Indigenous Studies

This gorgeous volume draws from the vast archives of the National Museum of the American Indian and the voices of some of the most prominent Native American scholars, writers, activists and tribal leaders. More than 300 full-color illustrations depict the artistry and culture of our hemisphere’s diverse indigenous peoples. With its insightful, firsthand prose, the book is a reminder that the ancient philosophies and folkways are just as valuable and relevant in today’s world as they were generations ago.

Neal McLeod examines the history of the nêhiyawak (Cree People) of western Canada from the massive upheavals of the 1870s and the reserve period to the vibrant cultural and political rebirth of contemporary times. Central to the text are the narratives of McLeod's family, which give first hand examples of the tenacity and resiliency of the human spirit while providing a rubric for reinterpreting the history of Indigenous people, drawing on Cree worldviews and Cree narrative structures.

In a readable style augmented with extensive use of the Cree language throughout, McLeod draws heavily on original research, the methodology of which could serve as a template for those doing similar work. While the book is based on the Cree experience of the Canadian prairies, its message and methodology are applicable to all Indigenous societies.

Neal McLeod holds a doctorate in Interdisciplinary Studies, and currently teaches Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. In addition to being a visual artist and entertainer, he has published a book of poetry, Songs to Kill a Wihtikow, and has another forthcoming entitled Gabriel's Beach. He is Cree and Swedish, and was born and raised in Saskatchewan.

This is the first in a series of readers in the First Nations languages of the prairie provinces meant for language learners and language users. The stories in this volume come from a variety of sources, all being narrated or written by fluent speakers of Cree, whether students or instructors of the Cree language or Elders. Funny Little Stories is a collection of nine stories representing the Plains Cree, Woods Cree, and Swampy Cree dialects, with a pronunciation guide and a Cree-to-English glossary.

Students and Elders come together in this volume to offer samples of three distinct genres of Cree storytelling: word play, humorous accounts of life experiences, and traditional stories about Wisahkecahk, the trickster-hero.

Each story is illustrated and is presented in both Standard Roman Orthography and syllabics, with English translation.

Educator & Series Information
Funny Little Stories is part of the First Nations Language Readers series. With a mix of traditional and new stories, each First Nations Language Reader introduces an Indigenous language and demonstrates how each language is used today. The University of Regina Press’s long-term goal is to publish all 60+ Indigenous languages of Canada.

Additional Information
110 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Narrated by Cree-speaking students, instructors, and Elders | Transcribed and Translated by Cree Linguistics Students | Edited and with a glossary and syllabics by Arok Wolvengrey

Authenticity Note: Because of the contribution of Indigenous Peoples, such as Cree-speaking Elders, to this work on Cree storytelling, it has received the Authentic Indigenous Text label.

Based on Métis artist Christi Belcourt’s painting “Medicines to Help Us,” this innovative and vibrant resource honours the centuries-old healing traditions of Métis women. With contributions from Métis Elders Rose Richardson and Olive Whitford, as well as key Michif phrases and terminology, Medicines to Help Us is the most accessible resource relating to Métis healing traditions produced to date.

Educator Information
This resource guide does not include the study prints referred to on the back cover and within the book. 

Michif Translators: Laura Burnoff and Rita Flamand

Elder Validation: Rose Richardson

Format: Book Only - English, with plant names in Michif, Nehiyawewin (Cree), and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibway)

Payepot and His People was first published serially by The Western Producer. In 1957 it was published in book form by the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society. Abel Watetch was a nephew of Chief Payepot and a veteran of World War I. As noted in the introduction to the 1957 edition, Watetch had earlier set down in "fine, clear handwriting" the previously unwritten history of his people, having "assembled many of the recollections of his kin to 'set the record right'." These writings were the basis of the story told here, supplemented by further recollections by Watetch and his friend, Chief Sitting Eagle Changing Position (Harry Ball), documented either on tape or through written correspondence.

The great Native American Novel of a battered veteran returning home to heal his mind and spirit

More than thirty-five years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.

Reviews
"Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place. I have read this book so many times that I probably have it memorized. I teach it and I learn from it and I am continually in awe of its power, beauty, rage, vision, and violence." —Sherman Alexie

Additional Information
272 pages | 5.65" x 8.40"

As a Crown Attorney working with First Nations in remote northwestern Ontario, Rupert Ross learned that he was routinely misinterpreting the behaviour of Aboriginal victims, witnesses, and offenders, both in and out of court. He discovered that he regularly drew wrong conclusions when he encountered witnesses who wouldn’t make eye contact, victims who wouldn’t testify in the presence of the accused, and parents who showed great reluctance to interfere in their children’s offending behaviour. With the assistance of Aboriginal teachers, he began to see that behind such behaviour lay a complex web of coherent cultural commandments that he had never suspected, much less understood.

As his awareness of traditional Native teachings grew, he found that the areas of miscommunication extended well beyond the courtroom, causing cross-cultural misunderstanding—and ill-informed condemnation.

Dancing with a Ghost is Ross’s attempt to give some definition to the cultural gap that bedevils the relationships and distorts the communications between Native peoples and the dominant white Canadian society—and to encourage others to begin their own respectful cross-cultural explorations. As Ross discovered, traditional perspectives have a great deal to offer modern-day Canada, not only in the context of justice but also in terms of the broader concepts of peaceful social organization and personal fulfilment.

Additional Information

THE BLOOD RESERVE (Canada's largest native reserve) is a land of wind, prairie, mountains, and rivers, a land of dramatic physical beauty. It is the setting for George Webber's stunning collection of black-and-white photographs, People of the Blood. From the spring of 1992 until the late summer of 2005, Webber journeyed to the reserve from his home in Calgary, documenting his experiences on film and with pen and paper.

People of the Blood is an intimate and compelling story of the reserve's people and stark, sweeping landscape told in black and white. In his quest to photograph and document hope and darkness in the western Canadian landscape, Webber has ceaselessly photographed the people, small communities, and the land for a quarter century. People of the Blood documents a photographic journey spanning over a decade, one that put Webber in contact with the strong people of the Blood, their spiritual practices, their hopes, their challenges, wins and losses.

With grace and compassion, Webber shows us the sweat lodge and the sun dance, the faces of hope and despair, rodeos and funerals, quiet kitchen conversations and heartbreaking devastation.

Never an interloper, Webber's quiet presence is that of a documentary photographer of the first order, which seeks to tell the stories of the people and the land in which they live. As it moves between the realms of the spiritual world and harsh reality, interspersed with the incredible beauty of the landscape, People of the Blood captures the light in the darkness, the hope that exists in the Blood people, who live in unforgiving landscapes and social circumstances. In his grainy, dark imagery, Webber continues to capture these sparks in what might seem to be barren surroundings.

In his bestselling book Dancing with a Ghost, Rupert Ross began his exploration of Aboriginal approaches to justice and the visions of life that shape them. Returning to the Teachings takes this exploration further still.

During a three-year secondment with Justice Canada, Ross travelled from the Yukon to Cape Breton Island, examining”and experiencing”the widespread Aboriginal preference for peacemaker justice. In this remarkable book, he invites us to accompany him as he moves past the pain and suffering that grip so many communities and into the exceptional promise of individual, family and community healing that traditional teachings are now restoring to Aboriginal Canada. He shares his confusion, frustrations and delights as Elders and other teachers guide him, in their unique and often puzzling ways, into ancient visions of Creation and our role with it.

Returning to the Teachings is about Aboriginal justice and much more, speaking not only to our minds, but also to our hearts and spirits. Above all, it stands as a search for the values and visions that give life its significance and that any justice system, Aboriginal or otherwise, must serve and respect.

A lyrical, epic narrative about Aboriginal knowledge and education.

we are narrators narratives voices interlocutors of our own knowings 
we can determine for ourselves what our educational needs are 
before the coming of churches residential schools prisons 
before we knew how we knew we knew

In a gesture toward traditional First Nations orality, Peter Cole blends poetic and dramatic voices with storytelling. A conversation between two tricksters, Coyote and Raven, and the colonized and the colonizers, his narrative takes the form of a canoe journey. Cole draws on traditional Aboriginal knowledge to move away from the western genres that have long contained, shaped, and determined ab/originality. Written in free verse, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is meant to be read aloud and breaks new ground by making orality the foundation of its scholarship.

Cole moves beyond the rhetoric and presumption of white academic (de/re)colonizers to aboriginal spaces recreated by aboriginal peoples. Rather than employing the traditional western practice of gathering information about exoticized other, demonized other, contained other, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is a celebration of aboriginal thought, spirituality, and practice, a sharing of lived experience as First Peoples.

Reviews

Additional Information
352 pages | 7.00" x 9.50"

Following on two previous collections— Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989) and Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (2004)—Living by Stories is the third volume of oral narratives by Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson. This third collection documents how the arrival of whites forever altered the Salish cultural landscape.

Living by Stories includes a number of classic stories set in the “mythological age” about the trickster/transformer, Coyote, and his efforts to rid the world of bad people— spatla or “monsters,” but this new volume is more important for its presentation of historical narratives set in the more recent past. As with the mythological accounts, there is much chaos and conflict in these stories, mainly due to the arrival of new quasi-monsters—“SHAmas” (Whites)—who dispossess “Indians” of their lands and rights, impose new political and legal systems, and erect roads, rail lines, mines, farms, ranches and towns on the landscape.

With permission from Harry Robinson, Wendy Wickwire began recording Robinson's oral stories in 1977. Robinson took his role as a storyteller very seriously and worried about the survival of the oral tradition and his stories. “I’m going to disappear”, he told one reporter, “and there’ll be no more telling stories.”

Review
Whenever I need to be reminded that language is magic and that stories can change the world, I go to Robinson.
- Thomas King

Additional Information
288 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Stories from Harry Robinson
Edited and compiled by Wendy Wickwire

When Will returns to Medicine River, he thinks he is simply attending his mother's funeral. He doesn't count on Harlen Bigbear and his unique brand of community planning. Harlen tries to sell Will on the idea of returning to Medicine River to open shop as the town's only Native photographer. Somehow, that's exactly what happens.

Through Will's gentle and humorous narrative, we come to know Medicine River, a small Albertan town bordering a Blackfoot reserve. And we meet its people: the basketball team; Louise Heavyman and her daughter, South Wing; Martha Oldcrow, the marriage doctor; Joe Bigbear, Harlen's world-travelling, storytelling brother; Bertha Morley, who has a short fling with a Calgary dating service; and David Plume, who went to Wounded Knee. At the centre of it all is Harlen, advising and pestering, annoying and entertaining, gossiping and benevolently interfering in the lives of his friends and neighbours.

Educator Information
Recommended Grades: 10-11

Grade 10/11 English First Peoples resource included in the unit Relationships - Families, Friendships, Communities, and the Land.

Additional Information
320 pages | 5.31" x 8.25"

First published in 1977 to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the signing of historical Treaty Seven by the First Nations of southern Alberta and the Canadian government, These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places has become a classic of Western Canadian literature.
These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places is a result of extensive research. After consulting archival records and the Stoney oral tradition, Chief John Snow describes with clarity, depth, and understanding the Native perspective on life since the birth of Treaty Seven in 1877.

With compassion and detail, Snow describes the stable state of First Nations prior to contact with Europeans and the destruction wrought by the whisky traders. He records the period of treaty-signing and the failure on the government’s part to hold to treaty agreements. And most importantly, Snow explains his people’s feeling of dispossession that continues to threaten the very survival of Stoney beliefs, values, and lifestyle.

In his wisdom, however, Snow is also optimistic: about the hope that was born after the introduction of self-government in 1969, following the granting of citizenship to Indian people across the nation; and about his people’s belief in biculturalism as they seek a path that allows them to thrive and benefit from both Native and non-Native cultures, rather than slip between the two.

In Tsawalk, hereditary chief Umeek develops a theory of "Tsawalk," meaning "one," that views the nature of existence as an integrated and orderly whole, and thereby recognizes the intrinsic relationship between the physical and spiritual. Umeek demonstrates how Tsawalk provides a viable theoretical alternative that both complements and expands the view of reality presented by Western science. Tsawalk, he argues, allows both Western and indigenous views to be combined in order to advance our understanding of the universe. In addition, he shows how various fundamental aspects of Nuu-chah-nulth society are based upon Tsawalk, and what implications it has today for both Native and non-Native peoples.

A valuable contribution to Indigenous studies, anthropology, philosophy, and the study of science, Tsawalk offers a revitalizing and thoughtful complement to Western scientific worldviews.

Reviews
"It provides a holistic, spiritual perspective, in contrast to the objective, Cartesian perspective of western science. Atleo argues, successfully I believe, that this spiritual view of nature is in many ways superior to the western disenchantment of the world. This book is one that will be valuable for scholars of the Northwest Coast, traditional ecological knowledge, and indigenous intellectuals. As well, it will probably fine a popular audience among those interested in First Nations, environmentalism, and, of course, New Age philosophy." — Michael Harkin, University of Wyoming, Journal of Anthropological Research, Spring 2005

Additional Information
168 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Since Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada was first published in 1988, its two editions have sold some 30,000 copies, and it is widely used as the basic text in colleges and universities across the country.

Now retitled, this comprehensive book still provides an overview of all the Aboriginal groups in Canada. Incorporating the latest research in anthropology, archaeology, ethnography and history, this new edition describes traditional ways of life, traces cultural changes that resulted from contacts with the Europeans, and examines the controversial issues of land claims and self-government that now affect Aboriginal societies.

Most importantly, this generously illustrated edition incorporates a Nativist perspective in the analysis of Aboriginal cultures.

Additional Information
400 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback