Indigenous Peoples
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:
Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world.
Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry—the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self—turns the poem to our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-, leads inevitably to heartbreak.
As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen—how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.
Reviews
“Such longing! ‘These days I wrestle no angels. I wrestle / with words. And no one is saved.’ writes Randy Lundy. In Something for the Dark, he presents tâpwêwina—truths drawn from the hand dealt and the life lived. ‘Nothing is hidden,’ he suggests, if we take the time to observe from a distance and wait in silence.” — Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion
Additional Information
96 pages | 5.51" x 8.50" | 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.
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:
Inuktitut Alianaittuq! Inuktitut is Awesome! is a beginner's guide to learning Inuktitut.
This book makes your learning journey intuitive by teaching Inuktitut language patterns. Through lessons that build pattern recognition and language intuition, you will internalize general Inuktitut language patterns that make Inuktitut conversations faster and easier to learn. This book includes charts, exercises, and other material that will help you on your way to learning Inuktitut.
Educator Information
The publisher recommends this work for young adults and adults.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
4 INTRODUCTION
6 INCLUDED LEARNING MATERIALS
8 LESSON 1 // PRONUNCIATION
16 LESSON 2 // HOW TO MAKE A WORD
26 LESSON 3 // HOW TO MAKE A PHRASE: -MIK/-NIK
36 LESSON 4 // HOW TO SPEAK IN THE PAST TENSE
46 LESSON 5 // SPEAKING IN THE FUTURE TENSE
56 LESSON 6 // BEING, HAVING, AND GETTING SOMETHING
68 LESSON 7 // WANTING TO, BEING ABLE TO, NEEDING TO
78 LESSON 8 // GOING PLACES
86 ANSWERS TO PUZZLE PRACTISE
88 APPENDIX 1 // LIST OF COMMON WORDS AND PHRASES
90 APPENDIX 2 // LIST OF COMMON VERBS AND NOUNS
96 BEGINNER'S INUKTITUT CHEAT SHEET
100 WORD ELEMENT FLASH CARDS
Addiitonal Information
120 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | 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:
A young man is haunted by a mythological specter bent on stealing everything he loves in this unsettling horror from the author of Indian Burial Ground and Sisters of the Lost Nation.
For fear of summoning evil spirits, Native superstition says you should never, ever whistle at night.
Henry Hotard was on the verge of fame, gaining a following and traction with his eerie ghost-hunting videos. Then his dreams came to a screeching halt. Now, he's learning to navigate a new life in a wheelchair, back on the reservation where he grew up, relying on his grandparents’ care while he recovers.
And he’s being haunted.
His girlfriend, Jade, insists he just needs time to adjust to his new reality as a quadriplegic, that it’s his traumatized mind playing tricks on him, but Henry knows better. As the specter haunting him creeps closer each night, Henry battles to find a way to endure, to rid himself of the horror stalking him. Worried that this dread might plague him forever, he realizes the only way to exile his phantom is by confronting his troubled past and going back to the events that led to his injury.
It all started when he whistled at night....
Additional Information
368 pages | 6.26" x 9.27" | Hardcover
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:
Thrust into the foster care system from an early age, Apple moves from house to house on Prince Edward Island without finding a home until she's a teenager and taken in by a couple who never managed to have children themselves. When she falls pregnant, her foster parents are keen to raise the baby with Apple still in the house—to live as a family.
That opportunity is torn from Apple by members of the Catholic Church along with social workers and government officials. Their vicious practices take the babies of unwed mothers and give them to wealthy families in exchange for large "donations" to the church. Apple's beloved baby ends up with a rich couple in the U.S., and is lost to her.
The Baby Train traces her life in the aftermath of that loss, raising subsequent children, creating deep bonds of friendship with other women struggling against society's rigid norms, and carrying underneath it all an unending love for her firstborn child.
We also follow her baby's path, and watch his affluent, neglected childhood and then adulthood unfold. He never knows that his birth mother still yearns for him, still lights him birthday candles every year.
The shameful legacy of forced and coerced adoption in Eastern Canada is brought to life in this sweeping novel.
Educator Information
PEI's birth alert practice allowed hospitals or social workers to flag expectant parents whom they felt might put their newborns at risk. Generally, this practice targeted Indigenous and unwed women.
Additional Information
224 pages | 5.75" x 8.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Ukraine, 1944
As the world around her is ripped apart by war and infiltrated by Nazi soldiers, Savka Ivanets works as a medic for the Ukrainian resistance, stitching wounds by day, stealing supplies by night, and dodging firefights between the SS and Soviet partisans. When her husband, Marko, a reluctant member of the Waffen-SS, forces her to deliver a coded message to an underground bunker, she’s terrified. But when her mission doesn’t go as planned, and her son, Taras, is kidnapped by the KGB, Savka fears she’ll never see him again.
Salt Spring Island, 1972
For Jeanie Esterhazy, the world, with its whispers and curious eyes, is too much to bear. Ever since the horrific accident that left her badly scarred, Jeanie, unable to remember anything about that awful day, has pulled away from society, utterly isolated.
Then a mysterious stranger appears at her house, and Jeanie suddenly begins having flashbacks about the night of her wedding—flashbacks that hold answers to the questions she’s had for years; flashbacks that make her realize the world around her is not as it seems.
Weaving together Savka and Jeanie's stories with artful precision, The Last Secret is at once luminous and transporting, a brilliant and impossible-to-forget story of love, hope, and the breathtaking resilience of women.
Reviews
"An extraordinarily powerful novel cinematically weaving one gripping layer into the next. From the frozen hellscape of Eastern Europe during WW2 to the lush green of Salt Spring Island in Canada, The Last Secret delivers a thrilling story of survival and love that held me spellbound throughout. Brava, Ms. Caron! An easy five stars." —Genevieve Graham, #1 bestselling author of The Forgotten Home Child
"How delicious to discover sleepy Salt Spring Island, BC, caught up in the icy tendrils of a Cold War thriller. Sweeping from hardship to heartache, The Last Secret is a timely reminder of the improbable bonds forged, broken and recast on World War II’s Eastern Front. Here, revenge is served tundra-cold, but with a dash of sea salt and fire." —Shelley Wood
Additional Information
416 pages | 6.09" x 8.91" | 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 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:
The Education of Augie Merasty offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school.
Now a retired fisherman and trapper, Joseph A. (Augie) Merasty was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of "aggressive assimiliation."As Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children in the ways of white society. They were taught to be ashamed of their native heritage and, as he experienced, often suffered physical and sexual abuse.Even as he looks back on this painful part of his childhood, Merasty’s generous and authentic voice shines through.
Awards
- 2016 Burt Award Second Place Winner
Reviews
"At 86, Augie Merasty has been a lot of things: Father. Son. Outdoorsman. Homeless. But now he is a first-time author, and the voice of a generation of residential-school survivors.... The Education of Augie Merasty is the tale of a man not only haunted by his past, but haunted by the fundamental need to tell his own story... one of the most important titles to be published this spring." —Globe and Mail
"[Augie] wrote his memoir to show people the unbelievable atrocities suffered by so many Indigenous people and in the hope that others would come forward to tell their stories of what happened in the residential schools." —Eagle Feather News
"This book is so much bigger than its small size. It is a path to healing. We cannot change history, but we can acknowledge it, learn about it, and remember it." —Prairies North
"The Education of Augie Merasty might be a small book, but it carries a punch to it that all Canadian need to read and understand." —Rabble
"A truly extraordinary memoir by a truly extraordinary man." —Midwest Book Review
"Carpenter's introduction and afterword... allow us to come to better understand Augie's 'sometimes chaotic, sometimes heroic aftermath of his life,' as Carpenter describes his last decade. Where Augie focuses on physical scars, Carpenter's experiences with Augie illustrate the long-term impacts on his residential school experience. And with The Education of Augie Merasty, he helps Merasty--who could be any number of individuals we each pass on the street--find his voice." —Active History
"Unsettling and profound, and good." —Blacklock's Reporter
"In this book I have seen horror through eyes of a child." —James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains
"A story in which our entire nation has an obscure and dark complicity." —David Carpenter, co-author of The Education of Augie Merasty and author of The Gold and other books
Educator Information
The Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools list recommends this resource for Grades 9-12 English Language Arts and Social Studies.
Caution: Mature subject matter and descriptions of discrimination, sexual/physical violence, and substance abuse.
Additional Information
105 pages | 4.25" x 6.53" | Hardcover
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
Synopsis:
Daring and vulnerable, this is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt.
In The Idea of An Entire Life, Belcourt delivers an intimate examination of twenty-first-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. Through lyric verse, sonnets, fieldnotes, and fragments, the poems, sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes slyly humorous, are always finely crafted, putting to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of grief and awe.
Reviews
"To read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of An Enitre Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes, but also beyond them: horizon as 'line break,' infrastructure as 'wound,' 'an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.' These poems are achingly beautiful. Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real-time, 'in order to repair it.' How this new form might arrive, 'miraculously' but also diligently, an act of recuperation and courage that’s on-going, 'meandering' but also (always) 'incomplete,' becomes what happens when we read."—Bhanu Kapil
Additional Information
96 pages | 5.00" x 7.50" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Amaruq: The Wolf was one of the first full-length novels ever written in Inuktitut. Out of print for over twenty years, this groundbreaking novel has been re-transcribed, translated, and meticulously edited to produce a commercially available bilingual version for the first time.
Written by Inuit Elder Uvinik Qamaniq, this sweeping novel oscillates between time and place. Alternating between a modern Arctic community, where a teen lives with his family and navigates the challenges of family life, to the world of Inuit stories woven by the teen's grandfather, who tells the boy of the epic coming-of-age journey of Amaruq, a young shaman, this book highlights the power of stories to teach and inform everyday experiences. With a cover illustrated by renowned Inuit artist Germaine Arnattaujuq
Educator Information
Bilingual: English and Inuktitut.
Additional Information
208 pages | 7.00" x 9.00" | 11 b&w line drawings | Paperback
Synopsis:
Join the dance of North American Indigenous interpretations of Christian Scripture
In Reading the Bible on Turtle Island, Indigenous scholars Chris Hoklotubbe and Danny Zacharias explore what it means to read the Bible from the lens of Indigenous peoples in North America. Exploring the intersection of Scripture, Cultural Traditions, Hearts and Minds, and Creation, they affirm Creator's presence with Indigenous people since the beginning. By recovering these rich histories, this book offers a fresh reading of Scripture that celebrates the assets, blessings, and insights of Indigenous interpretation.
Indigenous culture has often been dismissed or deemed problematic within Western Christian circles, and historical practices have often communicated that Indigenous worldviews have little to offer the church or its understanding of Scripture. Hoklotubbe and Zacharias challenge this perspective, reasserting the dignity of these cultures that were condemned through colonial practices and showing how Indigenous interpretations bring invaluable insights to all of God’s people.
In Reading the Bible on Turtle Island, Hoklotubbe and Zacharias
- Affirm the dignity and value of Indigenous cultures and their contributions to hermeneutics.
- Explore the intersection of the Bible with Indigenous traditions.
- Delve deeply into the stories of Scripture alongside the complex histories of Indigenous communities in North America.
- Celebrate the unique blessings and insights of Indigenous interpretation.
- Offer a fresh, transformative reading of the Bible that speaks to all of God’s people.
Reading the Bible on Turtle Island is a vital resource for scholars who are interested in the intersection of biblical studies and social location, who are seeking to explore Scripture through an Indigenous hermeneutic, or who desire to learn more about the contributions of Indigenous worldviews to Biblical interpretation.
Reviews
"We have been waiting for a book like this—one that presents indigenous biblical interpretation. T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and Daniel Zacharias call their approach to biblical interpretation Turtle Island Hermeneutics. I call it groundbreaking, urgent, and necessary at this present moment. Now students studying the Bible in seminary or college will have a text that will help them do what few books on interpretation can do—take the dirt, the water, the air, our animal kin, and of course, indigenous thought and life seriously. We are now in a new day for biblical scholarship." — William James Jennings, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University Divinity School
"Some years ago, I was told that Indigenous contributions to biblical scholarship would, at best, be superficial. The real work, after all, had already been done by European scholars. Reading the Bible on Turtle Island justifies my contention that this was not so. T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and Daniel Zacharias unpack Indigenous understandings of the biblical narrative for us in profoundly earthy and culturally complex ways. For the first time ever, many Indigenous people have read themselves into the biblical story and, together with the authors, have answered Lamin Sanneh's 2003 question, 'Whose religion is Christianity?' 'It's ours,' they have said!"— Terry LeBlanc, director emeritus and elder in residence of NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community
"Reading the Bible on Turtle Island introduces us to the riches of Indigenous interpretation of Scripture and invites us to gather around the council fire and learn from the ongoing discussion Indigenous disciples of Jesus are having about how to 'seek Creator in the Good Medicine Way of Jesus.' T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias not only create a dialogue between biblical scholarship, Indigenous history and wisdom, and ongoing debates about how to relate the gospel to culture, they do so in a way that is simultaneously accessible, deeply moving, gracious enough to create room for disagreement and ongoing debate, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Yet the book also offers a challenge, that the path to the healing of the nations and the Western church includes learning from Indigenous disciples who bear witness to the good word of Creator-made-flesh."— Michael J. Rhodes, author of Just Discipleship and lecturer in Old Testament at Carey Baptist College
"How we read ourselves into the Bible shapes the theology we develop. This book offers all Christians another reading, a reading that takes our stories seriously and provides an opportunity to develop an Indigenous theology rather than simply reconciling ourselves to a theology rooted in European priorities." — Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future and Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds
Additional Information
240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Bestselling author of Birdie, Tracey Lindberg, and renowned artist George Littlechild join together in a stunning collaboration of story and art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience.
In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond.
Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of “all my relations.”
Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly.
Additional Information
224 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | 20 full-color photos of paintings | Hardcover
Synopsis:
A dynamic framework for the development of an Indigenous strategy that shares the engaging story of ii’taa’poh’to’p at the University of Calgary.
The University of Calgary’s Indigenous strategy, ii’taa’poh’to’p, lays the path for a journey of transformation and renewal for truth and reconciliation through ways of knowing, doing, connecting, and being.
The Story of ii’ taa’poh’to’p is the story of the creation of the University of Calgary’s Indigenous Strategy. The result of an enlightening process of relationship building and deep learning and listening, it required the intentional and careful creation of parallel paths for institutional and Indigenous frameworks to create the strategy. Authentic conversations occurred in the ethical space between the parallel paths, allowing for increased understanding of differences and similarities between cultures.
This book captures powerful and emotional stories that emphasize the importance of reconciliation and decolonizing organizations. It demonstrates that trusting relationships can be developed between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relatives and lays out a dynamic framework and approach for the development of an Indigenous strategy.
The Grandparents of ii’ taa’poh’to’p welcome readers to learn from their experience. They share insightful lessons about the importance of being relational; honouring ways of knowing and doing from other cultures; developing generational strategies that persist over time; understanding the impacts of fear; and making assumptions about people’s prior knowledge. They discuss how relationship building through deep listening across cultures is essential to the development of an Indigenous strategy. The Story of ii’ taa’poh’to’p is essential reading for all those interested in the development of an Indigenous strategy in the pursuit of truth and reconciliation.
Educator Information
About the Authors: The Grandparents of ii ’taa’poh’to’p are a collective of leaders from diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences who guided the development of the Indigenous strategy at the University of Calgary.
Additional Information
176 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
you are only here
to learn from those who came before
and make space
for those who come after
Procession: a line of people moving in the same direction; a formal ceremony or celebration, as in a wedding, a funeral, a religious parade. Bestseller and Governor General's Award-winner katherena vermette's third collection presents a series of poems reaching into what it means to be at once a descendant and a future ancestor, exploring the connections we have with one another and ourselves, amongst friends, and within families and Nations.
In frank, heartfelt poems that move through body sovereignty and ancestral dreams, and from '80s childhood nostalgia to welcoming one's own babies, vermette unreels the story of a child, a parent, and soon, an elder, living in a prairie place that has always existed, though looks much different to her now. This book is about being one small part of a large genealogy. A lineage is a line, and the procession, whether in celebration or in mourning, is ongoing. procession delves into what it means to make poems and to be an artist, to be born into a body, to carry it all, and, if you're very lucky, age.
be a good ancestor
be a good kid
Reviews
"The poems in procession are remarkable: spare but generous, both grounded and skillfully drawn. With her signature musicality, insight, and wit, vermette reminds us that we - like our bodies and the earth, like our histories and our shared, threatened future - are essentially, impossibly intertwined." -Chimwemwe Undi, Governor General's Award-winning author of Scientific Marvel?
Additional Information
112 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A brilliant exploration of the body as a site of settler colonial impact, centring embodied wholeness as a pathway to our collective liberation.
This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism-through the body itself. Anishinaabeg visual artist Quill Christie-Peters takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond. But once we enter the world, our bodies are shaped and scarred by colonial forces.
In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father's survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabeg lens, the body is more than just flesh-it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.
Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility as pathways to wholeness, Quill explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness-despite pain and displacement-is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.
Additional Information
288 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Discover the rich tapestry of human emotion and divine wisdom with the First Nations Version Psalms and Proverbs. The latest volume from the critically acclaimed First Nations Version translation brings the ancient Sacred Songs and Wise Sayings of the Hebrew Scriptures to life through the vibrant, poetic imagery of Native American oral storytelling.
Discover Psalms and Proverbs Reimagined Through the Poetic Language of Native Storytellers:
Father Sky is telling us the story of the shining-greatness of the One Above Us All. The starry tent above us shows the beauty that Creator’s hands have made. Day after day, the story is told, and night after night, their wisdom fills the sky. Even though the skies above have no spoken words, all creation has heard their message.Psalm 19:1-3
From the strength of your heart, put all your trust in Grandfather, and do not hold yourself up with weak human thinking. As you walk the road of life, make every step a prayer. Grandfather will then make your eyes straight and your paths safe.Proverbs 3:5-6
Whether you're seeking solace, strength, or spiritual insight, the First Nations Version Psalms and Proverbs will guide you with its profound expressions of praise and trust in the Creator. Step into the harmonious blend of ancient wisdom and indigenous tradition to discover a spiritual experience that speaks directly to your heart.
Reviews
"The First Nations Version is far and away the most creative Bible translation I've ever read. It's an exciting alternative to the boring, stodgy renderings that have dominated the English market for centuries. All readers can open the FNV and experience old passages in new lights. Talk about it with your kids. Study it in churches and classrooms. Use it in worship. The Bible becomes alive!"— Matthew Schlimm, professor of Old Testament at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary
Additional Information
192 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A competing title to the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass - a fascinating insight into the Amazon rainforest from scientist and peruivan-born explorer Dr Rosa Espinoza.
Before you step into the jungle, there are a few things you need to know...
Join scientist Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinoza as she uncovers one of the most unexplored regions on the planet.
Dr Rosa is no stranger to the Amazon. Growing up with the rainforest as her back garden, she learnt the lessons of the rainforest from her grandmother, a native healer in natural medicine. She went on to pursue a classical education in science, gaining a PhD in the US, but has always been pulled back to the heart of the Amazon. As a leading biologist in her field, Rosa continues to explore the region through a unique blend of scientific inquiry and ancient insight.
In this debut, you'll learn about Dr Rosa's journeys in the Amazon: her treacherous encounters with a boiling river, her conservation work with stingless bees, her experience of taking ayahuasca as a natural psychedelic - and all the amazing biodiversity of the rainforest.
At the heart of Rosa's expedition is her passion to combine science with the indigenous knowledge of the Amazon. She shares her experience of learning from the indigenous communities that she visits, and shows what they have to teach us - stretching beyond the realm scientific knowledge. Here Rosa learns the most important lessons in how to reconnect to the natural world - and, in turn, will teach us to do the same.
In this book, Rosa celebrates the richness of Amazonian culture, the wonders of biodiversity, and the enduring spiritual connections between humanity and the natural world.
Additional Information
336 pages | 6.45" x 9.65" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Indigenous Spiritualities and Religious Freedom investigates the complex relationship between Indigenous legal orders and Canadian law, emphasizing the richness of Indigenous spiritual practices alongside their historical and ongoing suppression by the Canadian state. It critically examines the role and limitations of the Canadian Charter of Right’s section 2(a), which guarantees freedom of religion, in protecting the spiritual lives of Indigenous communities.
The book highlights the holistic nature of Indigenous spiritual beliefs, which view the spiritual as immanent and closely tied to land and specific locations. The book reveals how, by contrast, the Anglo-American conception of religious freedom often separates spiritual and religious matters from civic and political concerns, and so fails to provide meaningful protection for Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices.
Many essays in this collection propose alternative approaches to the relationship between Canadian law and Indigenous legal orders, particularly regarding Indigenous spiritual practices. Ultimately, Indigenous Spiritualities and Religious Freedom reveals the challenges – and perhaps the futility – of seeking significant protection for Indigenous spiritual practices within the existing framework of religious freedom.
Educator Information
Chapters
Introduction
Jeffery Hewitt, Beverly Jacobs, and Richard Moon
1. Water Is Life: Haudenosaunee Responses to Climate Change and Water Security - Dawn Martin-Hill
2. The Gaya’shra’gowa’ in the Twenty-First Century: Traditional Indigenous Governance and the Problem of Canadian Settler Colonial Law - Theresa McCarthy
3. An Imaginary for Our Sisters: Spirits and Indigenous Law - Val Napoleon
4. Indigenous Religious Rights: Reconciling Religious Views and Decolonizing Section 2(a) of the Charter - Natasha Bakht
5. Is State Neutrality Bad for Indigenous Religious Freedom? - Benjamin L. Berger
6. Ktunaxa and the Shape of Religious Freedom - Richard Moon
7. Beyond Experience? Objectivity, Indigeneity, and Freedom of Religion - John Borrows
8. Ancestors in the Land: Indigenous Burial Sites and Religious Freedom - Senwung Luk and Howard Kislowicz
9. Posing the Land Question: An Analysis of Servatius v. Alberni School District No. 70 - Ardith Walkem
10. The Perils of Rights and Reconciliation for Indigenous Peoples - Karen Drake
Contributors
Additional Information
240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
The stories we tell ourselves about our lives matter. How we make sense of the past affects how we make sense of the present— it can mean the difference between continuing patterns of harm and being the one to break the cycle. Scholar and author Michael Gauthier knows this struggle intimately. As a young Indigenous man grappling with the lasting effects of colonialism and intergenerational trauma, Michael turned to addiction to ease the pain and found himself in the prison system. In the intervening years, Michael has worked to understand how Indigenous people can find empowerment through the act of restorying their own lives. Gauthier draws on his PhD research in which he carried out Restorying circles using the Medicine Wheel as a guide to help formerly incarcerated Indigenous men map a new future by looking to their past. Now in Restorying Your Story, Gauthier invites readers to explore the universal application of restorying, and how it can be a powerful tool for all of us to build a good life.
Additional Information
150 pages | 8.50" x 5.50" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Utilizing intricately blended visual and written imagery, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares takes the reader on an Arctic journey interpreted through the mythological and contemporary world of an Inuit artist and author. Containing twenty short stories with accompanying pen ink drawings, it is the first publication to exclusively feature the writing and artwork of Alootook Ipellie. At the time of its original publication in 1993, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares was one of the few books to be written by an Inuk in Canada, and became a landmark in the emerging discipline of Inuit literature.
Additional Information
160 pages | 8.75" x 9.25" | Paperback
Synopsis:
In this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to inhabit?
Patty Krawec doesn’t want to be a “Good Indian.” When a friend asked what books could help them understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec gave them a list. This list then exploded into a book club, then into a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then, ultimately, into this book.
Drawing on conversations with readers and authors, Bad Indians Book Club delves into writing about history, science, and gender, and into memoirs and fiction, all by “Bad Indians” and those like them, whose refusal of the dominant narrative of the wemitigoozhiwag (European settlers) opens up new possibilities for identity and existence.
Introducing each chapter with flash fiction about a shapeshifting Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where stories of and by marginalized writers help us imagine a thousand worlds waiting to be born.
Reviews
“Bad Indians Book Club is a compendium of worlds. From a lifetime of reading, there emerges a marriage of tapestry and map, a vision of the literary canon not as some secret handshake of the correctly educated but as a living, growing organism. . . There’s a dangerousness to a book like this. It’s not enough to define the Good Indian, the Grateful Immigrant, the Untroublesome Minority. Nor is it enough to simply reject these designations. One must interrogate how they came to hold so much power, how they offer the willing participant so many crumbs of reward from colonialism’s table.”— Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, September 2025
“Bad Indians Book Club is like a kind and protective auntie guiding you through a sometimes hostile world with sheer wisdom and wit. It’s a resounding rallying cry for our stories and our peoples. There’s no other book club I’d want to be in!”— Waubgeshig Rice, author of Moon of the Turning Leaves, September 2025
“This genre-crossing, shape-shifting, imagination-expanding book is for all who love to, and also need to, read. We tell stories to live, and this enlivening book reflects on all kinds of stories, each page suffused with Patty Krawec’s unmistakable voice and generous, timeless wisdom.”— Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, September 2025
“I didn’t want the Bad Indians Book Club to end. I read it at the perfect time, when snow was on the ground, in a period of rest and renewal. Patty Krawec made me wonder and made me ponder. Her book is a call to action to be curious, vigilant, to listen to and receive the inner strength of the land, to create and recreate community, to agitate, to investigate, to take story into ourselves and to hold the teachings sacred. As she guides us, throughout the book she tells us a new, sustaining, serial story about Kwe, Deer Woman. Such a gift. There is so much goodness in The Bad Indians Book Club!”— Shelagh Rogers, Shelagh Rogers, Truth and Reconciliaton Commission Honorary Witness, recovering broadcast journalist, September 2025
“Bad Indians Book Club is full of good medicine — challenging us to ask questions and bringing us home to ourselves. As Patty Krawec guides us into the deep wisdom wells of many people who journey in kinship, we consider how to hold the curiosity of care and stories, and what it means to imagine and create a future that integrates all our stories into a web of healing. Please buy this book, and celebrate the power of story in a weary yet flourishing world.”— Kaitlin B. Curtice, author of Living Resistance, September 2025
“In Bad Indians Book Club, Patty Krawec provides critical space for the ne'er-do-wells, disrupters, red sheep, box-busters, tricksters, and all us rowdy relatives defying expectations. Indigenous people have always been proverbial thorns in the sides of colonizers, and this piercing book does an incredible job of letting the air out of today’s imperialist narratives.”— Taté Walker, Two Spirit Lakota storyteller and community-builder, September 2025
“With Bad Indians Book Club, Patty Krawec gifts us a compelling investigation into the power of not just reading books but also doing so in community. Krawec makes the case for building your circle through reading, as a way of being in better relations with all our kin, including the land. Thinking deeply alongside other books, Bad Indians Book Club is a needed guide at a moment when books are under attack. Books are not just written culture, they are also oral culture, and Krawec illuminates this beautifully.”— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Disordered Cosmo, September 2025
Additional Information
232 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
An essential and easy-to-read guide to treaties, Indigenous sovereignty, and land for all Canadians
Treaties cover much of Canada. Some were established thousands of years ago, with land and animals, and others date back to the time when Europeans first arrived in North America. These agreements make it possible for all of us to live, work, play, and profit on these lands. Additionally, treaties have profoundly shaped the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In Talk Treaty to Me, Crystal Gail Fraser and Sara Komarnisky untangle the complexities of treaties and set a path forward for greater understanding of all our roles, rights, and responsibilities. In this accessible, clear, and concise book, they discuss:
· Treaties among and between Indigenous Peoples
· The history of treaty-making between Indigenous Peoples and Britain, then Canada, from the very beginning to the present day
· Concepts like Métis scrip, modern land claims, Indigenous sovereignty, and unceded territory
· The (dis)honouring of treaties and the role of Canadian settler colonialism
· How the creation of Canadian borders interrupts Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood
· Important insights from gendered and queer perspectives on treaty and land
· The politics of land acknowledgements
· Reconciliation and Land Back movements
And more.
With a quick-reference timeline, maps, and black-and-white photographs throughout, Talk Treaty to Me concludes with a call to action and specific, tangible steps that all of us can take every day to support reconciliation.
Additional Information
256 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | 40 b&w photos, spot illustrations & maps | Paperback
Synopsis:
For thousands of years, Inuit practiced the traditional art of tattooing. Created the ancient way, with bone needles and caribou sinew soaked in seal oil, sod, or soot, these tattoos were an important tradition for many Inuit women, symbols etched on their skin that connected them to their families and communities. But with the rise of missionaries and residential schools in the North, the tradition of tattooing was almost lost. In 2005, when Angela Hovak Johnston heard that the last Inuk woman tattooed in the old way had died, she set out to tattoo herself in tribute to this ancient custom and learn how to tattoo others. What was at first a personal quest became a project to bring the art of traditional tattooing back to Inuit women across Nunavut, starting with Johnston’s home community of Kugluktuk. Collected in this beautiful book are moving photos and stories from more than two dozen women who participated in Johnston’s project. Together, these women have united to bring to life an ancient tradition, reawakening their ancestors’ lines and sharing this knowledge with future generations.
Awards
- 2018 NorthWords Book Prize Winner
Reviews
"This gorgeous photographic essay on the Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project is a deeply personal and affirming work about learning and preserving traditions-and reclaiming what residential schools tried to destroy."-School Library Journal
Additional Information
72 pages | 10.00" x 10.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
In ᑭᐢᑭᓱᒥᑐᐠ kiskisomitok: ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐤ to remind each and one other, nêhîyaw educator ᑳᐯᓵᑳᐢᑌᐠ reuben quinn uses the spirit marker writing system as a foundation for teaching ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐁᐧᐃᐧᐣ nêhîyawewin. The spirit marker writing system holds forty-four spirit markers and fourteen minor spirit markers. Some people call that system the star chart. Each spirit marker holds a law. These laws are meant to guide us in ways that support us in life. They are meant to guide us in ways of living well with the elements: fire, land, water, and air. The spirit markers remind us that these elements form the foundations of all relationships on earth.
Educator Information
In ᑭᐢᑭᓱᒥᑐᐠ kiskisomitok: ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐤ, reuben quinn uses the spirit marker writing system as a foundation for teaching ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐁᐧᐃᐧᐣ nêhîyawewin.
Additional Information
96 pages | 5.51" 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
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:
Explore Native American culture and learn Hand Talk, also known as Plains Indian Sign Language, Plains Sign Talk, and First Nation Sign Language.
In Talking with Hands, professional Native American dancer, storyteller, and educator Mike Pahsetopah reveals the beauty of Plains Indian Sign Language, which was once used as a common language between the Indigenous peoples of the region now generally known as the Great Plains of North America. The language was used for trade, but also for storytelling and by the Deaf community, making it a very common and useful tool in society. Today, only a few native speakers remain.
This beautifully designed book makes practicing Plains Indian Sign Language easy and engaging. Learn the proper positions and motions of this now-rare language with photos and descriptions throughout the pages. Follow along with diagrams to perfect your abilities.
Learn how to use your hands to convey the meanings of over 200 common words. In this detailed guide, you will learn to sign words like:
- Hungry
- Camp
- Evening
- Angry
- Fire
- Owl
- Together
- Brave
- And more
Honor and carry on the culture of the Plains peoples by learning the sign language they shared.
Additional Information
168 pages | 8.30" x 10.35" | 100+ color photos | Paperback
Synopsis:
Mary Siisip Geniusz has spent more than thirty years working with, living with, and using the Anishinaabe teachings, recipes, and botanical information she shares in Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask. Geniusz gained much of the knowledge she writes about from her years as an oshkaabewis, a traditionally trained apprentice, and as friend to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe medicine woman from the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and a scholar, teacher, and practitioner in the field of native ethnobotany. Keewaydinoquay published little in her lifetime, yet Geniusz has carried on her legacy by making this body of knowledge accessible to a broader audience.
Geniusz teaches the ways she was taught—through stories. Sharing the traditional stories she learned at Keewaydinoquay’s side as well as stories from other American Indian traditions and her own experiences, Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history. Stories such as “Naanabozho and the Squeaky-Voice Plant” place the plants in cultural context and illustrate the belief in plants as cognizant beings. Covering a wide range of plants, from conifers to cattails to medicinal uses of yarrow, mullein, and dandelion, she explains how we can work with those beings to create food, simple medicines, and practical botanical tools.
Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask makes this botanical information useful to native and nonnative healers and educators and places it in the context of the Anishinaabe culture that developed the knowledge and practice.
Additional Information
344 pages | 7.00" x 10.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Named after the Respecting Aboriginal Values and Environmental Needs (RAVEN) nonprofit organization, The RAVEN Essays is an anthology that celebrates a decade of prize-winning student essays. Since 2012, RAVEN has awarded an annual essay prize to honour students who champion the vital importance of Indigenous rights and self-determination, both in Canada and globally. The essays featured in this collection highlight exceptional student work while reflecting on the evolving relationship between Indigenous politics and academia. From issues like fishing rights and the Trans Mountain Pipeline to challenges of sexism and conservation policy, these essays capture a transformative period in Indigenous struggles, offering insights that resonate far beyond the Canadian settler state.
The anthology also includes contributions from prominent scholars such as Glen Coulthard, Dara Culhane, Michael Fabris, Sarah Hunt, and Heather Dorries. Five complementary essays explore various aspects of structural change, institutional constraints, and broader commitments to Indigenous knowledge within university settings. Aimed at readers in Indigenous law, environmental studies, anthropology, and geography, The RAVEN Essays is a book created by students for students, and by academics for the academy.
Together, the contributors reflect on the powerful formation and enactment of Indigenous law, environmental stewardship, place-based knowledge, pedagogy, and literacy – both within the academy and in the broader community, across land, water, and culture.
This collection celebrates emerging scholars in Indigenous studies, featuring student essays that explore Indigenous justice, ethics, and environmental justice, while highlighting a decade of collaboration with RAVEN, a legal defence organization.
Educator Information
Chapters
Educator Information
306 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 11 Illustrations | Paperback
Synopsis:
From ground zero of this country's most important project: reconciliation
Niigaan Sinclair has been called provocative, revolutionary, and one of this country's most influential thinkers on the issues impacting Indigenous cultures, communities, and reconciliation in Canada. In his debut collection of stories, observations, and thoughts about Winnipeg, the place he calls "ground zero" of Canada's future, read about the complex history and contributions of this place alongside the radical solutions to injustice and violence found here, presenting solutions for a country that has forgotten principles of treaty and inclusivity. It is here, in the place where Canada began—where the land, water, people, and animals meet— that a path "from the centre" is happening for all to see.
At a crucial and fragile moment in Canada's long history with Indigenous peoples, one of our most essential writers begins at the centre, capturing a web spanning centuries of community, art, and resistance.
Based on years' worth of columns, Niigaan Sinclair delivers a defining essay collection on the resilience of Indigenous peoples. Here, we meet the creators, leaders, and everyday people preserving the beauty of their heritage one day at a time. But we also meet the ugliest side of colonialism, the Indian Act, and the communities who suffer most from its atrocities.
Sinclair uses the story of Winnipeg to illuminate the reality of Indigenous life all over what is called Canada. This is a book that demands change and celebrates those fighting for it, that reminds us of what must be reconciled and holds accountable those who must do the work. It's a book that reminds us of the power that comes from loving a place, even as that place is violently taken away from you, and the magic of fighting your way back to it.
Awards
- Winner of the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.
Additional Information
384 pages | 5.14" x 7.92" | b&w photos throughout | Paperback
Synopsis:
A new, fully restored edition of the essential Canadian classic.
An unflinchingly honest memoir of her experience as a Métis woman in Canada, Maria Campbell's Halfbreed depicts the realities that she endured and, above all, overcame. Maria was born in Northern Saskatchewan, her father the grandson of a Scottish businessman and Métis woman--a niece of Gabriel Dumont whose family fought alongside Riel and Dumont in the 1885 Rebellion; her mother the daughter of a Cree woman and French-American man. This extraordinary account, originally published in 1973, bravely explores the poverty, oppression, alcoholism, addiction, and tragedy Maria endured throughout her childhood and into her early adult life, underscored by living in the margins of a country pervaded by hatred, discrimination, and mistrust. Laced with spare moments of love and joy, this is a memoir of family ties and finding an identity in a heritage that is neither wholly Indigenous or Anglo; of strength and resilience; of indominatable spirit.
This edition of Halfbreed includes a new introduction written by Indigenous (Métis) scholar Dr. Kim Anderson detailing the extraordinary work that Maria has been doing since its original publication 46 years ago, and an afterword by the author looking at what has changed, and also what has not, for Indigenous people in Canada today. Restored are the recently discovered missing pages from the original text of this groundbreaking and significant work.
Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Kanata Classics series, which celebrates timeless books that reflect the rich and diverse range of voices in Canadian literature.
Additional Information
224 pages | 5.50" x 8.23" | Paperback
Synopsis:
For more than three decades, bestselling author Louise Erdrich has enthralled readers with dazzling novels that paint an evocative portrait of Native American life. From her dazzling first novel, Love Medicine, to the National Book Award-winning The Round House, Erdrich’s lyrical skill and emotional assurance have earned her a place alongside William Faulkner and Willa Cather as an author deeply rooted in the American landscape.
In Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Erdrich takes us on an illuminating tour through the terrain her ancestors have inhabited for centuries: the lakes and islands of southern Ontario. Summoning to life the Ojibwe's sacred spirits and songs, their language and sorrows, she considers the many ways in which her tribe—whose name derives from the word ozhibii'ige, "to write"—have influenced her. Her journey links ancient stone paintings with a magical island where a bookish recluse built an extraordinary library, and she reveals how both have transformed her.
A blend of history, mythology, and memoir, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is an enchanting meditation on modern life, natural splendor, and the ancient spirituality and creativity of Erdrich's native homeland—a long, elemental tradition of storytelling that is in her blood.
Additional Information
160 pages | 5.31" x 8.00" | 15 Illustrations, 1 Map | Paperback
Synopsis:
Part of the inaugural Kanata Classics list, with a new introduction by David Chariandy, NISHGA is a groundbreaking, deeply personal, and devastating autobiographical meditation that attempts to address the complicated legacies of Canada’s residential school system and contemporary Indigenous existence.
As a Nisga'a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga'a language, Nisga'a community, and Nisga'a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school--both of his grandparents attended the same residential school--his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least.
NISHGA explores those complications and is invested in understanding how the colonial violence originating at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, then his father's generation, and ultimately his own. The project is rooted in a desire to illuminate the realities of intergenerational survivors of residential school, but sheds light on Indigenous experiences that may not seem to be immediately (or inherently) Indigenous.
Drawing on autobiography and a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible.
Reviews
“With NISHGA, Jordan Abel has reinvented the memoir, incorporating personal anecdotes, archival footage, legal documentation, photos and concrete poetry to create an unforgettable portrait of an Indigenous artist trying to find his place in a world that insists Indigeneity can only ever be the things that he is not. Abel deftly shows us the devastating impact this gate-keeping has had on those who, through no decisions of their own, have been ripped from our communities and forced to claw their way back home, or to a semblance of home, often unassisted. This is a brave, vulnerable, brilliant work that will change the face of nonfiction, as well as the conversations around what constitutes Indigenous identity. It's a work I will return to again and again.” —Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
“In NISHGA, Jordan Abel puts to use the documentary impulse that has already established him as an artist of inimitable methodological flair. By way of a mixture of testimonial vignettes, recordings of academic talks, found text/art, and visual art/concrete poetry, Abel sculpts a narrative of dislocation and self-examination that pressurizes received notions of “Canada” and “history” and “art” and “literature” and “belonging” and “forgiveness.” Yes, it is a book of that magnitude, of that enormity and power. By its Afterword, NISHGA adds up to a work of personal and national reckoning that is by turns heartbreaking and scathing.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of NDN Coping Mechanisms and A History of My Brief Body
"This is a heart-shattering read, and will also be a blanket for others looking for home. NISHGA is a work of absolute courage and vulnerability. I am in complete awe of the sorrow here and the bravery. Mahsi cho, Jordan.” —Richard Van Camp, author of Moccasin Square Gardens
“Jordan Abel digs deeply into the questions we should all be asking. Questions that need no explanation but ones that require us to crawl back into our bones, back into the marrow of our understanding. NISHGA is a ceremony where we need to be silent. Where we need to listen.” —Gregory Scofield, author of Witness, I Am
Educator & Series Information
This edition of Nishga is part of the Kanata Classics series, which celebrates timeless books that reflect the rich and diverse range of voices in Canadian literature.
Additional Information
304 pages | 5.54" x 8.26" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Tales of an Urban Indian is a one-person play that follows the trials and tribulations of Simon Douglas, a young First Nations man who moves from his rural reservation to the big city of Vancouver. This dark comedy examines the issues of race, identity, and assimilation that drive young Indigenous men to self-destruction.
In The Trickster of Third Avenue East, Roger and Mary are spiralling out of control but are too scared to let each other go. Enter J.C., a mysterious visitor who turns their lives upside down and forces them to confront their darkest secrets. J.C. pushes Roger and Mary into the realm of the supernatural and past the brink of sanity.
Additional Information
134 pages | 5.45" x 8.40" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A Métis girl is adopted by a Mennonite family in this breathtaking memoir about family lost and found—for those who loved From the Ashes and Educated.
By the time Brittany Penner is seven years old, she has loved and lost twenty-one foster siblings who have come into her family and left—all of them Indigenous like her. "When will it be my turn?" she asks her mother time and time again. "When will I be taken away?" You won't be, she is told. You're adopted. You're here to stay. You're the lucky one.
On the day of her birth in 1989, near the end of the Sixties Scoop, Brittany was relinquished into the care of the government and adopted by a white Mennonite family in a small prairie town. Her name and where she came from are hidden from her; all she is told is that she is Métis. Her childhood is shaped by church, family, service and silence. Her family is continuously shifting as siblings arrive and depart, one by one. She knows that to stay, she has to force herself into the mold created for her. She must be obedient. Quiet. Good. No matter what.
Whenever she looks in the mirror, she searches her features, wondering if they've been passed down to her by her biological mother. She thinks, if she can find her mother, she'll find all the answers she's looking for. As Brittany moves into adulthood, she will uncover answers—but they will be more tangled than she could have imagined.
Children Like Us asks difficult questions about family, identity, belonging and cultural continuity. What happens when you find what you're looking for, but it can't offer you everything you need? How do you reckon with the truth of your own story when you've always been told you're lucky and should be grateful? What does it mean to belong when you feel torn between cultures? And how does a person learn to hold the pain and the grief, as well as the triumphs, the joys and the beauty, allowing none to eclipse the others?
Reviews
"Children Like Us is a luminous memoir about identity, loss and belonging. Adopted at birth by a white Mennonite family, Brittany Penner grows up straddling two worlds—one she knows and one that remains just out of reach. As she pieces together her origins, she reckons with the complexities of family, love and cultural displacement. Both intimate and unflinching, Children Like Us is a powerful exploration of what it means to know where you come from—and what it costs when that knowledge is withheld." —Adrienne Brodeur, nationally bestselling author of Wild Game
"An absolutely mesmerizing debut. It was a privilege to bear witness to Brittany Penner's story about intergenerational trauma, identity, and belonging. The kinds of complicated grief we so often experience in life are born out of the complexity of human relationships and our fierce ability to both hurt and heal one another. Penner explores this truth deftly, with wisdom, compassion and grace. I hope everyone reads this book." —Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance
Additional Information
384 pages | 5.62" x 8.25" | Paperback