government called him “Number 53.” Robert Cree was all of these while facing his people’s oppressors and freeing the ghosts of tortured spirits.
The Many Names of Robert Cree is his first-person account of survival in a brutally racist residential school system designed to erase traditional Indigenous culture, language, and knowledge. It is also the story of an epic life of struggle and healing, as Cree takes the wisdom of his ancestors and a message of reconciliation to the halls of government and to industry boardrooms.
In the storytelling tradition of his people, Cree recounts his early years in the bush, his captivity at a residential school, his struggles with addiction, his political awakening as one of Canada’s youngest First Nation Chiefs, and the rising Indigenous activism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He also recounts the oil industry’s arrival on his poverty-stricken reserve and the ensuing struggle to balance economic opportunity with environmental challenges.
Throughout, Cree’s leadership is rooted in his unshakable commitment to the sacred traditional teachings of his people. His beliefs give him the strength to focus on hope, dignity, and building a better future for his community. Now a respected Elder and spiritual leader, Cree champions forgiveness as a powerful force that can bring healing and transformation for all.
Additional Information
264 pages | 6" x 9" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A Vital Resource to Preserve, Teach, and Live the Bush Cree Language
Reading and Writing Bush Cree is a heartfelt, practical, and approachable guide for fluent speakers and Cree language educators who want to learn to read and write sakâw nîhiyawîwin—Bush Cree, or the Northern Y dialect. Written by Connie Twin, a first-language speaker from Bigstone Cree Nation in northern Alberta, and Tanya Fontaine, a dedicated Cree language learner and educator, this book bridges oral fluency with written literacy to support language preservation and revitalization.
Through personal stories and cultural insight, the authors guide readers into the structure of Cree grammar and the use of Standard Roman Orthography (SRO). With clear examples of both fluent and full written forms, this book also sheds light on how Cree sounds are represented in writing and highlights important differences between Northern and Southern Y dialects.
This is more than a how-to book—it’s a call to keep sakâw nîhiyawîwin alive for future generations.
Features
- A first-language speaker’s perspective on learning to read and write Cree
- Focus onsakâw nîhiyawîwin (Bush Cree / Northern Y dialect)
- A step-by-step introduction to Standard Roman Orthography (SRO) and syllabics
- Need-to-know basics of Cree reading, writing, grammar, and Y dialect variation
Additional Information
116 pages | 6" x 9" | Paperback
Synopsis:
How colonial medical policies are linked to health inequities that persist in First Nations a century later.
Tuberculosis, once a leading cause of death in Europe and North America, was understood to be preventable and even curable by the early twentieth century. Yet despite growing knowledge about the disease and interventions that would slow its spread, tuberculosis deaths among First Nations in Canada remained staggeringly high. Government policies rooted in colonialism exacerbated a tuberculosis epidemic. Wilful Neglect explores the devastating consequences of the Department of Indian Affairs’ failed responses to tuberculosis among First Nations in Canada from 1867 to 1945. Even when medical treatment for tuberculosis became widely available, and despite the codification of the federal government’s obligations in treaties and other legislation, the basic health needs of First Nations remained unmet. The government instead prioritized an assimilationist agenda, including the placement of Indigenous children in residential schools, which became hotbeds for the spread of the infection. Drawing on the department’s own annual reports, memoranda, and budgets over more than seventy years, Jane Thomas traces key moments, decisions, and individuals involved in shaping federal health policy, laying bare the repercusions of racializing a disease. Health policies developed by colonial governments without the involvement of First Nations have always failed. Wilful Neglect demonstrates a direct link between the federal government’s historical health policies and the disparities that continue into the present.
Reviews
“Wilful Neglect is a compelling national case study of the federal government’s complicity in the deaths of thousands of First Nations individuals during the tuberculosis epidemics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” - Hugh Shewell, Carleton University
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Figures and Table • ix
Foreword • xi
Shawn Batise
Acknowledgments • xv
Abbreviations • xxi
Introduction • 3
1 “The promises we have to make to you are not for today only but for tomorrow”: Setting Precedent Through Legislation, Treaties, and Government Practice, 1867–1883 • 25
2 “There is a ready compliance on their part with regulations”: Assimilation at All Costs Through Civilizing, Christianizing, and Sanitizing the Infected, 1884–1903 • 47
3 “We are giving the best attention we can to the medical needs of the Indians”: Dr Peter Bryce’s anti-TB Crusade, 1904–1913 • 70
4 “We have been trying to get off rather cheaply”: Treatment of “Indian Tuberculosis,” 1914–1928 • 109
5 “The activities of the medical branch cannot fairly be judged by the visible results”: Vaccine Trials, Pilot Projects, and a New Medical Services Branch, 1929–1937 • 139
6 “A comprehensive and progressive program is long overdue”: New Funding and Treatment Facilities, 1938–1945 • 172
Conclusion: If Preventable, Why Not Prevented? • 193
Afterword • 199
Appendix A: Individuals Responsible for the Department of Indian Affairs (1867–1945) • 202
Appendix B: Department of Indian Affairs Medical Expenses (1868–1904) • 206
Appendix C: Timeline of United Church Mission Hospitals Opened in Canada • 208
Appendix D: Canadian Tuberculosis Association Expenses (1902–1945) • 210
Appendix E: Department of Indian Affairs Medical Expenses (1905–1945) • 212
Notes • 217
Bibliography • 271
Index • 289
Additional Information
318 pages | 6" x 9" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A historical epic about a girl from a remote Tongan island who becomes her people's queen.
Talking corpses, poetic parrots, and a fan that wafts the breath of life—this is the world young Kōrero finds herself thrust into when a mysterious visitor lands on her island, a place so remote its inhabitants have forgotten the word for stranger. Her people are desperate and on the brink of starvation, and the wayward stranger offers them an impossible choice: they can remain in the only home they’ve ever known and await the uncertainty to come, or Kōrero can join him and venture into unfamiliar waters, guided by only the night sky and his assurance of a bountiful future in the Kingdom of Tonga. What Kōrero and her people don’t know is that the promised refuge is no utopia—instead, Tonga is an empire at war and on the verge of collapse, a place where brains are regularly liberated from skulls and souls get trapped in coconuts with some frequency.
The perils of Tonga are compounded by a royal feud: loyalties are shifting, graves are being opened, and everyone lives in fear of a jellyfish tattoo. Here, survival can rest on a perfectly performed dance or the acceptance of a cup of kava. Together, the stranger and Kōrero embark upon an epic voyage—one that will deliver them either to salvation or to the depths of the Pacific.
Evoking the grandeur of Wolf Hall and the splendor of Shōgun, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Adam Johnson conjures oral history, restores the natural world, and locates what’s best in humanity. Toweringly ambitious and breathtakingly immersive, The Wayfinder is an instant, timeless classic.
Reviews
“A powerful and original epic . . . Deadly politics, tragic romance and dangerous sea journeys keep the drama at a spirited boil.”—The New York Times
“[An] epic-scale historical adventure from Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson . . . Johnson paints a rich tale of nature, politics, and tradition . . . It's a unique, spellbinding saga that drew us into an elaborate world.”—Apple's Best of the Month
“Expansive in scope, historically detailed, and totally enthralling . . . Johnson's monumental research into the history, legacy, and imprint of the Polynesian culture is evident in the meticulous detail of his narrative—which is about much more than his characters, whose vibrancy demands acknowledgement, and his gorgeous landscape descriptions . . . Part bildungsroman, part historical exploration, this novel is a study of the many islands in the South Pacific, their power struggles, abuses of power, and the perseverance to survive.”—Booklist (starred review)
"Epic historical fiction with a twist of magical realism, The Wayfinder follows a Tongan royal family facing political upheaval and a community on a distant island facing starvation. It is a dual timeline with multiple viewpoints that makes you feel totally immersed in the story." — Goodreads Review, Shannon
Additional Information
736 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Reconciliation, as set out by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is a process of understanding the Canadian state's genocide against Indigenous Peoples and creating a new relationship between Indigenous Peoples and settlers based on mutual respect and dignity. Given the racism and paternalism embedded in the Canadian state and related institutions, building such a relationship is a monumental task, but in addition, there is a major structural roadblock in the way: federalism, the political system that organizes Canadian governance.
Divided Power argues that Canada’s system of federalism, rooted in settler colonialism, has dispossessed Indigenous Peoples for settler benefit. Far from being a neutral, balanced way to distribute responsibilities and powers, the division between the state and provinces and territories obstructs Indigenous Peoples’ agency and governance. Under such coercive political exclusion, how can truth and reconciliation be fully achieved? Emily Grafton meticulously traces the ways that federalism limits the potential for reconciliation and proposes alternative power-sharing models.
Guiding readers through the terrain of debate, Grafton deftly and accessibly merges a political analysis of federalism with a clear assessment of settler colonialism to argue that reconciliation will be incomplete for as long as the current division of powers persists. Divided Power points to a promising approach to holding the Canadian state responsible for integrating the principles of truth and reconciliation into its very foundation.
Reviews
“Emily Grafton explores Canadian federalism – not the usual division of powers between the federal and provincial governments, but between the colonized and the colonizer. Federalism, Grafton argues, was informed by Indigenous political frameworks but has been torqued by colonial assumptions about Indigenous inferiority so as to require colonial dominance and Indigenous subordination. This book is a useful antidote to the complacent endorsement of the settler state status quo, so prevalent in scholarship and in politics.” - Joyce Green, Ktunaxa Nation, Professor Emerita, University of Regina; Elder-Auntie, CPSA Reconciliation Committee
“Grafton exposes the evolution and coloniality of Canadian federalism in its unjust and mundane efforts to diminish Indigenous sovereignties. Divided Power is a tour de force of alternatives, and you’ll never think of federalism the same way after reading it!” - Ajay Parasram, author of Pluriversal Sovereignty and the State
Additional Information
192 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Flow into a new season in one of Canada’s most celebrated literary landscapes, with Leaf Counter. A lyric decolonial romp through the Ontario’s famed Prince Edward County, Aginjibagwesi (Spinus tristis) draws us through the poetics of the land and the struggles of the poet as decolonizer in this new epic border-crossing collection. Golden witness to the timelessness of land and spirits, Leaf Counter criss-crossed the lands around Ameliasburgh, its ghosts, heroes, and even the poets of Purdy’s A-Frame. Leaf Counter knows of sorrow, struggle, and wends a tale in a braided narrative as he scans "light and steeple” and sees timeless men at the centre and edges of the order of things, Simon Girty, Al Purdy, Charles Bukowski, and even Bret Hart, move and shift in time and place. Leaf Counter is our celestial, Lenape, winged guide of legend and myth. And through his spring enumeration of all things, we garner an understanding of the famed Canadian poet Al Purdy and the lands that he grew from. Witness the collapse of the old repressive order through the eyes of the poet and movements of the mighty little bird.
Additional Information
148 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
An Indigenous Origin – The Maskoki Cheraw Connection unveils a deeply researched and long-overlooked history of the Lumbee Tribe’s ancestral connection to the Cheraw people. Drawing on fourteen years of meticulous research, LK Oxendine uncovers historical records, maps, treaties, and cultural narratives that restore a suppressed identity erased by centuries of denial, displacement, and political marginalization.
From the ancient Maskoki territories to the arrival of Spanish, French, and British forces, this compelling account traces the Lumbee Cheraw’s journey through survival, cultural preservation, and the ongoing struggle for recognition. Oxendine’s work honors the voices of ancestors, the strength of matrilineal societies, and the unbreakable ties between people and land.
Part memoir, part ethnographic history, this book invites readers to witness the truth long hidden in archives and oral traditions, truth that affirms an honorable Indigenous heritage and demands acknowledgment in the twenty-first century.
If you are drawn to Indigenous history, identity reclamation, and the untold stories of the American Southeast, An Indigenous Origin – The Maskoki Cheraw Connection is an essential read.
Additional Information
416 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
An investigation into how Native American identity became a commodity, from cultural appropriation to ethnic fraud to disenrollment
Settler capitalism has been so effective that the very identities of Indigenous people have been usurped, misconstrued, and weaponized. In Who Gets to Be Indian?, scholar and writer Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) explores how ethnic fraud and the commodification of Indianness has resulted in mass confusion about what it means to be Indigenous in the United States.
As an entry point to the seemingly intractable problem of ethnic fraud, Gilio-Whitaker critically looks to the film industry, including a case study of Sacheen Littlefeather, who is most known as the Native American woman that rejected an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973—though later revealed, she was not who she said she was. Gilio-Whitaker argues that this pretendian phenomenon originated in Southern California when the United States was forcing assimilation of Indians into white America culturally, but also into its capitalist economic system. With Indianness becoming a marketized commodity in the Hollywood film business, the field became open to anyone who could convincingly adopt an Indian persona.
Deeply researched using socio-historical analysis, Gilio-Whitaker offers insights from her own experiences grappling with identity to provide clarity and help readers understand how the commodification of Indianness have ultimately left many people of legitimate American Indian heritage to be disconnected from their tribes. Personal and compelling, Gilio-Whitaker takes settler capitalism to task and helps us better understand how we got here in order to counteract the abuses of pretendianism and disenrollment.
Reviews
“This incendiary j’accuse isn’t afraid to name names.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“With clarity and conviction, Dina Gilio-Whitaker exposes what’s at stake for Native people when Indianness becomes a commodity. A sharp, personal, and urgent look at the high cost for actual Native people in a system built to exploit them at every turn.”—Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science
“Indigeneity is caught between truth tellers and tricksters. With abiding concern for tribal nationhood, Dina Gilio-Whitaker boldly espouses our truths while confronting the tricksters among us. Indigenous America needs more truth tellers like her and books like this.”—Gabe Galanda, Indigenous rights attorney
“Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s Who Gets to Be Indian? tackles the problem of the commodification of Native identity at a crucial moment in American history. With incisive analysis, Gilio-Whitaker reveals how settler capitalism has distorted and exploited Indigenous identities and exposes the roots of folks pretending to be Native and its harms to Native communities. This book is a call to action and a vital tool for understanding how we can protect Indigenous people. A must-read for anyone seeking to confront the complexities of Native identity, sovereignty, and power in America.”—Liza Black, author of Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960
“A fresh and unflinching look into the rise of pretendianism—when it became normalized for Hollywood to grant Native American identities to various grifters. Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s courageous and original analysis will challenge readers, Indigenous or not, to think deeply about the nature of settler colonialism today.”—Darryl Leroux, author of Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity
Additional Information
280 pages | 6.22" x 9.30" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Offering readers a unique history of an Indian Day School and a profile of Anishinaabe resilience.
The atrocities of the residential school system in Canada are amply documented. Less well-known is the history of day schools, which some two hundred thousand Indigenous youth attended.
The Curve Lake Indian Day School operated for over ninety years, from 1899 to 1978. Implementing Indigenous community research practices, Jackson Pind, alongside the Chief and Council of Curve Lake First Nation, conducted a search of the federal archive on operations at the school. Students by Day presents the findings, revealing that the government failed in its fiduciary duty to protect students. Harmful and discriminatory policies forced children to abandon their language and culture and left them subject to many types of abuse. To supplement this documentation, Pind also interviewed survivors of the school, who shared their often difficult testimony. He situates Curve Lake’s development and operations within the wider context of Canadian assimilation policies, noting the lasting impacts on Anishinaabe identity and culture.
Not only recovering the archive, written and oral, but building on files repatriated to the community, Students by Day is a story of Indigenous resilience, activism, and hope in the face of educational injustice.
Reviews
“An incredible achievement. Students by Day is innovative and collaborative, pushing Indigenous historical research forward in ways that will offer real, tangible improvements to communities and individuals.” - Lianne C. Leddy, author of Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake
“Students by Day is an intricate uncovering of day schools’ history, navigating archives and life stories. It sets a gold standard for community-centred research, reminding us of the centrality of love to culture, people, and politics.” - Niigaan Sinclair, author of Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre
“With care, clarity, and accountability, Jackson Pind’s book listens to Curve Lake First Nation and honours survivors’ experiences. Students by Day is not only powerful history; it’s a model for community-based research that serves Indigenous resurgence.” - Crystal Gail Fraser, author of By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Figures vii
Foreword: Day Schools xi
Drew Hayden Taylor
Acknowledgments xv
1 Introduction to Place: Growing Up in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg Territory 3
2 Researching Indian Day Schools in Canada 15
3 The New England Company and the Creation of the Indian Day School 30
4 Mismanagement and Mistrust: The Methodist Missionary School in Curve Lake 45
5 A Legacy of Neglect: The United Church of Canada’s Indian Day School 86
6 Beyond the Classroom: Educational Philosophies and Opportunities 122
7 Experiencing Indian Day School: Education and Integration 150
8 A Class in Resistance: Curve Lake First Nation’s Fight for Education 173
Afterword 197
Jack Hoggarth
Appendix: Letter of Support from Curve Lake First Nation 201
Notes 203
Index 255
Additional Information
256 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 9 photos, 5 drawings | Hardcover
Synopsis:
A bold, refreshing, and darkly funny debut novel about a mixed-ancestry Mi'kmaw woman balancing academia, grief, love, and new motherhood, for fans of Fleabag and Amanda Peters.
When the tides in the Cobequid Bay went out and left stretches of mudflats, I could walk halfway to the other shore. Sometimes the mud engulfed my feet, right up to my ankles, and made it hard to move. The longer you stayed stuck, the harder it was to keep going.
Charlie Francis's five-year plan has gone to shit. She was supposed to greet the new millennium by diving head-first into a master's degree, but her thesis has ground to a halt, Y2K was a bust, her rambunctious family and claustrophobic hometown are driving her around the bend—and the maybe-love-of-her-life, Adam, keeps joking about her moving home to marry him and have his babies.
When Charlie's beloved uncle—the same person who told her to get out of town and never look back—dies suddenly, Charlie leans into her independence, breaking Adam's heart and rushing headlong into an academic career despite the baked-in racism of the predominantly white institution. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she has to navigate being a (mostly) single mother on top of everything else.
Charlie finds herself at a crossroads—and only so much stress-baking can keep reality at bay. How can she reconcile being a student of history within the colonial system that exploited her ancestors? How can she be a good mother when she can barely afford groceries? And how can she be a proud Mi'kmaw woman when the world seems determined to keep her down?
Maybe it's time for a new five-year plan.
With grit, humour, a lovable cast, and the nostalgia of the early aughts, this bold and refreshing novel from a powerful new voice in Indigenous fiction explores grief, the complex bonds of family, and cultural identity.
Additional Information
320 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
While awareness of the sexual and gendered colonial violence faced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQI+ people has grown, the field of Indigenous law and beyond has yet to fully engage with Indigenous feminisms, gender, and sexuality in a sustained way. Ravens Talking challenges this gap, treating Indigenous feminisms as essential, insightful, and deeply transformative.
Through critical feminist analyses, this book examines key issues in Indigenous law, demonstrating how legal understandings shift when gender is consistently, meaningfully, and creatively engaged. The contributors to this collection confront the forms of power shaping these essential conversations and bring to the fore intergenerational Indigenous feminisms; Indigenous law and gender; the forms of expression and translation between and across legal and political worlds; and the rich array of disagreements and conflicts between Indigenous women. Ravens Talking intends to capture the complexities arising from Indigenous feminisms in living contexts to provoke questions and develop critical perspectives.
Both intellectually rigorous and practically grounded, Ravens Talking is a vital contribution encouraging dialogue on Indigenous legal traditions, justice, and sovereignty.
Educator Information
Chapters
1. Indigenous Women Talking: The Work of Indigenous Feminisms in the World
2. Introduction: Indigenous Feminist Legal Studies
3. Nêhiyaw Ceremony, Gendered Protocols, and Nêhiyaw Law
4. Understanding Indigenous Womxn’s Economic Sovereignty through Story
5. Giving Voice to Jigonsaseh: A Feminine Perspective on the Haudenosaunee Legal Order
6. What if Survivors Wrote the Laws? An Indigenous Feminist Audit of Tribal Sexual Assault in the United States
7. Deliberating Feminist Legal Strategies in R v Barton
8. Visualizing Violence Against Indigenous Women: Documentary Film as Disruption in Finding Dawn and American Outrage
9. Sovereign Refusals: Spending Time with Apak in the Journals of Knud Rasmussen
10. Thoughts and Questions and Questions
Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Every solstice, Jupi—just as his father did before him, and his before him—must make a nearly impossible pilgrimage to light an oil lamp at the base of a remote cliff. There he must wait for Kipik, an ancient being who has bound Jupi’s family to a mammoth task: share a story every visit that appeases the fickle Kipik, or suffer unthinkable consequences.
For decades, Jupi has made the trek, growing grey and exhausted carrying this burden. Nearing the end of his life, Jupi knows he must name a successor, someone from his bloodline who can carry this weight and pass it on to future generations. But Jupi’s life has not been easy. His three children, one deceased, one incarcerated, one addicted, are not suitable successors. So Jupi must connect with a granddaughter he barely knows, whose language he barely speaks, and convince her to carry the weight of their family, perhaps their whole community, for the rest of her life.
This moving collection explores shifting definitions of what it means to be accountable to others, how family and community are defined, and how the spirits and demons of the past (both personal and legendary) are very much alive today.
Additional Information
136 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | b&w illustrations | Paperback
Synopsis:
Winter Count draws inspiration from the Plains First Nations practices of recording significant events each winter, a visual reminder that helps structure histories and traditions passed down to future generations. This handsome volume explores how winter has long shaped Indigenous, Canadian settler, and northern European art, uniting different cultural perspectives through such diverse topics as storytelling, effects of light, physical adaptation, and community and isolation.
Presenting a selection of works spanning from the early 19th century to the present day — including artists such as Kenojuak Ashevak, J.E.H. MacDonald, Claude Monet, Kent Monkman, Megan Musseau, and Jin-me Yoon — Winter Count features approximately 170 plates, along with illustrated essays by curators from the National Gallery of Canada. The result is a book that invites readers to see winter anew — not as a season to be endured, but as a source of invention, connection, and mutual respect across time and place.
Educator Information
Dual-language: English and French
Additional Information
304 pages | 9.00" x 12.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Since the earliest days of human memory, countless generations have turned their eyes to the skies in wonder, drawing patterns, understanding the stars’ connection to cycles and events, and carrying their stories and teachings forward to subsequent generations.
The Song of the Stars offers a unique journey through the skies, linking us to generations of ancestors who marvelled at the same stars we still gaze upon today. The book brings together Anishinaabe cultural teachings about the cosmos and the Anishinaabemowin language with scientific insights to demonstrate how both viewpoints can help us foster deeper and more meaningful relationships to the Earth and the cosmos. Robert Animikii Horton, Anishinaabemowin educator, proves that this dual perspective can be a source of awe and wonder, inspiring in us a love of both language and science.
Demonstrating how Anishinaabe cultural teachings and scientific insights can complement one another and need not be irreconcilable opposites, The Song of the Stars provides a combination of perspectives that cultivates a deeper understanding of the vast mystery surrounding our place in the universe.
Educator Information
Contents
1. In Awe of the Awe-Inspiring
2. Aki: The Earth
3. Giizis: The Sun
4. Gichi-giizis: The Solar Eclipse
5. Naawakwe: Solar Noon
6. Ma’iingan Omiikana: The Sun’s Ecliptic
7. Aadwaa’amoog: Orion’s Belt
8. Waawaate: The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)
9. Jiibay Miikana: The Milky Way
10. Gookomisinaan Dibiki-giizis: The Moon
11. Gaagige-giizhig: The Universe
12. Anang: Star
13. Ojiig Anang: Fisher Star
14. Ojiig: The Big Dipper
15. Gichi-Ogimaa Anang: Vega
16. Gaa-bibooniked: The Wintermaker
17. Maang: The Little Dipper
18. Bagonegiizhig: The Pleiades
19. Moonz: Pegasus
20. Onwaajige Anang: Halley’s Comet
21. Madoodiswan: Corona Borealis
22. Ma’iingan: Canis Major
23. Nanaboozhoo: Scorpius
24. Waaban Anang: The Morning Star
25. Biidaaban, Waaban, Zaagajiwens, & Mooka’am: The Process of Sunrise
26. Mishibizhiw: Leo, Cancer, and Hydra
27. Gaa-madoodood: Hercules
28. Bangishin Anang: Falling Star
29. Binesi: Cygnus
30. Mishiginebig: Draco
31. Ikwe Anang: Venus
32. Directions and More
Additional Information
120 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Ask Haida artist and hereditary chief 7IDANsuu James Hart how long it took him to master the art of carving, and he'll tell you: "Around ten thousand years."
Hart has achieved national prominence and international acclaim for his towering poles, stately cedar sculptures, and massive bronzes - monumental works that extend the long continuum of Haida visual traditions into powerful new forms. Since his early days assisting Robert Davidson and Bill Reid, through his reproductions of historical Haida poles and his carving of original house front, story, and memorial poles for private commissions and clan-based contexts in Haida Gwaii and beyond, he has developed an innovative practice rooted in tradition, and widely celebrated: thousands of people gathered to witness the raising and activation of his Reconciliation Pole; his Three Watchmen bronzes overlook the Audain Art Museum, National Gallery of Canada and the Plains of Abraham; and The Dance Screen (The Scream Too) in Whistler is considered a once-in-a-generation sculptural masterpiece.
This, the first publication devoted to Hart, is both a survey of his major career achievements and a document of an impossible-to-assemble exhibition. Alongside hundreds of photos of nineteen monumental works and associated smaller carvings and bronzes scattered across North America and Europe, and drawing on over two years of interviews with the artist, Curtis Collins illustrates how key animal and supernatural figures reappear across scales and mediums, from jewellery to sixty-foot poles (the "backbone" of his practice), and speaks to the associated activation ceremonies as integral to Haida monumental art. Wade Davis considers Hart's expressions of Haida resilience within the people's long history, from time immemorial to the nation's present-day efforts towards national sovereignty; Gwaliga Hart offers a personal perspective on his father's work; and in an autobiographical essay the artist himself reflects on his life, and his life's work.
Educator Information
Contributors:
- Gwaliga Hart
- Wade Davis
- Michael Audain (foreword)
Additional Information
256 pages | 10.25" x 11.25" | 200 colour photographs | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Revisiting the political activism of WIC Wuttunee
William (Bill) Wuttunee was a trailblazing lawyer, a courageous native rights activist; and one of the architects of the process for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His 1971 book, Ruffled Feathers: Indians in Canadian Society, decried conditions on reserves and pressed for integration-on Indigenous peoples' own terms-supporting many of the aims of the Trudeau government's 1969 "White Paper." Though controversial at the time, Wuttunee's arguments were rooted in a foundational belief in the strengths of his people and a steadfast rejection of victimhood. In the fifty years that have followed its publication, Ruffled Feathers has been largely forgotten, though ideas that Wuttunee put forth-ending the Indian Act and the reserve system-continue to find space within contemporary Canadian political discourse.
In this volume, editor Wanda Wuttunee gathers a diverse cohort of scholars to engage with her father's ideas and offer their own perspectives on the opportunities and challenges facing Indigenous peoples in Canada, then and now. Favouring discourse over conclusions, Still Ruffling Feathers leads the reader to a nuanced understanding of the ongoing conversations and unresolved issues stemming from the Indian Act and invites us to envision miyo-pimâtisiwin, "the good life."
Reviews"
"Still Ruffling Feathers explores an important area of modern history on Indigenous leadership. The thoughts and ideas expressed by William Wuttunee still have resonance today." - Dr. Brian Caillou, University of Calgary
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Brotherhood by William I.C. Wuttunee
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction by Wakchan (Wanda Wuttunee), Red Pheasant Cree Nation, Saskatchewan
Chapter 1. Reflections on a Legacy--An Eagle Eye Perspective by Wakchan (Wanda Wuttunee), Red Pheasant Cree Nation, Saskatchewan
Chapter 2. Still Ruffling Feathers Too--More than 50 Years Later by Makookins (Xakiji (Chief) Lee Crowchild), Tsuut'ina Nation, Alberta
Chapter 3. William Wuttunee--Ruffling Feathers in "Indian" Time and Space by Thohahoken (Michael Doxtater), Mohawk Turtle Clan Family of Satekariwate, Ontario
Chapter 4. Learning to Straighten Our Ruffled Feathers: An Education by Askîy Pihêsiw (Robert Falcon Ouelette), Red Pheasant Cree Nation, Saskatchewan
Chapter 5. Ruffled Feathers: A Critical Assessment by Bush Doctor (Peter Kulchyski), Bissett, Manitoba
Chapter 6. Final Thoughts--Debating Our Future, Coming to One Mind by David Newhouse, Onandaga, Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario.
Appendix A: Excerpts from Ruffled Feathers (1971) by William I.C. Wuttunee
Appendix B. Selected Poetry of William I. C. Wuttunee
Appendix C. Discussion Questions Bibliography
Additional Information
204 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A Native American first contact story and gripping thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse
"Thrilling and personal... an important addition to the landscape of science fiction."—Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising
"Hole in the Sky is mind-bending… indigenous knowledge collides with science fiction in a thrilling page-turner."—Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker and writer of Reservation Dogs
On the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, a strange atmospheric disturbance is noticed by Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck single father trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter, Tawny. At NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, astrophysicist Dr. Mikayla Johnson observes an interaction with the Voyager 1 spacecraft on the far side of the solar system, and she concludes that something enormous and unidentified is heading directly for Earth. And in an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the United States, an American threat forecaster known only as the Man Downstairs intercepts a cryptic communication and sends a message directly to the president and highest-ranking military brass: “First contact imminent.”
Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky is a riveting thriller in the most creative tradition of extraterrestrial fiction. Drawing on Wilson’s unique background as both a threat forecaster for the United States Air Force and a Cherokee Nation citizen, this propulsive novel asks probing questions about nonhuman intelligence, the Western mindset, and humans’ understanding of reality.
Reviews
“Incredible... Hole in the Sky is not only a thrilling, brilliant page-turner, its pages also turned me into the kind of reader I always want to be—deeply involved and curious about the world and the story unfolding before me, as if by magic—the kind of reader who can’t stop reading, who dreads the book coming to an end even while I can’t stop making my way toward it, who goes back and starts all over to figure out how it was done. Here we have a highly original premise about alien contact—no small feat unto itself—which also manages to seamlessly fold in Indigenous lives and knowledge. Every character here is alive, and there are so many stunning sentences I had to stop underlining. The story is killer. I love it. Run don’t walk to read this book.”—Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There and Wandering Stars
“Hands down one of the best books I’ve read in a couple of years. Daniel H. Wilson has crafted a technotradish ride into the future in the most harrowing and engaging ways imaginable. Tightly tuned, sharply researched, and warm in all the best ways, you’ll want to clear your schedule because this is a sit-down-and-read-the-whole-thing-right-now kind of book. Bravo, Mr. Wilson!”—Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., bestselling co-editor of the Never Whistle At Night series
“This book doesn’t whisper. It roars from the edges of space, memory, and grief. Hole in the Sky is Indigenous sci-fi at its rawest: part cosmic threat, part broken father-daughter elegy, part fever dream of classified government failures. The humanity here is bruised, sharp-tongued, and holding on. And the fear? It’s in the blood. This one gets under your skin and stays there.”—Shane Hawk, bestselling co-editor of the Never Whistle at Night series
Additional Information
288 pages | 6.35" x 9.54" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
From veteran hockey reporter Patrick Johnston and Gino’s longtime friend Peter Leech comes the authorized biography of Gino Odjick.
In the 1980s and ’90s, National Hockey League games were very different from the nimble, skill-focused displays we see today. One of the greatest differences—and one of the sport’s more popular facets at the time—was the widespread presence of “enforcers”: hulking, battle-scarred players whose main task was to police the sport by chasing down and brawling with opponents who had broken unwritten codes determining which aspects of violence counted as dishonorable or unjustified.
When hard-hitting Vancouver Canucks player Gino Odjick emerged in the early 1990s, he quickly became one of the game’s most feared enforcers and revered teammates, a sign of a new era for the team, racking up 296 penalty minutes in the 45 games he played in his rookie season. Hailing from Kitigan Zibi, an Algonquin community near Maniwaki, Quebec, Gino was one of the few Indigenous players in the NHL at the time. But it was Gino’s ferocious play contrasted by his genuinely affable and openhearted personality off the ice that won him a special place in the hearts of Canucks supporters.
Yet legends often obscure the human stories behind them. Patrick Johnston and Peter Leech look beyond Gino’s legendary persona, drawing on insights from family members, friends, and teammates to recount Gino’s early years in a loving household that was always ready to welcome foster children. Gino’s father, Joe, had suffered the lonely traumas of the residential school system, and the experience had instilled a commitment in the family to those who were less fortunate.
The book also details Gino’s eventual struggles with alcohol abuse, and how he responded by taking on the role of empathetic mentor to young Indigenous people, travelling from community to community to hear their stories and offer hope. He never wavered in this role, even as he confronted serious illnesses, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the rare blood disorder that he survived for years longer than expected, but that eventually led to his death at age fifty-two.
Gino is a moving tribute to a beloved hockey legend.
Reviews
"Gino was the greatest teammate; he had such a huge heart and knew his role better than anyone in the league. Gino loved being a Vancouver Canuck and gave back to the community in so many ways. He will be greatly missed by his family, friends, and fans. This book will give people insight into his remarkable life."—Geoff Courtnall
“Gino provides a compelling account of the life of a beloved Vancouver Canuck. From his humble beginnings in Quebec to NHL stardom and beyond, Odjick was dedicated to the well-being of teammates and the Indigenous community. This is an excellent tribute to an exceptional man.”—Randi Druzin, author of Between the Pipes and Behind the Mask
Additional Information
288 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | b&w insert | Hardcover
Synopsis:
With evidence of human habitation dating back to the last ice age, British Columbia boasts a fascinating array of archaeological sites. In this thoroughly up-to-date survey, professional archaeologist Robert Muckle takes readers to some exciting locations to explain what archaeology is (and isn’t), how research is undertaken in BC, and what it contributes to our broader understanding of human history.
Once upon This Land introduces readers to some of the most notable archaeological investigations in the province, including footprints left in mud on Calvert Island 13,000 years ago, the remains of a First Nations village near Lillooet, and the body of a man frozen in ice for centuries in the Tatshenshini region. He also explores more recent phenomena, such as a First World War internment camp near Fernie, a Japanese logging camp in North Vancouver, shipwrecks, airplane crashes, and even the remnants of COVID-19 left behind in urban landfills.
This unique book will appeal to readers who want to understand how and where archaeology happens in British Columbia, including those interested in a career in the field. It is also for those who would like to explore and know more about the province’s archaeological sites and history.
Reviews
"May this book offer all who read it a glimmer of understanding of the fourteen thousand years of documented relationships between Indigenous peoples and the land which has sustained us."— From the foreword by archaeologist Karen Rose Thomas
"Bob Muckle’s beginner’s guide to archaeology in what is now British Columbia requires no experience with the discipline to grasp vocabulary and ideas currently used by archaeologists. His clear, plain-language narrative peels back the layers of earth to reveal a story contained in the soil of this province." — Eldon Yellowhorn, Indigenous Studies, Simon Fraser University
"I have always wished for an archaeology of BC book like this that I could use in teaching my own classes. While the writing style is accessible and never condescending, Once upon This Land will help inquisitive readers appreciate just how complex and vast the archaeological history of the northwest part of North America really is." — Brian Pegg, Department of Anthropology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Foreword: An Indigenous Archaeologist’s Perspective / Karen Rose Thomas
Introduction
1 Archaeology as Storytelling and a Profession
2 The Distant Past: The Ice Age to 5,000 Years Ago
3 The Human Story: 5,000 to 200 Years Ago
4 Recent Times: The 1800s and 1900s
5 Archaeology in Contemporary Times
Epilogue: Ten Important Things to Remember
Glossary; Further Reading; Index
Additional Information
222 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 14 colour photos, 15 b&w photos, 2 colour illus., 2 b&w illus., 1 map | Paperback
Synopsis:
A moving multigenerational memoir of Indigenous resistance, environmental justice, and a Yurok family's fight to protect their legacy and the Klamath River.
For the members of a Northern California tribe, salmon are the lifeblood of the people—a vital source of food, income, and cultural identity. When a catastrophic fish kill devastates the river, Amy Bowers Cordalis is propelled into action, reigniting her family's 170-year battle against the U.S. government.
In a moving and engrossing blend of memoir and history, Cordalis propels readers through generations of her family’s struggle, where she learns that the fight for survival is not only about fishing—it’s about protecting a way of life and the right of a species and river to exist. Her great-uncle's landmark Supreme Court case reaffirming her Nation’s rights to land, water, fish, and sovereignty, her great-grandmother’s defiant resistance during the Salmon Wars, and her family's ongoing battles against government overreach shape the deep commitment to justice that drives Cordalis forward.
When the source of the fish kill is revealed, Cordalis steps up as General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe to hold powerful corporate interests accountable, and to spearhead the largest river restoration project in history. The Water Remembers is a testament to the enduring power of Indigenous knowledge, family legacy, and the determination to ensure that future generations remember what it means to live in balance with the earth.
Reviews
"A powerful interweaving of memory, history, and activism, The Water Remembers is a lyrical and uncompromising account of Amy Bowers Cordalis’s fight to protect the Klamath River and the sovereignty of the Yurok Nation. Told through a Yurok storytelling lens, this book traverses ancestral knowledge, ecological devastation, and legal resistance, revealing the sacred bond between people and river. Bowers Cordalis, an attorney and lifelong fisherwoman, writes with the clarity of lived experience and the heart of a riverkeeper. This is a vital work of Indigenous resurgence and environmental justice, brimming with spirit, truth, and unstoppable resolve."—Terese Marie Mailhot, author of Heart Berries
"The Water Remembers is a powerful, poetic testament to Indigenous resilience and reverence for the natural world. Amy Bowers Cordalis weaves history, activism, and sacred connection into a compelling narrative of communities fighting to protect what is most vital. This book is not just a call to action; it’s a song of survival and restoration."—Leah Thomas, environmental educator and author of The Intersectional Environmentalist
Additional Information
288 pages | 6.00" x 9.25" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
An epic quest fantasy debut that is the Tlingit indigenous response to The Lord of the Rings
When Elān trapped a salmon-stealing raven in his cupboard, he never expected it would hold the key to saving his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders plaguing their shores. In exchange for its freedom, the raven offers a secret that can save Elān’s home: the Koosh have lost one of their most powerful weapons, and only the raven knows where it is.
Elān is tasked with captaining a canoe crewed by an unlikely team including a human bear-cousin, a massive wolf, and the endlessly vulgar raven. To retrieve the weapon, they will face stormy seas, cannibal giants and a changing world. But Elān is a storyteller, not a warrior.
As their world continues to fall to the Koosh, and alliances are challenged and broken, Elān must choose his role in his own epic story.
Reviews
“Goodness, it’s so exciting when epic fantasy tropes are done well, when they feel fresh and unexpected. I am always so thankful for writers who can breathe new life into the genre elements we love the most, and Russell has done exactly that here.” —Reactor
“Storytelling at its purest, harkening back to times spent around a fire to listen to a master of their craft weave an engrossing tale… A thoroughly enjoyable, unique, and long overdue voice in modern fantasy.” —Karin Lowachee, author of The Crowns of Ishia trilogy
Additional Information
400 pages | 5.56" x 8.68" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
A haunting, unforgettable novel of obsession, pride, and forgiveness, exploring the friendship and rivalry between two gifted boys in harrowing circumstances, from the acclaimed writer of The Removed.
Milton Muleborn has envied Matthew Echota, a talented Cherokee artist, ever since they were locked up together in a dangerous juvenile detention center in the late 1980s. Until Matthew escaped, that is.
A novel within a novel, we read here Milton’s dark, sometimes comic, and possibly unreliable account of the story of their childhood even as, years later, he remains jealous of Matthew’s extraordinary abilities and unlikely success. Milton reveals secrets about their friendship, their families, and their nightmarish, surreal, experience of imprisonment. In revisiting the past, he explores the echoing traumas of incarceration and pride.
Filled with Brandon Hobson’s swirling yet visceral writing, and punctuated with original artwork, The Devil Is a Southpaw is an ambitious, elegant, and propulsive novel in the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez.
Reviews
"Hobson has never been more brilliant, more transcendent, more in touch with the beating human spirit, than he is in The Devil is a Southpaw. No other writer is so continuously reinventing the novel, weaving together Cherokee myth, rock and roll, the supernatural, and his own first published paintings. Perhaps his best novel yet, which is really saying something." — Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
“Brandon Hobson is a great contemporary American fiction writer—wily, funny, sly, sad, and vast. The Devil Is a Southpaw is a welcome addition to his very significant stack. It’s got a little Cervantes in it, a little Pink Floyd, and a lot of American tragedy. I bet you’ll love it, as I did.” — Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America
"Hobson holds the reader’s attention with appealing surrealistic asides, such as the boys’ encounter with a doppelgänger of painter Salvador Dalí, who rhapsodizes over the band Duran Duran. There’s plenty of fun to be had with this cerebral novel." — Publishers Weekly
Additional Information
352 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | 27 b/w illustrations | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Uplifting stories, vignettes, and reflections to inspire gratitude, love, joy, and hope in navigating life in a changing, challenging world.
This beautiful and welcoming book can be read cover to cover or used as a daily source of guidance, providing gentle wisdom that inspires and empowers. Through the lens of five transformative practices - gratitude, love, joy, happiness, and hope - bestselling author Monique Gray Smith weaves together short stories, poignant reflections, and thoughtful questions that invite readers to pause and reconnect with their inner light. And as an Indigenous author, Monique brings her cultural wisdom and unique perspective to each offering.
Sharing the Light is a powerful reminder that when we embrace our light and share it with the world, that energy not only transforms us but ripples out to uplift everyone around us.
Additional Information
208 pages | 5.00" x 7.75" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
A landmark photography collection featuring work exclusively by Indigenous Americans, shedding new light on the understanding of Indigenous America.
The history of photography–and the Americas–is incomplete without the critical work and perspectives of Indigenous American photographers. Since the 1800s, cameras have been in the hands of Indigenous people and they have incorporated photography into their lives as creators, patrons, and collectors.
Five years ago, photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke set off on a mission to assemble a groundbreaking, digital library of Indigenous photographers from the 19th century to the present. With In Light and Shadow: A Photographic History from Indigenous America, Adams and Stacke expand on that work, creating a one-of-a-kind collection of photographs that offers a first-hand look at the people, cultures, and evolving traditions of Indigenous America while providing a counterhistory to settler-colonial narratives.
From Jennie Fields Ross Cobb, the earliest known Indigenous American woman photographer, to Arhuaco documentarian Amado Villafaña Chaparro, through Kapuleiikealoonalani Flores, a Native Hawaiian who was born in 2000, the photographers span many generations as well as multiple Indigenous societies and nations. Each entry includes a biographical sketch of the artist, along with their inspirations and contributions to the photographic medium.
With profiles of 80 photographers and more than 250 photographs, this unique book brings to light the canon of Indigenous American photography that has been developing on its own terms for decades.
Additional Information
304 pages | 8.50" x 10.30" | 250 black-and-white and color photographs | Hardcover
Synopsis:
An ambitious, world-envisioning work of Indigenous futurism.
Since 2015—through a proliferation of forms including sculpture, regalia, film, photography, poetry, painting, and installation—acclaimed multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has been weaving together strands of a new myth. Collectively referred to as Future Ancestral Technologies, this sprawling series of interrelated works seeks to reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.
Part graphic novel, part art book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide offers readers a view beneath, beyond, and between the lines of Luger's ever-expanding artistic universe. In this ecstatically hybrid work, Luger transforms a 1970s military survival guide through poetic redaction, speculative fiction, and iterative line drawing—deftly surfacing and disrupting the colonial subconscious that haunts this vexed source text. An epic and timely meditation on planetary life in the midst of transformation, SURVIVA boldly presents an earth-based, demilitarized futuredream that foregrounds Indigenous knowledge as critical to humanity’s survival
SURVIVA is the first title from Aora Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to exploring transformational thought and culture that transcends borders, disciplines, and traditions. Rooted in an ethos of polyvocality and planetary consciousness, Aora publishes works that forge bold connections across time, place, ideas, and beings often seen as separate.
Reviews
"SURVIVA offers Indigenous wisdom for a shared future built on ancestral knowledge in radical relation. This is a survival guide like none other." —Candice Hopkins, curator of the Forge Project
"SURVIVA boldly reimagines our conceptions of time and history, challenging our collective narratives and pushing us to rethink the art of survival through a lens of transformation."—Hank Willis Thomas, artist and cofounder of For Freedoms
"Cannupa Hanska Luger has created a wondrous book of survivance, a story to carry in pocket and study at every opportunity. At once a dystopia (earth is near destroyed) and a postcolonial fantasy (the colonizers abandon the planet for good), SURVIVA is a work of artistic brilliance that draws our attention to the simultaneity of ruins and futures. Rich with dreampower and evocation, these pages illustrate the mysteries of space-time, the dissolution of boundaries, and the relational universe described by Indigenous quantum mechanics. Read carefully, SURVIVA has the power to bend time itself, lifting us from past and present into futures innumerable."—Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Playing Indian
Additional Information
162 pages | 5.44" x 8.31" | original line drawings & ecopoetic fragments - reminiscent of 1970s diy photocopy culture | Paperback
Synopsis:
Part historical biography, part compilation of the written works of Mary Rose Delorme Smith (1861–1960), a prolific and accomplished Métis woman.
Born into a prominent fur-trading family and remembered as a community builder and rancher, Marie Rose Delorme Smith (1861–1960) is seldom recognized as a writer and chronicler of Métis and Prairie history. Fluent in French, English, and likely Michif, Delorme Smith recorded a wealth of written records and stories throughout her long life, in the form of letters, published articles, unpublished manuscripts, and personal documents.
Donated to public archives following her death, these written works garnered some interest among scholars and biographers over the years, as prominent Indigenous women gradually found a place in the histories they had been left out of for generations. Delorme Smith became the subject of biographies and scholarly research, and she was finally recognized as a “National Historic Person” by the Canadian government in 2022. However, the recognition bestowed upon her rarely highlighted her own words, which reveal so much about her life, Métis history, and Prairie life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For the first time, historian and biographer Doris Jeanne MacKinnon presents an extensive array of Delorme Smith’s writings, preserved verbatim, and puts them in historical and social context. This fascinating collection of documents from a bygone era reveals the strength, intellect, and leadership of a fascinating Métis martriarch.
Additional Information
276 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | b&w photographs | Paperback
Synopsis:
In British Columbia, land acknowledgements often refer to “unceded territory.” Yet many people remain uncertain about the history behind these words or their implications for the future of the province.
Unceded reveals the BC government’s history of injustice toward First Nations, providing the context for understanding the province’s current reconciliation efforts, including modern treaty negotiations. Treaty commissioner George M. Abbott combines archival research with a former cabinet minister’s insider perspective on government to chronicle over 150 years of BC-Indigenous relations. Abbott’s account details how early government officials refused to negotiate treaties and instead coerced First Nations onto small and scattered reserves while granting settlers access to vast tracts of land. Despite sustained Indigenous resistance, the situation only worsened as non-Indigenous demands for land and natural resources increased in the decades that followed.
It was only after several Supreme Court decisions affirmed Indigenous land rights that BC sat down at the negotiating table. More recently, the province has taken notable steps toward reconciliation, concluding modern treaties and passing legislation that acknowledges Indigenous rights. As Abbott shows, overcoming the legacy of colonialism is no small task, but achieving justice is worth the effort it takes.
This book is for readers of BC history, those who follow provincial politics, or anyone invested in the future of British Columbia. It is essential reading for elected officials and policy makers and will also appeal to scholars and students of Canadian history, political science, and Indigenous-settler relations.
Reviews
"Unceded is an excellent account of the relationship between First Nation groups and the government of British Columbia. It is well-researched and enriched by interesting insights from George Abbott’s own involvement in more recent developments as a member of the provincial cabinet."— Jim Reynolds, author of Canada and Colonialism and former general counsel to the Musqueam First Nation
"I wish to thank George Abbott for his book about our colonial past. It is only with a better understanding of our history that we can have a better chance of creating a brighter future for First Nations in British Columbia."— From the foreword by the Honourable Steven Point, Grand Chief of the Stó:lō and BC’s first Indigenous Lieutenant-Governor
Additional Information
280 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Behind the Bricks is the story of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s first and longest-running residential school and a model for the entire residential school system.
From the outside, the Mohawk Institute looks like a large and welcoming school building. When one looks behind the bricks of the school, however, a much different story becomes apparent. Conceived and overseen by Six Nations community member Richard W. Hill Sr., Behind the Bricks is an important work that provides deep insight into the Mohawk Institute, Canada's first, and longest-running, residential school, operating from 1828 to 1970 in Brantford, Ontario. Many see the Mohawk Institute as a model for the residential school system.
Behind the Bricks brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts. The book begins with an overview that traces the history and context of the school, and the remainder of Behind the Bricks touches on a broad array of topics from the experiences of students, to archaeology and architecture, to the role of religion, and beyond, drawing on a wide variety of sources including government documents, church records, and oral history.
Behind the Bricks examines the policies and motivations that shaped the experiences of all three parties involved with the school, the government, the church, and the students and their communities.
A thorough and thoughtful history that provides deep insight into over a century of institutional operation, Behind the Bricks is an essential work that tells us not only about the Mohawk Institute, but the entire residential school system, providing a window into the past with the goal of working towards a future of truth and reconciliation.
With contributions by: William (Bill) Acres, Diana Castillo, Sarah Clarke, Jimmie Edgar, Wendy L. Fletcher, Bonnie Freeman, Tara Froman, Alexandra Giancarlo, Cody Groat, Evan J. Habkirk, Richard W. Hill Sr., Keith Jamieson, Sandra Juutilainen, Magdalena Miłosz, David Monture, Teri Morrow, John Moses, Alison Norman, Thomas Peace, Jennifer Pettit, Paul Racher, and Bud Whiteye.
Reviews
"As we continue to reckon with the legacy of colonial schooling, this timely collection helps to model how to put truth before reconciliation." — Sean Carleton, University of Manitoba
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Preface
Richard W. Hill, Sr.
Introduction
Jennifer Pettit
The Russ Moses Residential School Memoir
John Moses and Russ Moses
Part One: Historical Overview and Context of the Mohawk Institute
1. “To Shake Off the Rude Habits of Savage Life”: The Foundations of the Mohawk Institute to the Early 1900s
Jennifer Pettit
2. “The Difficulties of Making an Indian into a White Man Were Not Thoroughly Appreciated”: The Mohawk Institute, 1904 to Present
Jennifer Pettit
Part Two: Teachers, Curriculum, and Tools of Control
3. The Indian Normal School: The Role of the Mohawk Institute in the Training of Indigenous Teachers in the Late 19th Century
Alison Norman
4. Teaching Control and Service: The Use of Military Training at the Mohawk Institute
Evan Habkirk
5. “New Weapons”: Race, Indigeneity, and Intelligence Testing a thte Mohawk Institute, 1920-1949
Alexandra Giancarlo
Part Three: The Building, The Grounds, and Commemoration
6. A “Model” School: An Architectural History of the Mohawk Institute
Magdalena Miłosz
7. The Stewardship, Preservation, and Commemoration of the Mohawk Institute
Cody Groat
Part Four: Survival and Resistance
8. Ten Years of Student Resistance at the Mohawk Institute, 1903-1913
Diana Casillo
9. ęhǫwadihsadǫ ne:ˀhniˀ adigyenǫ:gyeˀs ganahaǫgwęˀ ęyagǫnhehgǫhǫ:k/They buried them, but they the seeds floated around what will sustain them.
Teri Lyn Morrow, Bonnie Freeman, and Sandra Juutilainen
Part Five: The New England Company and the Mohawk Institute
10. A Model to Follow?: The Sussex Vale Indian School
Thomas Peace
11. Robert Ashton, The New England Company, and the Mohawk Institute, 1872-1910
Bill Acres
12. The Lands of the Mohawk Institute: Robert Ashton and the Demise of the New England Company’s “Station,” 1891-1922
Bill Acres
Part Six: Student Experiences and Voices
13. Life at the Mohawk Institute During the 1860s
Thomas Peace
14. Collecting the Evidence: Restoration and Archaeology at the Mohawk Institute
Sarah Clarke, Paul Racher, and Tara Froman
15. Collective Trauma and the Role of Religion in the Mohawk Institute Experience
Wendy Fletcher
16. Concluding Voices – Survivor Stories of Life Behind the Bricks
Richard W. Hill, Sr.
Closing Poems
Jimmie Edgar
Bud Whiteye
David Monture
Acknowledgements
Appendix One: History of Six Nations Education by Jamieson
Keith Jamieson
Appendix Two: Mohawk Institute Students Who Became Teachers
Suggested Reading
Additional Information
402 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 89 Illustrations | Paperback
Synopsis:
Duncan Mercredi was Winnipeg's Poet Laureate in 2021. In this frank, raw, and honest collection the poet chases down the river of who he is. Each bend, each stone, every waterfall, a sharing of self. Then the writings can be rolled up and when the time comes, the time that he leaves the place he calls home, they will be placed on the sacred fire. To return to where they came from. You are invited to walk with the author during intimate reflection and pause to remember the people who have been a part of his life and journey, the ones who influenced him, both good and bad. The paths taken, the roads travelled that led him to this city. As the wick burns the last of its wax we recognize its existence as the scent of smoke still remains long after the light goes out.
Additional Information
160 pages | 5.00" x 7.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
An unflinching examination of the impacts of settler colonialism from first contact to the contemporary nation state.
On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples is the first installment in a comprehensive collection investigating settler colonialism as a state mandate, a structuring logic of institutions, and an alibi for violence and death. The book examines how settler identities are fashioned in opposition to nature and how eras of settler colonialism have come to be defined. Scholars and thinkers explore how settlers understood themselves as servants of empire, how settler identities came to be predicated on racialization and white supremacy, and more recently, how they have been constructed in relation to multiculturalism.
Featuring perspectives from Indigenous, Black, mixed-race, and other racialized, queer, and white European-descended thinkers from across a range of disciplines, On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples addresses the fundamental truths of this country. Essays engage contemporary questions on the legacy of displacement that settler colonialism has wrought for Indigenous people and racialized settlers caught up in the global implications of empire.
Asserting that reconciliation is a shared endeavor, the collection’s final section exposes the myth at the heart of Canada’s constitutional legitimacy and describes the importance of affirming Indigenous rights, protecting Indigenous people (especially women) from systemic violence, and holding the Canadian settler nation state—which has benefited from the creation and maintenance of genocidal institutions for generations—accountable.
Reviews
“Remarkable...likely to become a landmark reference work for scholars and interested individuals alike.” — Lorenzo Veracini, author of Colonialism: A Global History
“Positive shared futures with all our relations depend on perpetual truth-telling and (re)conciliation. This book guides us through the dark and toward the light.”— David Garneau, author of Dark Chapters
"A thought-provoking and insightful ‘must read’ for all those seeking reconciliation based on truth, justice, and accountability.” — Paulette Regan, author of Unsettling the Settler Within and former research director for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off! That observation best describes the power of this fabulous book that every Canadian should read.”— Val Napoleon, Professor and Law Foundation Chair of Indigenous Justice and Governance, University of Victoria
Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the On Settler Colonialism in Canada series.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributor Biographies
David B MacDonald and Emily Grafton, “Introduction: Critical Engagements with Canadian Settler Colonialism: Colonization, Land Theft, Gender Violence, Imperialism, and Genocide”
Section 1: Considering Violence and Genocide in the Canadian Settler State
Karine Duhamel, “I feel like my spirit knows violence: interrogating the language of temporality and crisis for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ people.”
James Daschuck, “The Battleford hangings and the rise of the settler colonial state.”
David B MacDonald, “Match and Exceed: Why Recognizing Genocide in Canada is Only the First Step in Promoting Indigenous Self-Determination.”
Malissa Bryan, “Unsettled Arrivants: Imagining Black & Indigenous Solidarity Under Settler Colonialism.”
Angie Wong, “Labouring and Living in Canada: Early Chinese Arrivants and Making Settler Colonial Canada.”
Section 2: Logics of Empire, Colonialism, and Unsettlement
Liam Midzain-Gobin, “Imperial circulation, implicatedness and co-conspiracy, racialized interruptions of settler colonialism in Canada.”
Peter Kulchyski, “A Contribution to Periodizing Settler Colonial History in Canada”
Ajay Parasram, “Learning Settler Colonialism: Double Diaspora and Transnational Imperial Refraction.”
Andrew Woolford, “Settler natures: becoming settler against water.”
Section 3: Settler colonial society: Relating, Reckoning, and Unreconciliation
Chris Lindgren and Michelle Stewart, “Reckoning and Unreconciled: Neil Stonechild, Starlight Tours, and Racialized Policing in the Settler State.”
Fazeela Jiwa, “On shitheads and revolutionaries: claiming my displaced kin.”
Jerome Melancon, “Relying upon the Colonial Project: Francophone Communities in Minority Settings within the Bilingual Settler Colonial State.”
Desmond McAllister, “Straddling Different Worlds.”
Bernie Farber and Len Rudner, “B’Chol Dor v’Dor: In each and Every Generation.”
Section 4: Asserting Indigenous Knowledges in settler colonial Canada
Solomon Ratt (poetry) “stolen childhood” and “asastîwa – They pile up”
Joyce Green, “Being and Knowing Home.”
Rebecca Major, “Surviving Institutions in Canada’s Polite Society.”
Paul Simard Smith, “On the Illegitimacy of the Canadian Constitutional Order.”
Emily Grafton, “Resistance and Resurgence: Asserting Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Settler Colonial Canada.”
“Afterword,” Jeremy Patzer
Additional Information
384 pages | 6.02" x 9.01" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Turning a lens on the dark legacy of colonialism in horror film, from Scream to Halloween and beyond.
Horror films, more than any other genre, offer a chilling glimpse—like peering through a creaky attic door—into the brutality of settler colonial violence. While Indigenous peoples continue to struggle against colonization, white settler narratives consistently position them as a threat, depicting the Indigenous Other as an ever-present menace, lurking on the fringes of “civilized” society. Indigenous inclusion or exclusion in horror films tells a larger story about myths, fears, and anxieties that have endured for centuries.
Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes traces connections between Indigenous representations, gender, and sexuality within iconic horror classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th. The savage killer, the romantic and doomed Indian, the feral “mad woman”—no trope or archetype escapes the shadowy influence of settler colonialism. In the end, horror both disrupts and uncovers colonial violence—only to bury its victims once more.
Reviews
“This is the book I’ve waited my whole movie-geek life for.”— Jesse Wente
“Bloody Bodies, Bloody Landscapes is a must read for anyone consuming horror media. Laura Hall masterfully dissects the ways in which settler-colonialism is at the core of sexism, racism, sanism, and white supremacy, and how we see those systems of oppression at work in historical and contemporary horror.”— Jessica Johns
“Expertly foregrounding the most overlooked horror in this film genre—settler colonialism—Bloodies Bodies, Bloody Landscapes is deadly.”— Christine Sy
"Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes is brilliant scholarship that pinpoints the ugly truth about the treatment of Indigenous people in horror cinema. But Hall is doing much more than examining tropes of mysticism, savagery, and settler colonialism-as savior in horror; she is directing our attention to the recuperative power of certain portrayals, thereby reminding us that an anticolonial lens can produce whole and full human stories—even scary ones.”— Robin R. Means Coleman, author of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. They’re Here! Settler Colonialism and the Horror Film
Chapter 2. The Bloodsucking Brady Bunch: Gender, the Family and Settler Colonial Horrors
Chapter 3. We All go A Little Mad Sometimes!
Chapter 4. Cowboys in the Antarctic: Settler Colonialism and Nature in Horror
Chapter 5. Jason Voorhees Does a Land Acknowledgement: Indigeneity Lurking in the Woods
Conclusion
Sources
Additional Information
288 pages | 6.02" x 9.01" | Paperback
Synopsis:
New poems from award-winning storyteller and poet Joseph Dandurand.
Prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand offers his latest poetry collection, following The Punishment and The East Side of It All, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Building on his legacy as a skilled storyteller, Dandurand continues to write about trauma, love, grief and forgiveness. These poems are about the streets, the East Side, self-pity, spirits and Dandurand’s people, the Kwantlen. As the jury of the 2022 Latner Writers’ Trust Award wrote, “his quotidian reflections read like parables, with startling economy.” After putting this collection down, don’t be surprised to find yourself saying “thank you,” too.
Additional Information
102 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Profoundly honest and moving, Kihiani is the uplifting story of an Inuk artist’s journey to healing and self-discovery
Born in Fort Churchill, Manitoba, but raised in Arviat, a predominantly Inuit community on the western edges of Hudson Bay, Susan and her six siblings grew up in a humble but loving home. But while living in Rankin Inlet, when she was eight years old, Susan’s life was disrupted by a life-changing event, a distinct separation that created a schism inside her for many years and from which she continues to heal.
At fifteen, she started writing poems that spilled out of her, and when Susan had the choice to leave her community, she grabbed it like a lifeline. Eventually, Susan was approached by a producer at CBC who was making a compilation album of Arctic artists and years later signed with a major label for her third album, This Child.
The disruption and milestones, the turmoil and joy, the devastation and healing—this is Susan Aglukark’s story of discovering her Inuk self.
Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
An irreverent and playful novella of Metis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life
Conor Kerr's 2024 novel Prairie Edge was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, Beaver Hills Forever, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Metis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada's colonial education system and resource extraction industries.
A beguiling and genre-bending work, Beaver Hills Forever offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.
Reviews
"Not every Metis kid / Needs a sad story," says a character in Conor Kerr's propulsive and deeply entertaining new work, where each bone-clean sentence holds a galaxy of stories in its marrow. Kerr is part of a vital contemporary movement that is reimagining what our literatures can be and what they can do. Beaver Hills Forever is a reminder that laughter and passion are as much a part of the narrative as struggle. In these pages, you'll find voices that demand to be heard, felt, and remembered." — Carleigh Baker, author of Last Woman and Bad Endings
"Much like his prose, Conor Kerr's Beaver Hills Forever imbues the language of everyday Indigenous life with a poetic charm that is just incredibly readable and relatable. This book is truly multitudinous: a love story, an anti-love story, a critique of neoliberalism, an ode to the Prairies, and, above all, proof that even our smallest desires are worthy of sustained poetic consideration." — Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of Coexistence
"Beaver Hills Forever is full of raunch and riot. Conor Kerr's ability to gravitate around the embodied truths of institutional whiteness, class, settler colonization, and the Indigenous (Metis) experience in the moraine of amiskwaciy is rebellious in its desire to not pathologize or rationalize the violent backdrops of its animate setting. With his skilled hand, Kerr makes sure there is "room for [all] in the digital economy of the Future." — Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
"Aho, fancy reader! Welcome to Conor Kerr's Beaver Hills Forever. We'll laugh, we'll cry. We'll smoke, we'll die. Etc, etc. Beaver Hills Forever is funny, heartfelt, poetic, badass. It's Bald Boy, Goodbye, Sad Story, Indigenous Canon. Etc, etc. Magpie cackles, Metis literatures, Aunty Prof wonders, realizes, smudges, feel-good energy. Fuck all the ongoing bullshit internal politics and academic distortion and just hear the truth, etc, etc." — Jordan Abel, author of Empty Spaces and NISHGA
Additional Information
88 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A Bow Forged from Ash is a journey of Indigenous reclamation. In poems that explore identity, belonging, responsibility and wholeness, Melissa Powless Day navigates her ties to the landscapes of Southwestern Ontario and the nations to which she belongs. Traversing lived experience, ancestral memory, family stories, and critical engagements with the Land, Powless Day pulls back the bow of language: her poems are poised, unyielding in their nanda-gikendang, their seeking, to voice complex stories about the messiness of returning home, a restoration of familial and community bonds generations in the making. Ultimately, A Bow Forged from Ash is a book that proves reclamation and resistance are inseparable: one cannot walk with pride in their Indigeneity without choosing to resist the colonial status quo.
Additional Information
112 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
In this extraordinary and inspiring debut memoir, Jesse Thistle, once a high school dropout and now a rising Indigenous scholar, chronicles his life on the streets and how he overcame trauma and addiction to discover the truth about who he is.
If I can just make it to the next minute... then I might have a chance to live; I might have a chance to be something more than just a struggling crackhead.
From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up.
Abandoned by his parents as a toddler, Jesse Thistle briefly found himself in the foster-care system with his two brothers, cut off from all they had known. Eventually the children landed in the home of their paternal grandparents, but their tough-love attitudes meant conflicts became commonplace. And the ghost of Jesse’s drug-addicted father haunted the halls of the house and the memories of every family member. Struggling, Jesse succumbed to a self-destructive cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and petty crime, spending more than a decade on and off the streets, often homeless. One day, he finally realized he would die unless he turned his life around.
In this heartwarming and heartbreaking memoir, Jesse Thistle writes honestly and fearlessly about his painful experiences with abuse, uncovering the truth about his parents, and how he found his way back into the circle of his Indigenous culture and family through education.
An eloquent exploration of what it means to live in a world surrounded by prejudice and racism and to be cast adrift, From the Ashes is, in the end, about how love and support can help one find happiness despite the odds.
Awards
- 2020 Indigenous Voices Awards Winner for Published Prose in English
- Winner, Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Nonfiction
- Winner, High Plains Book Awards
- An Indigo Book of the Year
Reviews
“From the Ashes hits you like a punch in the gut. It’s an unflinching, heartrending and beautifully written story of survival against seemingly impossible odds. But it’s also a book that should make you furious. Thistle paints a vivid portrait of a country seemingly incapable of doing right by Indigenous youth or by those struggling with homelessness, addiction and intergenerational trauma. That he survived to tell this story is truly a miracle. Still, one question haunts me after finishing this powerful and devastating book: How do we ensure that the next generation isn’t forced to navigate a broken system that takes their lives for granted and fails them at every turn? My greatest hope, then, is that From the Ashes will be the wakeup call Canada needs.” — IAN MOSBY, historian and author of Food Will Win the War
Educator Information
Caution: Deals with mature subject matter.
Additional Information
368 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"
Synopsis:
One young woman’s relentless quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut will irrevocably alter the fates of the people she loves most in this tour de force of a debut about ambition, belonging, and family.
My mother took my sister and me, and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to, a place on earth she thought we might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair. I watched the moon.
Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister in tow—to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.
Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her: her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.
In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity, and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.
Reviews
“A story of decisions; right, wrong and everything in between, To the Moon and Back explores love and ambition and all its complicated messiness. With characters so perfectly rendered that you’ll want to hug them or give them a shake, Eliana Rampage explores what it means to belong in this immersive and exciting debut.” — Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers (winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence)
“A soaring masterpiece that mixes the terror, care, betrayal, and death-defying love of family with deliciously abject lesbian drama and the beautifully self-destructive doggedness of possessing a singular dream. Every character in this novel will stay with you forever. I love this book.” —Casey Plett, award-winning author of A Dream of a Woma—
“A John Irving-esque tragicomic saga… This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: There are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!” —Kirkus Review (starred review)
Additional Information
448 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
This new collection of horror short fiction weaves together contemporary Arctic settings with ancient monsters and mysterious beings that have been said to stalk the tundra for centuries.
Featuring authors from across the Canadian Arctic, this new volume of Taaqtumi—an Inuktitut word that means “In the Dark”—reveals just how horrifying the dark can be.
Featuring new fiction from award-winning authors Aviaq Johnston, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley and Jamesie Fournier, as well as new voices in the genre, this collection is perfect for any horror lover.
Educator & Series Information
Includes stories from Indigenous authors across the Canadian Arctic.
This book is part of the Taaqtumi series.
Additional Information
184 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | b&w illustrations | Paperback
Synopsis:
This book invites readers to step into a space of reflection on your personal relationship with truth, reconciliation, and Orange Shirt Day.
Written in response to the increase of residential school denialism, Phyllis Webstad and Kristy McLeod have collaborated to create a book that encourages readers to face their own biases. This book challenges readers through a series of sensitive conversations that explore decolonization, Indigenization, healing, and every person’s individual responsibility to truth and reconciliation. Centered around the Orange Shirt Day movement, and a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, these conversations encourage readers to unpack and reckon with denialism, biases, privilege, and the journey forward, on both a personal and national level.
Within each chapter, Phyllis Webstad draws on her decade of experience (sharing her Orange Shirt Story on a global level and advocating for the rights of Indigenous Peoples) to offer insights on these topics and stories from her personal journey, which co-author and Métis scholar, Kristy McLeod, helps readers to further navigate. Each section includes real denialist comments taken from social media and Kristy's analysis and response to them. Through empathy-driven truth-telling, this book offers an opportunity to witness, reflect, heal, and be intentional about the seeds we hope to plant for the future, together.
Additional Information
350 pages | 5.70" x 8.25" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
"John Macfie's vivid and stirring photographs show a way of life on full display - the world my ancestors inhabited and that my mom fondly described to me. It is a world that, shortly after these pictures were taken, ended. So distant and yet achingly familiar, these pictures feel like a visit home."- Jesse Wente, Anishinaabe broadcaster, arts leader, and author of Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance
While working as a trapline manager in Northern Ontario during the 1950s and 1960s, John Macfie, a Canadian of Scottish heritage, formed deep and lasting relationships with the people of the Indigenous communities in the region. As he travelled the vast expanse of the Hudson Bay watershed, from Sandy Lake to Fort Severn to Moose Lake and as far south as Mattagami, he photographed the daily lives of Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities, bearing witness to their adaptability and resilience during a time of tremendous change.
Macfie's photos, curated both in this volume and for an accompanying exhibition by the nipisihkopawiyiniw (Willow Cree) writer and journalist Paul Seesequasis, document ways of life firmly rooted in the pleasures of the land and the changing seasons. People of the Watershed builds on Seesequasis's visual reclamation work with his online Indigenous Archival Photo Project and his previous book, Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun, serving to centre the stories and lives of the people featured in these compelling archival images.
Reviews
"The images reflect a sensitive eye and respectful approach to a solid documentary project." - The Globe and Mail
"Shines a light on the overlooked histories of Indigenous communities in northern Ontario." - APTN
Additional Information
192 pages | 8.01" x 9.99" | 100 colour and black and white photos | Paperback
Synopsis:
Next Level Chef winner Pyet De Spain celebrates her Mexican and Native American heritage in this collection of mouthwatering recipes, a vibrant fusion that ties us to the land and to one another.
Star chef Pyet DeSpain rose to prominence as the first winner of Gordon Ramsey’s Fox television show Next Level Chef. Now, in her debut cookbook, she shares the joy of cooking fueled by her burning passion for Native American and Mexican American cuisine. Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking is a tribute to her dual heritage—a gorgeously crafted celebration of the diversity of food and the stories, traditions, culture, and profound philosophies of Indigenous people that season each meal.
Pyet shows you how to incorporate a delicious range of key ingredients—from venison, dandelion greens, to sunchokes, bison, and native berries—into more than sixty fusion dishes. Family and friends will be excited to gather around the table to enjoy sweet and savory food such as:
- Three Sisters Salad
- Bison and Sweet Corn Soup
- Fry Bread
- Mexican Chocolate & Mezcal Cake
- Corn Silk and Honey Tea
- Wojapi BBQ Sauce
In addition to her inventive and palate pleasing recipes, Pyet invites home cooks to honor the seasons on our beautiful Earth and connect with essential foodways. “This is more than just a cookbook,” Pyet writes. “It’s giving a voice to Indigenous people, while also highlighting the fusion of my two cultures with fire and purpose.”
Reviews
"Pyet's talent is evident in every recipe in this book. The way she weaves her heritage into her dishes is extraordinary and I've seen it every day since the first time I tasted her work on Next Level Chef. Trust me, you're in for an absolute treat." — Gordon Ramsay
Pyet’s Rooted in Fire beautifully honors her Prairie Band of Potawatomi and Mexican heritage through food storytelling that is both personal and powerful. Her voice is heartfelt, her vision and dedication are clear, and her talent within the Indigenous food movement is undeniable. I’m so proud to see her shining as a modern-day Indigenous food warrior—this book marks an important chapter in her growing legacy." — Sean Sherman, Founder of The Sioux Chef/NATIFS.org and Author of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen and Turtle Island
Additional Information
288 pages | 7.38" x 9.12" | 128 four color food photographs | Hardcover
Synopsis:
From the #1 bestselling and award-winning author of Indians on Vacation, a witty and wry novel set in a small Ontario town where all is seemingly ordinary except for one thing—aliens have landed on the moon
In Thomas King’s new novel, the citizens of a small Ontario town face life-changing decisions. Bria’s grandmother asks her to take her great-grandmother’s rosary to Edmonton and return it in person to the pope. When she flings it into the lake, the rosary somehow hits the pope on the cheek, thousands of kilometres away. It is the same rosary. How is this possible? Thea is furious at her son for putting her in an old-age home. She should have had a daughter. A daughter would never have forced her from her home. Darlene is mixed up with the no-good petty thief Billy. When she ends up in the hospital, she finds Thea’s fanny pack on the floor. Darlene needs the $265 tucked inside, but she also wants a reward for returning the fanny pack. Herb has bought the drive-in movie theatre on the edge of town and has turned it into his home. He watches movies on the big screen while treating the parking lot as his personal driving range. Should he travel west to see his family on the reserve? Nico has a Subaru whose battery keeps failing, but there are no replacements in North America. Gary and Brenda from the dealership are having an affair. Richard wants to set up a dating profile but has no cell phone.
Just the stuff of ordinary life except for one thing: Aliens have landed on the moon. They are watching Earth and earthlings. What is their plan? With the arrival of the aliens, ordinary life is upended in ways that are both hilarious and revealing. While some people fear the aliens’ three-part mandate to save the planet (which might have been written by a grade 9 student in the US), others think the arrival of the aliens is a golden opportunity for a deep discount weekend at Costco that could possibly rival Amazon’s Black Friday.
Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
From adventures in Indigenous futurism to tales of first love, the stories and poems of Beyond the Glittering World proclaim and celebrate a rising generation of Native American storytellers.
Beyond the Glittering World brings together twenty emerging and established Native women writers and writers of marginalized genders, including Moniquill Blackgoose, Heid E. Erdrich, A.J. Eversole, Chelesa Hicks, and D. Daye Hunter. Immersing readers in worlds as varied as their authors, this collection presents an array of singular voices at their genre-bending, boundary-breaking, devastating, and joyous best.
Reviews
"An evocative compilation of voices pondering Indigenous futures and the shape of Indigenous love. Beyond the Glittering World holds a healthy dose of gender-bending, genre-challenging, future-hoping might. This anthology is a welcome addition to the field of Indigenous anthologies.”—DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA, Whiskey Tender
Additional Information
240 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A celebration and in-depth exploration of Canada’s West Coast through an Indigenous and immigrant lens, Reconciling weaves together personal tales and tough histories for guiding steps toward true understanding.
A personal and historical story of identity, place, and belonging from a Musqueam-Chinese Elder caught between cultures.
It’s taken most of Larry Grant’s long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status, suddenly labeled “bastard children.” With one stroke of the pen, they were no longer recognized as Indigenous.
In Reconciling, Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver — and most cities in the Americas, from Cusco to Mexico City, from New York to Toronto. It combines Indigenous traditions with key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential schools, and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview. Each chapter takes the form of a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman and is built around one pivotal geographical place and its themes, including the Musqueam reserve, Chinatown, the site of the Mission Residential School, the Vancouver docks, and the University of British Columbia.
When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling, an ongoing, unfinished process we’re all going through, Indigenous and settler, immigrant and Canadian-born. “I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self,” he explains. “To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that.”
Reviews
“Musqueam Elder Larry Grant’s intimate eyewitness accounts of huge changes in the region’s landscape and its evolving relationship with his people are a must-read for people who want to join Canada’s journey towards reconciliation.” — Paul Yee, author of Saltwater City
“Conversing with the ideal listener, the inquisitive, sensitive journalist Scott Steedman, Larry Grant speaks unflinchingly of his dual heritages and how, for most of his life, he had to suppress one or another or both. Steedman presents Grant’s spoken prose with pristine clarity, and so governmental crimes and real-estate wrongs are laid bare, and unbearable is our outrage, but necessary is our courage to rectify and reconcile.” — George Elliott Clarke, author of Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir
“Larry Grant’s conversational memoir is a poignant and honest recollection of identity politics as well as a meditation on bearing witness and surviving ecological and cultural displacement. His wise words invite you to reflect on how all of us can better reconcile with the past, present, and future and how we can never escape the fact that everything in this world is connected.” — Donna Seto, author of Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History
Additional Information
232 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 16 black and white halftones; bibliography; table of contents | Paperback
Synopsis:
“To know ourselves is the most profound and difficult endeavor. Though we are all made of the same questions, we have individual routes to the answers, or to reframing the questions. Why is there evil in the world? Why do people suffer, and some more than others? Why are we here? What are we doing here? What happens after death? Does anything mean anything at all? Who am I and what does it matter?” writes Joy Harjo, renowned poet and activist, in this profound work about the struggles, challenges, and joys of coming of age.
In her best-selling memoir Poet Warrior, Harjo led readers through her lifelong process of artistic evolution. In Girl Warrior, she speaks directly to Native girls and women, sharing stories about her own coming of age to bring renewed attention to the pivotal moments of becoming including forgiveness, failure, falling, rising up, and honoring our vast family of beings.
Informed by her own experiences and those of her ancestors, Harjo offers inspiration and insight for navigating the many challenges of maturation. She grapples with parents, friendships, love, and loss. She guides young readers toward painting, poetry, and music as powerful tools for developing their own ethical sensibility. As Harjo demonstrates, the act of making is an essential part of who we are, a means of inviting the past into the present and a critical tool young women can use to shape a more just future. Lyrical and compassionate, Harjo’s call for creativity and empathy is an urgent and necessary work.
Reviews
"Joy Harjo combines the wisdom that was here long before Europeans showed up with the challenges of a woman’s life in the present. The result is inspired by the past and a personal preparation for the future."— Gloria Steinem, feminist activist and author
"What a beautiful and brilliant call to arms. I wish I had Joy Harjo’s words when I was young. This book is a lovely ode to her own bravery and by extension, all of ours. Girl Warrior gives possibility to young people (and all people) through Joy Harjo’s own coming-of-age narrative. More than about having waded through tumultuous waters and survived to not only tell the story but thrive inside the people we become on the other side. This book is simply a balm."— Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winner
Additional Information
176 pages | 5.37" x 8.00" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
A Snuneymuxw ethnobotany guide grounded in Indigenous knowledge and deep ancestral connection to the land.
Plant Teachings from My Auntie: Gathering Coast Salish Plants for Medicine, Textiles, Nourishment, and Ceremony is a richly illustrated compendium of the many culturally significant wild foods and herbal remedies found in the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation.
Each entry features plant descriptions complete with both their Hul'q'umi'num and botanical names, typical native habitat, and traditional uses. Particular attention is paid to the sacred Western Red Cedar or "tree of life." The book also offers a selection of healing recipes; tips for respectful, sustainable harvesting; ethical and responsible preparation techniques; and a guide to local gathering sites.
Snu'y'ulh refers to teachings handed down through generations. Snuneymuxw Elder and Knowledge Keeper Geraldine Manson, whose traditional name is C'tasi:a, draws on the sacred knowledge passed on to her by her "Auntie Ellen," Dr. Ellen White, also known as Kwulasulwut. Central to these learnings is the fundamental concept or protocol of honoring gifts from the land by gathering and preparing in ways that respect the history, culture, spirituality, and Indigenous knowledge associated with each species.
This powerful work is a rare treasure that will appeal to those seeking to foster greater cultural understanding and ecological responsibility while deepening their commitment to meaningful reconciliation.
Additional Information
96 pages | 9.00" x 7.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A guide that provides ideas and action steps for bringing Indigenous perspectives and philosophies of land-based learning into professional practice, in the classroom and beyond.
Renewal, the second book in the Footbridge series, guides K–12 educators in bringing Indigenous voices and the philosophy, principles, and practices of Indigenous land-based education into their teaching. This text encourages educators to:
- respectfully renew their own relationships with land directly engage students with the land, no matter where they are located
- guide students in learning through observation, listening, and discussion and to take action in response
- honour diverse ways of knowing and being
- understand historic injustices and engage with the contemporary Land Back movement
Through critical engagement with diverse written and visual works created by Indigenous leaders, land defenders, scholars, and Knowledge Keepers, experienced educators Christine M'Lot and Katya Adamov Ferguson support readers in connecting with Indigenous perspectives on land and water. They offer guidance on bringing Indigenous works into the classroom, including concrete ways to facilitate discussions around land-based topics, advice for land-based activities, and suggestions for how students can engage with these topics through inquiry learning.
In this resource, you will find:
- prompts for individual reflection and group discussion
- valuable concepts and methods that can be applied in the classroom and beyond
- practical action steps and resources for educators, parents, librarians, and administrators
Use this book as a springboard for your own learning journey or as a lively prompt for dialogue within your professional learning community.
Reviews
"Renewal lays out a simple and practical approach to land-based education. It works from the premise that land-based education is not simply “taking the classroom outside,” but is about "education on the land, about the land, and from the land.” The spiritual foundation of earth-based cultures is about living in your place as one small, equal part of the land (land being the entirety of air, earth, water, living beings, and spirits), a foundation common to most Indigenous cultures on this planet. I hope that others adopt it in their journey to become more holistic educators and maybe even make a positive difference in shaping how we humans interact with the land." — Dr. Garry Merkel, Director, Centre of Indigenous Land Stewardship, The University of British Columbia
Educator & Series Information
For use with grades K to 12.
This book is part of The Footbridge Series. This series aims to bridge curricular outcomes with Indigenous-centered content and perspectives from across Turtle Island. Like a footbridge, this series is intended to provide a path between Indigenous worldviews and the classroom, engaging differences, including tensions, and highlighting the importance of balance, all while helping teachers integrate Indigenous perspectives into multiple disciplines within the K-12 education system.
Contributions by Nicki Ferland, Peatr Thomas, Tyna Legault Taylor, Shannon Webb-Campbell, Tasha Beeds, Sonny Assu, Shalan Joudry, Tricia Logan, Dakota Bear, Shirli Ewanchuk, Dan Henhawk, Réal Carrière, Hetxw'ms Gyetxw Brett D. Huson, Reanna McKay (Merasty)
Photographs by Inuksaq Angotingoar, Makayla Aupaluktuq, Brendan Kingilik, Carina Kingilik, Kyle Lareau, Quin Mikkungwak, Narkyagik, Kaylee Rumbolt, Marissa Scottie, Nathan Snow, Connor Tagoona-Niego, Koen Tapatai, and Shelly Tunguaq
Additional Information
224 pages | 7.00" x 10.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Emma LaRocque was born in 1949 in Lac La Biche into a Cree-speaking Métis family. She grew up in a one-room, kerosene-lit log cabin built by her father. At the age of nine, she fought her parents to attend school, where she encountered English and the colonizer’s harmful stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. Confronting the contradictions of colonialism sparked her journey as a writer and scholar, as she sought to understand the dissonance between her identity and the world around her.
The Emma LaRocque Reader is a comprehensive collection of her most significant writings, poetry and prose, offering an intimate window into the mind of one of Canada’s foremost Indigenous scholars. Through her work, LaRocque provides profound insights into the intersections of colonialism, sexism, and racism in Canada, while also critically celebrating the beauty of her community and culture. In the afterword, she reflects on fifty years of challenging the colonial enterprise. A vital contribution to postcolonial literature, The Emma LaRocque Reader intertwines the personal and the political to explore what it means to be human, offering a powerful testament to Indigenous resistance, resilience, and vision.
This collection brings together the works of Métis scholar Emma LaRocque, offering a half-century of her poetry and prose, and shedding new light on Canada, colonialism, and Indigenous resistance.
Educator Information
Chapters
Foreword by Armand Ruffo
Preface by Elaine Coburn
Acknowledgments by Emma LaRocque
Acknowledgments of Permissions to Reprint
Introduction by Elaine Coburn
1975 A Personal Essay on Poverty (Excerpt from Defeathering the Indian)
1983 The Métis in English Canadian Literature
1988 On the Ethics of Publishing Historical Documents
1989 Racism Runs through Canadian Society
1990 Preface: Here Are Our Voices: Who Will Hear?
1990 Geese (poem)
1990 Nostalgia (poem)
1990 “Progress” (poem)
1990 The Red in Winter (poem)
1990 Incongruence (poem)
1990 Loneliness (poem)
1990 Beggar (poem)
1990 Tides, Towns, and Trains
1992 My Hometown, Northern Canada, South Africa (poem)
1993 Violence in Aboriginal Communities
1994 Long Way from Home (poem)
1996 The Colonization of a Native Woman Scholar
1996 When the Other Is Me: Native Writers Confronting Canadian Literature
2001 Native Identity and the Métis: Otehpayimsuak Peoples
2001 From the Land to the Classroom
2004 When the Wild West Is Me
2006 Sweeping (poem)
2006 Sources of Inspiration: The Birth of "For the Love of Words": Aboriginal Writers of Canada
2007 Métis and Feminist
2009 Reflections on Cultural Continuity through Aboriginal Women’s Writings
2010 Native Writers Reconstruct: Pushing Paradigms
2013 For the Love of Place – Not Just Any Place: Selected Métis Writings
2015 “Resist No Longer”: Reflections on Resistance Writing and Teaching
2016 Contemporary Métis Literature: Resistance, Roots, Innovation
2016 Colonialism Lived
2017 Powerlines (poem)
2022 Wehsakehcha, Comics, Shakespeare, and the Dictionary
2023 Afterword
Index
Additional Information
348 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback























































