Indigenous Studies

In this followup to his hugely popular Midnight Storm Moonless Sky: Indigenous Horror Stories, Blackfoot storyteller Alex Soop plunges us again into enthralling tales that mix reality with dark terror. Within its stories, Whisper at Night and They Will Come reveals ancient theories of the paranormal, post apocalyptic scenarios, impossible wells of grief, and monstrous phobias. Soop scares the wits out of readers, all the while uncovering overlooked social anxieties and racism affecting Indigenous Peoples across North America.

Educator & Series Information
This is the second volume in the Indigenous Horror series.

Additional Information
276 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

What happens behind the scenes at a Canadian human rights tribunal? And why aren’t human rights tribunal processes working for Indigenous people?

Witness to the Human Rights Tribunals opens the doors to the tribunal, revealing the interactions of lawyers, tribunal members, expert witnesses, and Indigenous litigants. Bruce Miller provides an in-depth look at the role of anthropological expertise in the courts, and draws on testimony, ethnographic data, and years of tribunal decisions to show how specific cases are fought and how expert testimony about racialization and discrimination is disregarded. His candid analysis reveals the double-edged nature of the tribunal itself, which re-engages with the trauma and violence of discrimination that suffuses social and legal systems while it attempts to protect human rights.

Grounded in expert experience, this important book asks hard questions. Should human rights tribunals be replaced, or paired with an Indigenous-centred system? How can anthropologists support an understanding of the pervasive discrimination that Indigenous people face? It definitively concludes that any reform must consider the problem of symbolic trauma before Indigenous claimants can receive appropriate justice.

An international audience of scholars and students of law, anthropology, the anthropology of law, human rights, and alternative justice will find this comprehensive work invaluable. Advocates, lawyers, and other professionals involved in human rights tribunals and extra-court proceedings will also find it an important addition to their libraries.

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240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"| 8 tables | Paperback

From Oklahoma to California, the heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers—seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks’ stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people.

In stories like “Superdrunk,” “Tsexope,” and “Wets’a,” iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. And in “By Alcatraz,” a Native student finds herself alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, seeking out new friendships during a national holiday she does not recognize. Leaping back in time, “A Fresh Start Ruined” inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage woman attempting to hide her origins while social climbing in midcentury Oklahoma. And in “House of RGB” a young professional settles into a new home, intent on claiming her independence after a break-up, even if her ancestors can’t seem to get out of her way.

Whether in between college semesters or jobs, on the road to tribal dances or escaping troubled homes, the characters of A Calm & Normal Heart occupy a complicated and often unreliable terrain. Chelsea T. Hicks brings sharp humor, sprawling imagination, and a profound connection to Native experience in a collection that will subvert long-held assumptions for many readers, and inspire hope along the way.

Reviews
"Chelsea T. Hicks' deadpan dexterous wit can make you laugh and cry in the space of a heartbeat. A Calm and Normal Heart is the book I've been waiting for— audacious, tender, and fiercely committed." —Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence

"A Calm & Normal Heart is sharp, sexy, and endlessly surprising. An electric blend of playfulness and intensity in Hicks's prose ignites her characters' desires. Their stories dazzle and are to be savored. This is a gorgeous collection!" —Deesha Philyaw, National Book Award finalist and author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

"The stories in Chelsea Hicks's A Calm & Normal Heart are full of quiet truths and wry, soulful secrets. It is a book that doesn't at all feel like a debut story collection, but rather written with startling beauty and the flawless precision of a master storyteller. It is a genuine page-turner full of sentences so beautiful they demand re-reading." —Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed

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Hardcover

In the dense rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Somass River (c̓uumaʕas) brings sockeye salmon (miʕaat) into the Nuu-chah-nulth community of Tseshaht. C̓uumaʕas and miʕaat are central to the sacred food practices that have been a crucial part of the Indigenous community’s efforts to enact food sovereignty, decolonize their diet, and preserve their ancestral knowledge.

In A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other, Charlotte Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization in the context of broader efforts to re-Indigenize contemporary diets on the Northwest Coast. Coté offers evocative stories of her Tseshaht community’s and her own work to revitalize relationships to haʔum (traditional food) as a way to nurture health and wellness. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation, and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounds healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty: berry picking, salmon fishing, and building a community garden on reclaimed residential school grounds. This book is for everyone concerned about the major role food plays in physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness.

Reviews
"A powerful philosophy of food sovereignty. Coté successfully navigates myriad scholarly and nonscholarly voices, telling a compelling comprehensive story that helps us understand the practices and policies needed to make change in our food systems." — Kyle Whyte, Michigan State University

"Adeptly uses a deep storytelling method, including both lived experience and critical analysis of history and theory, to examine experiences and transformations of Indigenous foodways." — Hannah Wittman, University of British Columbia

"I am so grateful for Charlotte Cote’s A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other, which creates a path into the living foodways and thoughtways of her people. Her warm, storytelling voice and sharing of collective knowledge embody the generous spirit of a feast, and this book itself, is a feast." — Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry

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208 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 17 b&w illustrations | 2 maps | Paperback

The long-awaited collection of talks, presentations, prayers, and ceremonies of renowned Mi'kmaw Elder, human rights activist, and language and culture warrior, Sister Dorothy Moore.

Mi'kmaw Elder Sister Dorothy Moore has spent a lifetime advocating for the rights of her people. As a well-known educator and a survivor of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, she has broken down systemic barriers, leading the Mi'kmaq to access all levels of education, and worked tirelessly to reclaim and promote Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

In A Journey of Love and Hope, Sister Dorothy's words are collected in print, as she originally spoke them, for the first time. Included are speeches, talks, presentations, and ceremonies delivered between 1985 and 2015 to universities, government departments, and Indigenous organizations and gatherings. Thematic sections include Culture and Language, Spirituality, Racism, Education, and Prayers and Ceremonies, framed by Ikantek (introductions) from well-known Mi'kmaw writers and educators, as well as an Associate Sister of the Sisters of St Martha.

Sister Dorothy's talks and presentations will inspire and serve to disrupt the dominant narratives of complex Indigenous issues such as colonialism, oppression, racism, and discrimination. A Journey of Love and Hope gives a voice to Mi'kmaw lived experiences and provides a valuable resource for use in schools, postsecondary education institutions, and communities. Her words are an inspiration to all Treaty people.

Features original illustrations by celebrated Mi'kmaw artist Gerald Gloade and appendices, including a complete list of Sister Moore's talks and presentations and a timeline of life events.

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184 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover | Colour photo insert

An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada’s most daring literary talents.

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.

What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.

Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely.

Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become—and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music.

Reviews
"No one breaks your heart as elegantly as Billy-Ray Belcourt. Innovative, intimate, and meticulous, A Minor Chorus is a thoughtful riot of intersections and juxtapositions, a congregation of keenly observed laments gently vivisecting the small, Northern Alberta community at its core."—Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster

"The literary child of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, this novel builds on both, and is yet still something so new. It has the guts to centre Indigenous queer life as worthy of serious intellectual and artistic inquiry—which, of course, it always has been. We will be reading and re-reading and learning from A Minor Chorus for decades to come."—Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

"An absolutely dazzling confluence of big ideas and raw emotions, told in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s singular poetic voice. A Minor Chorus is about loving, questioning, and fighting for your life, and it’s as compelling a debut novel as I’ve read in years."—Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You

"A truly exceptional novel about how the disregarded sometimes live the most remarkable lives, and how storytelling will redeem us somehow, make us less lonely. A Minor Chorus is like a song that’s over too soon; I want to play it on repeat, to memorize the words so that I can sing them to myself."—Katherena Vermette, author of The Strangers

Additional Information
192 pages | 5.20" x 7.78" | Hardcover

In Aboriginal™, Jennifer Adese explores the origins, meaning, and usage of the term “Aboriginal” and its displacement by the word “Indigenous.” In the Constitution Act, 1982, the term’s express purpose was to speak to specific “aboriginal rights”. Yet in the wake of the Constitution’s passage, Aboriginal, in its capitalized form, became increasingly used to describe and categorize people.

More than simple legal and political vernacular, the term Aboriginal (capitalized or not) has had real-world consequences for the people it defined. Aboriginal™ argues the term was a tool used to advance Canada’s cultural and economic assimilatory agenda throughout the 1980s until the mid-2010s. Moreover, Adese illuminates how the word engenders a kind of “Aboriginalized multicultural” brand easily reduced to and exported as a nation brand, economic brand, and place brand—at odds with the diversity and complexity of Indigenous peoples and communities.

In her multi-disciplinary research, Adese examines the discursive spaces and concrete sites where Aboriginality features prominently: the Constitution Act, 1982; the 2010 Vancouver Olympics; the “Aboriginal tourism industry”; and the Vancouver International Airport. Reflecting on the term’s abrupt exit from public discourse and the recent turn toward Indigenous, Indigeneity, and Indigenization, Aboriginal™ offers insight into Indigenous-Canada relations, reconciliation efforts, and current discussions of Indigenous identity, authenticity, and agency.

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272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

An important language resource that helps intermediate nêhiyawêtan learners begin to understand more advanced grammar of the language.

Let’s keep on speaking Cree:
In our language is our life;

Let’s keep on speaking Cree:
In our language is our identity.

Building on mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree, Solomon Ratt’s first influential Cree language resource, âhkami-nêhiyawêtân / Let’s Keep Speaking Cree helps intermediate nêhiyawêtan learners begin to understand more advanced grammar of the language. The textbook is more than a language textbook though: it includes a series of the author’s original stories written in Cree, complete with comprehension questions, making it ideal for self-study as well as classroom use.

Educator & Series Information
This book builds on mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree.

Latest Cree language workbook by highly respected author and educator Solomon Ratt, intended for intermediate readers/speakers/
learners

First title in the Continuing Language series, which will build upon our introductory Indigenous language learner texts

Includes sections on going to the doctor, Cree culture and values, protocols, faith, humility, teachings, and more.

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304 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | Spiral Bound

In this poetry collection, the author honours Inuit who lay in the past, and Inuit who are with us now and most importantly the Inuit who are waiting to come to us. The author believes it is not okay that Inuit children and adults died and were buried in unmarked graves, their bodies never returned to their loved ones. It is not okay that their relatives were never told of their deaths or where they were buried because keeping track of dead Inuit bodies was simply not very important to Canadian authorities. The author wants to imagine a world free of colonialism, a world without interference in Inuit lives.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Modern Indigenous Voices series.

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72 pages | 8.50" x 5.50" | Paperback

Indigenization is more than reconciliation: It is a better business practice!

Some of the common questions businesses, educational institutions, and communities ask are: “Do we need an Indigenization strategy? If so, why; what is it really?; and, how do we do it?”

Amplifying Indigenous Voices in Business is for organizations and allies who would like to make a positive difference by learning how to amplify Indigenous voices, Indigenize businesses, and support Indigenous entrepreneurship, all in the bigger spirit of reconciliation.

Author Priscilla Omulo addresses Canada’s complicated history with Indigenous peoples and how that contributes to today’s challenges in the business realm. While the challenge is real, so is the opportunity, and Omulo’s step-by-step guide explains how any organization can make immediate plans to improve the way they do business by doing the research, consulting the right people, and formulating a strategy to move forward. Omulo shows readers how a commitment to doing the right thing will lead to a more sustainable and inclusive place for all, and a stronger foundation for businesses and other organizations.

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152 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

A multigenerational discussion of culture, history, and naming centring on archival photographs of Inuit whose names were previously unrecorded.

"Our names - Atiqput - are very meaningful. They are our identification. They are our Spirits. We are named after what's in the sky for strength, what’s in the water ... the land, body parts. Every name is attached to every part of our body and mind. Yes, every name is alive. Every name has a meaning. Much of our names have been misspelled and many of them have lost their meanings forever. Our Project Naming has been about identifying Inuit, who became nameless over the years, just "unidentified eskimos ..." With Project Naming, we have put Inuit meanings back in the pictures, back to life." Piita Irniq

For over two decades, Inuit collaborators living across Inuit Nunangat and in the South have returned names to hundreds of previously anonymous Inuit seen in historical photographs held by Library and Archives Canada as part of Project Naming. This innovative photo-based history research initiative was established by the Inuit school Nunavut Sivuniksavut and the national archive.

Atiqput celebrates Inuit naming practices and through them honours Inuit culture, history, and storytelling. Narratives by Inuit elders, including Sally Kate Webster, Piita Irniq, Manitok Thompson, Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, and David Serkoak, form the heart of the book, as they reflect on naming traditions and the intergenerational conversations spurred by the photographic archive. Other contributions present scholarly insights and research projects that extend Project Naming’s methodology, interspersed with pictorial essays by the artist Barry Pottle and the filmmaker Asinnajaq.

Through oral testimony and photography, Atiqput rewrites the historical record created by settler societies and challenges a legacy of colonial visualization.

Reviews
“Atiqput brings together statements by Inuit artists, elders, and activists with work by project facilitators and scholars to produce a vibrant tapestry that at once mourns the losses of the past, treasures the traces that can be regained, and celebrates the continued power of Inuit cultural forms.” -  Peter Kulchyski, University of Manitoba and author of Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice: Begade Shutagot’ine and the Sahtu Treaty

Additional Information
264 pages | 9.00" x 10.00" | Hardcover

Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indigenous literature based on the Indigenous practice of life writing.

Since the 1970s non-Indigenous scholars have perpetrated the notion that Indigenous people were disinclined to talk about their lives and underscored the assumption that autobiography is a European invention. Deanna Reder challenges such long held assumptions by calling attention to longstanding autobiographical practices that are engrained in Cree and Métis, or nêhiyawak, culture and examining a series of examples of Indigenous life writing. Blended with family stories and drawing on original historical research, Reder examines censored and suppressed writing by nêhiyawak intellectuals such as Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, and James Brady. Grounded in nêhiyawak ontologies and epistemologies that consider life stories to be an intergenerational conduit to pass on knowledge about a shared world, this study encourages a widespread re-evaluation of past and present engagement with Indigenous storytelling forms across scholarly disciplines

Educator Information
Table of Contents

What does the phrase Métis peoples mean in constitutional terms? As lawyers and scholars dispute forms of Métis identity, and debate the nature and scope of Métis rights under the Canadian Constitution, understanding Métis experience of colonization is fundamental to achieving reconciliation.

In Bead by Bead, contributors address the historical denial – at both federal and provincial levels – of outstanding Métis concerns and Aboriginal rights claims, in particular with respect to land, resources, and governance. Tackling such themes as ongoing colonial policies, the invisibility of Métis women in court decisions, identity politics, and racist legal principles, they uncover the troubling issues that plague Métis aspirations for a just future.

This nuanced analysis of the parameters that current Indigenous legal doctrines place around Métis rights discourse moves beyond a one-size-fits-all definition of Métis or a uniform approach to Aboriginal rights. By raising critical questions about self-determination, colonization, kinship, land, and other essential aspects of Métis lived reality, these clear-eyed essays go beyond legal theorizing and create pathways to respectful, inclusive Métis-Canadian constitutional relationships.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of Métis and Indigenous studies and Aboriginal law, as well as for lawyers, politicians, and civil servants engaged in Métis issues.

Contributors: Brodie Douglas, Karen Drake, Christopher Gall, Adam Gaudry, Sébastien Grammond, Brenda L. Gunn, Thomas Isaac, Wanda McCaslin , Darren O’Toole, Jeremy Patzer, Signa A. Daum Shanks, D’Arcy Vermette.

Reviews
“Finally, we have a source that in a single place provides material and commentary that will support informed debate and help to come to grips with the questions of Métis identity, community, and constitutional rights. . . . This book accurately addresses who we are: as a people with common values, traditions, culture, way of life, family ties, history, communities and shared territory. . . . There is no question of its value, the knowledge we gain from it and how it will augment everyone’s perspective of the issues of Métis.”—Tony Belcourt, OC, first president of the Native Council of Canada and founding president of the Métis Nation of Ontario

Educator Information
Table of Contents

Foreword / Tony Belcourt

Introduction / Yvonne Boyer, Larry Chartrand, and Wanda McCaslin

1 Métis Identity Captured by Law: Struggles over Use of the Category Métis in Canadian Law / Sébastien Grammond

2 Recognition and Reconciliation: Recent Developments in Métis Rights Law / Thomas Isaac

3 Shifting the Status Quo: The Duty to Consult and the Métis of British Columbia / Christopher Gall and Brodie Douglas

4 The Resilience of Métis Title: Rejecting Assumptions of Extinguishment / Adam Gaudry and Karen Drake

5 Where Are the Women? Analyzing the Three Métis Supreme Court of Canada Decisions / Brenda L. Gunn

6 Manitoba Metis Federation and Daniels: "Post-Legal" Reconciliation and Western Métis / Jeremy Patzer

7 Colonial Ideologies: The Denial of Métis Political Identity in Canadian Law / D’Arcy Vermette

8 Métis Aboriginal Rights: Four Legal Doctrines / Darren O’Toole

9 Suzerainty, Sovereignty, Jurisdiction: The Future of Métis Ways / Signa A. Daum Shanks

Afterword / Yvonne Boyer and Larry Chartrand

Index

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236 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

In this new edition of her powerful debut, Plains Cree writer and National Poet Laureate Louise B. Halfe - Sky Dancer reckons with personal history within cultural genocide.

Employing Indigenous spirituality, black comedy, and the memories of her own childhood as healing arts, celebrated poet Louise B. Halfe - Sky Dancer finds an irrepressible source of strength and dignity in her people. Bear Bones and Feathers offers moving portraits of Halfe's grandmother (a medicine woman whose life straddled old and new worlds), her parents (both trapped in a cycle of jealousy and abuse), and the people whose pain she witnessed on the reserve and at residential school.

Originally published by Coteau Books in 1994, Bear Bones and Feathers won the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, and was a finalist for the Spirit of Saskatchewan Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award.

Reviews
"With gentleness, old woman's humour, and a good red willow switch, Louise chases out the shadowy images that haunt our lives. She makes good medicine, she sings a beautiful song."— Maria Campbell, author of Halfbreed

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144 pages | 5.75" x 8.50" | Paperback

We find our way forward by going back.

The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."

Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.

This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

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224 pages | 5.81" x 8.53" | Hardcover