Indigenous Studies

Dreamcatcher and the Seven Deceivers, the sequel to the Seven Sacred Teachings, warns of voices we can expect to hear in our dream time – voices that do not represent the Sacred Teachings.

These are the voices of Seven Deceivers who are spoken of by name. The allure of their whisperings is carefully spelled out in order that all might come to know what to listen for. Dreamcatcher and the Seven Deceivers is a carefully woven telling of how and why Creator sent Trickster to Turtle Island with a gift that would help us see the light and resist temptation. At a time before distant religions and churches came with their teachings, their commandments and their seven cardinal sins, we knew. We knew the way of the Good Red Road. We knew the right way to live; not through commandments but through Sacred Teachings – Teachings that were given to us long before their arrival. And we knew we would be tested by Seven Deceivers – what they called seven cardinal sins. We knew because we had been forewarned. And when these distant churches arrived with their teachings, their relics and their symbols, we had our own. One was the Dreamcatcher.

Rooted in humility and honesty, the creators have tried to respect the cultures and traditions of all peoples. It is our hope that this telling will unite and thus heal divisions. Prophecies tell that this is the time for One Heart, One Mind and One Drum. We, readers and authors alike, are the ones we have been waiting for. There is nobody else who can revitalize our culture and values except ourselves.

It is our hope that this telling might move readers toward greater courage and wisdom and ultimately toward achieving and understanding what is true in life’s journey.

The Seven Sacred Teachings are a link that ties all Native, Inuit and Métis communities together.

Educator Information
Available in French HERE!

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35 pages

In the pre-reserve era, Aboriginal bands in the northern plains were relatively small multicultural communities that actively maintained fluid and inclusive membership through traditional kinship practices. These practices were governed by the Law of the People as described in the traditional stories of Wîsashkêcâhk, or Elder Brother, that outlined social interaction, marriage, adoption, and kinship roles and responsibilities.

In Elder Brother and the Law of the People, Robert Innes offers a detailed analysis of the role of Elder Brother stories in historical and contemporary kinship practices in Cowessess First Nation, located in southeastern Saskatchewan. He reveals how these tradition-inspired practices act to undermine legal and scholarly definitions of “Indian” and counter the perception that First Nations people have internalized such classifications. He presents Cowessess’s successful negotiation of the 1996 Treaty Land Agreement and their high inclusion rate of new “Bill-C31s” as evidence of the persistence of historical kinship values and their continuing role as the central unifying factor for band membership.

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216 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Arctic historian Kenn Harper gathers the best of his columns about Inuit history, which appear weekly in Nunatsiaq News, in this exciting new series of books.

Each installment of In Those Days: Collected Columns on Arctic History will cover a particularly fascinating aspect of traditional Inuit life. In volume one, “Inuit Biographies,” Harper shares the unique challenges and life histories of several Inuit living in pre-contact times.

The result of extensive interviews, research, and travel across the Arctic, these amazing short life histories provide readers with a detailed understanding of their specific time and place.

Series Information
This book is part of the In Those Days series, a historical series that collects writings on Arctic history.

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200 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

When he began his career with the Saskatoon Police in 1987, Ernie Louttit was only the city’s third native police officer. Indian Ernie, as he came to be known on the streets, details an era of challenge, prejudice, and also tremendous change in urban policing. Drawing from his childhood, army career, and service as a veteran patrol officer, Louttit shares stories of criminals and victims, the night shift, avoiding politics, but most of all, the realities of the marginalized and disenfranchised.

Louttit spent his entire career (including as a Sergeant) patrolling the streets of Saskatoon’s west side, an area until recently beset by poverty, and terrible social conditions. Here, he struggled to bring justice to communities where the lines between criminal and victim often blurred. Though Louttit’s story is characterized by conflict, danger, and violence, he argues that empathy and love for the community you serve are the greatest tools in any officer’s hands, especially when policing society’s less fortunate.

While his story is based on his experiences in Saskatoon, it is equally applicable to the challenges faced in any community where marginalized people live. It is an exciting, passionate, easy to read, and highly accessible story aimed at a broad audience.

With the advent of Aboriginal street gangs such as Indian Posse, Manitoba Warriors, and Native Syndicate, Winnipeg garnered a reputation as the “gang capital of Canada.” Yet beyond the stereotypes of outsiders, little is known about these street gangs and the factors and conditions that have produced them. “Indians Wear Red” locates Aboriginal street gangs in the context of the racialized poverty that has become entrenched in the colonized space of Winnipeg’s North End. Drawing upon extensive interviews with Aboriginal street gang members as well as with Aboriginal women and elders, the authors develop an understanding from “inside” the inner city and through the voices of Aboriginal people — especially street gang members themselves.

While economic restructuring and neo-liberal state responses can account for the global proliferation of street gangs, the authors argue that colonialism is a crucial factor in the Canadian context, particularly in western Canadian urban centres. Young Aboriginal people have resisted their social and economic exclusion by acting collectively as “Indians.” But just as colonialism is destructive, so too are street gang activities, including the illegal trade in drugs. Solutions lie not in “quick fixes” or “getting tough on crime” but in decolonization: re-connecting Aboriginal people with their cultures and building communities in which they can safely live and work.

When the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug’s traditional territory was threatened by mining exploration in 2006, they followed their traditional duty to protect the land and asked the mining exploration company, Platinex, to leave. Platinex left — and then sued the remote First Nation for $10 billion. The ensuing legal dispute lasted two years and eventually resulted in the jailing of community leaders. Ariss argues that though this jailing was extraordinarily punitive and is indicative of continuing colonialism within the legal system, some aspects of the case demonstrate the potential of Canadian law to understand, include and reflect Aboriginal perspectives. Connecting scholarship in Aboriginal rights and Canadian law, traditional Aboriginal law, social change and community activism, Keeping the Land explores the twists and turns of this legal dispute in order to gain a deeper understanding of the law’s contributions to and detractions from the process of reconciliation.

Indigenous scholars strive to produce accessible research grounded in the daily lives of Native peoples, research that will improve their communities in meaningful and sustained ways. They also recognize that long-lasting change depends on effective leadership.

Living Indigenous Leadership showcases innovative research and leadership practices from diverse nations and tribes in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. The contributors use vibrant stories and personal narratives to offer insights into the unique nature of Indigenous leadership. These dynamic case studies reveal that Native leaders, whether formal or informal, ground their work in embodied concepts such as land, story, ancestors, and elders, concepts rarely mentioned in mainstream studies of leadership. Indigenous leadership, they show, finds its most powerful expression in collaboration, in the teaching and example of Elders, and in community projects to promote higher education, language revitalization, health care, and the preservation of Indigenous arts.

This collection not only adds Indigenous methods to studies on leadership, it also gives a voice to the wives, mothers, and grandmothers who are using their knowledge to mend hearts and minds and to build strong communities. Their personal stories and collective knowledge will inspire further research and future generations.

The past two decades have witnessed the emerging role of grassroots social movements and community-based peacebuilding as key sites of transformative political and cultural engagement. Merging Fires offers case studies of grassroots alliance building between non-Indigenous activists and three Indigenous communities:
the Chippewa of Nawash,the Grassy Narrows First Nation and the Anishinaabe Grand Council of Treaty #3. These Canadian examples offer insights into the challenges, limitations and complexities of transformative, community-based alliance building and raise critical questions about power, knowledge and pedagogy at the grassroots level.

While this analysis is uniquely Canadian in scope, Merging Fires is of great political relevance in light of the Idle No More movement as well as similar decolonizing initiatives occurring globally. Rick Wallace’s research methodologies and ethics of solidarity are starkly different from many mainstream academic approaches, and his documentation of on-the-ground efforts at peacebuilding fills an important gap in the field.

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178 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

This lavishly-illustrated book tells a story through words and images that has never before been told, not in any single book. The focus is entirely on the Mi'kmaq of the Island, an island which for thousands of years has been known to the Mi'kmaq and their ancestors as Epekwitk. That name means "cradle on the sea" and no more poetic description of PEI has ever been penned. The story of the PEI Mi'kmaq is one of adaptation and perseverance across countless generations in the face of pervasive change. Today's environment is far from what it was millennia ago. So too, the economy, society, lifestyle, language and religion of the people has witnessed some dramatic shifts. Nonetheless, despite all the changes, today's Mi'kmaq feel deeply connected to the Island in its entirety and to their ancestors and the values they still share. This book tells those many stories, and communicates much more. While the book is a stand-alone publication, it is also a companion to a travelling exhibition of the same name.

- Winner of APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award
- Winner of PEI Book Award for Non-fiction

Growing up on the Six Nations native reserve, Salt Baby never quite fit in, as a “white” looking “Indian” — fair skin and curly hair made her more of a Shirley Temple type than a Pocahontas type. Salt Baby navigates the native reserve and the city while explaining herself, as well as her blood quantrum, to the world and to “Alligator”: “It’s always different for Indians.”

Reviews
“This hilarious and moving play explores the experience of being invisibly ethnic and raises questions about how we expect Aboriginal people to look.” —Toronto Arts Online

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74 pages | 5.40" x 8.40"

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King's critical and personal meditation on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope--a sometimes inconvenient but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.

Awards

• 2014 Burt Award Second Place Winner

Educator Information
This resource is also available in French in a pocket-sized format: L'Indien malcommode: Un portrait inattendu des Autochtones d'Amerique du Nord (format poche)

Additional Information336 pages | 5.18" x 7.99"

Sherman Alexie’s celebrated first collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, established its author as one of America’s most important and provocative voices. The basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals, it remains one of his best loved and widely praised books twenty years after its initial publication.

Vividly weaving memory, fantasy, and stark reality to paint a portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian reservation, this book introduces some of Alexie’s most beloved characters, including Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who no one seems to listen to, and his compatriot, Victor, the sports hero who turned into a recovering alcoholic. Now with an updated introduction from Alexie, these twenty-four tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet they are filled with passion and affection, myth and charm. Against a backdrop of addiction, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between men and women, Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, and, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

Educator Information
Resource for English First Peoples 10-12.  

Short stories.

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304 pages | 5.50" x 8.25"

The Poetics of Land and Identity is about the meaning of land for the many diverse First Nations within British Columbia. The work offers a study of the folklore and symbolic traditions within many Aboriginal regions and illustrates how these traditions emphasize the importance of orality and poetics as the defining factor in the value of land. Christine J. Elsey offers a deft, scholarly discussion of these “storyscapes,” providing us with a point of access for understanding First Nations’ perspectives on the world and their land. She provides an important alternative to the monetary, exploitative, resource-driven view of nature and land ownership and highlights the conflicts between the colonial, Western perspective of nature and the holistic view of First Nations people.

For the first time in history, the Blackfoot people share their culture, beliefs and traditions with the rest of the world.

In an innovative partnership with the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, a team of elders and spiritual leaders from the Blackfoot community agreed to share their history, traditions and artifacts in an effort to document their lives. The Story of the Blackfoot People: Nitsitapiisinni is the first piece of permanent documentation written by the leaders of the Blackfoot community about their lives both past and present.

This book chronicles all the important aspects of Blackfoot life and history. The book begins by exploring the fundamental belief systems of the Blackfoot including their traditional stories, sacred places, dances and ceremonies. Strong relationships are recognized by the Blackfoot as one of the most important keys to survival and the roles of men, women, children and elders, and their sacred connection to nature and their environment, are examined in detail. Less harmonious relationships are also candidly explored including relations between the Blackfoot people and the governments of the United States and Canada. In its moving conclusion, the Blackfoot community discusses the importance of uniting ancient traditions with modern challenges in order for their legacy to survive.

Revealing the enduring strength and fortitude of spirit of the Blackfoot people, this book will have meaning for both native and non-native readers alike.

Authenticity Note: This work is labelled as containing Authentic Indigenous Text because of the contributions from elders and other Indigenous peoples.

In a post-apocalyptic world, Bern and Elena are exiled from their village. Their crime? The two women are no longer of child-bearing age.

Forced to rely upon traditional wisdom for their survival, Elena and Bern retreat from the remains of civilization to a freezing, desolate landscape where they attempt to continue their lives after the end of the world. When a charismatic stranger from the village arrives seeking their aid, the women must decide whether they will use their knowledge of the past to give the society that rejected them the chance at a future.

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80 pages | 5.36" x 8.39"