Indigenous Peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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152 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

An intimate yet wide-sweeping story of a marine biologist working to save ocean ecosystems from climate change.

With the world’s oceans ravaged by climate change, Émeraude, a young marine biologist, works to preserve aquatic ecosystems by recreating them for zoos. When her work earns her a spot aboard a research vessel with an extended mission in the Arctic, it is the inescapable draw of the ocean that will save her when the world she leaves behind is irrevocably changed.

Stories of Émeraude’s ancestors — a young sailor abandoned at birth, a conjuror who mixes potions for her neighbours, a violent young man who hides in the woods to escape an even more violent war, and a talented young singer born to a mother who cannot speak — weave their way through her intimate reflections on a modest life, unknowingly shaped by those who came before.

Reviews
"Aquariums is a luminous, touching and comforting book, written with great clarity. In other words, a healing read. It can be read in a single sitting, and picked up again when one’s soul needs soothing." — Solaris

"J.D. Kurtness stands out on the indigenous literary scene for her unique style, inspired by dystopian and apocalyptic writing. In Aquariums, the author delivers a fragmented novel of filiation, mixing the different (non-)stories of a lineage and of the same generation, like an aquarium housing an ecosystem, to an apocalyptic end forcing a reset of the planetary population. Kurtness’s aesthetic is characterised by a holistic cosmic writing in which a sort of Glissant’s Tout-Monde is formed: the narratives of ancestors and the living communicate with the perceived and existing elements. This cosmic writing is conveyed through the fragmentary form, which is more organic than functional, the use of nature-related metaphors, that are tied to the life story of a whale, and the hybridity of the novel, which mixes the genres of life writing and dystopia. Although the author is Ilnu, the dimension of autochthony is not central to Aquariums. It is partially present in the discourse and the constellation of characters, but is not actively addressed." - Abstract from Dystopie, Fragmentation et Filiation dans Aquariums de J.D. Kurtness by Jody Danard

"This is a small book on a huge theme, set in various places and eras, featuring different perspectives. It could be confusing, but it works – so much so that I sometimes wished Kurtness had picked up some of her loose threads and developed the stories of Émeraude’s ancestors instead of returning to her protagonist’s journey. I want to know more about the scarred sailor, the blind shark, and the travelling whale. She dips her toe into the fantastical or the romantic and then pulls back, back to the science of a dying world. Aquariums is an inventive book on a grim not-so-distant future. In the end, Kurtness chooses to believe in the resilience of humanity. Like her ancestors before her, Émeraude will fight for her people’s future." - Roxane Hudon, Montreal Review of Books

Educator Information
Translated from French to English by Pablo Strauss 

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176 pages | 5.00" x 7.00" | Paperback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educator Information
Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educator Information
Table of Contents

Foreword / Tony Belcourt

Introduction / Yvonne Boyer, Larry Chartrand, and Wanda McCaslin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword / Yvonne Boyer and Larry Chartrand

Index

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Information
144 pages | 5.75" x 8.50" | Paperback

We find our way forward by going back.

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

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

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

Additional Information
224 pages | 5.81" x 8.53" | Hardcover

What does it mean to become rooted in the land? How can we become better relatives to our greatest teacher, the Earth? Becoming Rooted invites us to live out a deeply spiritual relationship with the whole community of creation and with Creator.

Through meditations and ideas for reflection and action, Randy Woodley, an activist, author, scholar, and Cherokee descendant, recognized by the Keetoowah Band, guides us on a one-hundred-day journey to reconnect with the Earth. Woodley invites us to come away from the American dream--otherwise known as an Indigenous nightmare--and get in touch with the water, land, plants, and creatures around us, with the people who lived on that land for thousands of years prior to Europeans' arrival, and with ourselves. In walking toward the harmony way, we honor balance, wholeness, and connection.

Creation is always teaching us. Our task is to look, and to listen, and to live well. She is teaching us now.

"This journey is your personal invitation into a different kind of relationship with nature—or, as I like to say, with the whole community of creation. It is also an invitation into a different kind of relationship with Creator, however you understand Creator to be present in your own life and within everything—as God, as Great Mystery, as a higher power, or as the universe." - Randy Woodley 

Reviews
“Randy Woodley reminds us that we all have an understanding of what it means to be indigenous to a spiritual place. Through slowly unfolding layers of meaning, he shows us where we may discover that place for ourselves.”—Steven Charleston, elder of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

“Becoming Rooted offers us a precious way back into the land: a way into restoration and reciprocity, a way into healing ourselves and the land, a way of belonging again, a way of finding out who we are. Randy Woodley takes us by the hand and walks with us for the first one hundred days. We begin to think and feel differently, our senses gain new direction, and we start to gain roots. I am so grateful for this book and for the life and work of Randy Woodley.”— Cláudio Carvalhaes, associate professor of worship, Union Theological Seminary

“Becoming Rooted draws you deeper into relationship with the land where you live. Few of us live in the place we were born, but these reflections take you past that disconnection and help you notice the world around you in new ways.”—Patty Krawec, Anishnaabe author and co-host of the Medicine for the Resistance podcast

Educator Information
Includes meditations, reflections, and action items for 100 days.

Additional Information
256 pages | 5.20" x 7.10" | Hardcover 

Bent Back Tongue is a raw examination of love, identity, politics, masculinity, and vulnerability. Through sharp honesty and revealing satire, Gottfriedson delves into Canadian colonialism and the religious political paradigms shaping experiences of a Secwépemc First Nations man. This is a book that tears through deceptions that both Canada and the church impose on their citizens. Gottfriedson tackles the darkest layers of a shared colonial history; at the same time, the poems in Bent Back Tongue are a celebration of love, land, family, and the self.

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120 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

Blood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship.

Conceived in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones, Tyler Pennock's Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker's relationship to the living--never forgetting non-human kin.

This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw.

Reviews
"Pennock's Blood shines on the parts of the self that defy the ruthlessness of empire. By turns inward to the still and sobering power of language, and again outward to the echoes of 'leaves and wind,' a music as sensitive as it is revelatory ushers us into his unique measure of aliveness. The poet here is engaged and unafraid to look long." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

Additional Information
104 pages | 5.75" x 8.50" | Paperback

American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.

Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.

Reviews
"Unlike poets who adopt cultures into which they weren't born, or raised, okpik, who has fished the waters of which she writes so eloquently, has something rare these days: an authentic voice, one that nets ancient beliefs without discarding modern science or the daily news."—Poetica

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96 pages | 7.19" x 9.00" | Paperback 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Indigenous activism have made many non-Indigenous Canadians uncomfortably aware of how little they know about First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. In Braided Learning, Susan Dion shares her approach to engaging with Indigenous histories and perspectives. Using the power of stories and artwork, Dion offers respectful ways to learn from and teach about challenging topics including settler-colonialism, treaties, the Indian Act, residential schools, and the Sixties Scoop. Informed by Indigenous pedagogy, Braided Learning draws on Indigenous knowledge to make sense of a difficult past, decode unjust conditions in the present, and work toward a more equitable future.

This book is a must-read for teachers and education students. It should also be read by students and practitioners in social work, child and youth counselling, policing, and nursing, or anyone seeking a foundational understanding of the histories of Indigenous peoples and of settler colonialism in Canada.

Reviews
“This book should be in every educator’s library. It serves as a model for educators to learn and teach about the history of Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism without fear or reservation. It is exactly what has been asked for over and over again.”— Tracey Laverty, First Nations, Inuit and Métis Education, Saskatoon Public Schools

"Braided Learning is a safe learning space for people at the start of their learning journey about Indigenous education and history. Each reader will take away the parts of the stories that are important to them, just like listeners do when we hear stories in the lodge from our elders. Nobody tells you what to do – you figure it out yourself with some subtle guidance." — Deb St. Amant, elder-in-residence, Faculty of Education, Queen’s University

"Understanding how educators can participate in reconciliation means understanding what stands in the way. Susan Dion understands both. Highly readable, engaging, and passionate, this book moves teachers from apprehension to action. Educators of all levels, read this book and take heed of Dion’s question: “So what are you going to do now?” — Amanda Gebhard, co-editor of White Benevolence: Racism and Colonial Violence in the Helping Professions

Educator Information
Table of Contents
Introduction: Indigenous Presence

1 Requisites for Reconciliation

2 Seeing Yourself in Relationship with Settler Colonialism

3 The Historical Timeline: Refusing Absence, Knowing Presence, and Being Indigenous

4 Learning from Contemporary Indigenous Artists

5 The Braiding Histories Stories / Co-written with Michael R. Dion

Conclusion: Wuleelham – Make Good Tracks

Glossary and Additional Resources: Making Connections, Extending Learning

Notes; Bibliography

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

A new commemorative edition of Theodore Fontaine's powerful, groundbreaking memoir of survival and healing after years of residential school abuse.

Originally published in 2010, Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools chronicles the impact of Theodore Fontaine’s harrowing experiences at Fort Alexander and Assiniboia Indian Residential Schools, including psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse; disconnection from his language and culture; and the loss of his family and community. Told as remembrances infused with insights gained through his long healing process, Fontaine goes beyond the details of the abuse that he suffered to relate a unique understanding of why most residential school survivors have post-traumatic stress disorders and why succeeding generations of Indigenous children suffer from this dark chapter in history. With a new foreword by Andrew Woolford, professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba, this commemorative edition will continue to serve as a powerful testament to survival, self-discovery, and healing.

Reviews
"Broken Circle is a life story of Mr. Fontaine and he said it like it was; 'his personal story affirms the tragedy that occurred during this era and the impacts it has on our Indigenous people today'. Mr. Fontaine's humbleness and care for his people was remarkable and no words will ever express what he meant to his people on Turtle Island." —Chief Derrick Henderson, Sagkeeng First Nation

“Theodore Fontaine has written a testimony that should be mandatory reading for everyone out there who has ever wondered, 'Why can’t Aboriginal people just get over Residential Schools?' Mr. Fontaine’s life story is filled with astonishing and brutal chapters, but, through it all, time, healing, crying, writing, friends and family, and love—sweet love—have all graced their way into the man, father, son, brother, husband, and child of wonder Theodore has always deserved to be. What a humbling work to read. I’m grateful he wrote it and had the courage to share it. Mahsi cho." —Richard Van Camp, Tłįchǫ author of The Lesser Blessed and Moccasin Square Gardens

Additional Information
224 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 2nd Edition | Paperback

Powerful stories of "Metis futurism" that envision a world without violence, capitalism, or colonization.

"Education is the new buffalo" is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, "Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?"

Inspired by classic and contemporary speculative fiction, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo explores science fiction tropes through a Metis lens: a Two-Spirit rougarou (shapeshifter) in the nineteenth century tries to solve a murder in her community and joins the nehiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy) in order to successfully stop Canadian colonial expansion into the West. A Metis man is gored by a radioactive bison, gaining super strength, but losing the ability to be remembered by anyone not related to him by blood. Nanites babble to babies in Cree, virtual reality teaches transformation, foxes take human form and wreak havoc on hearts, buffalo roam free, and beings grapple with the thorny problem of healing from colonialism.

Indigenous futurisms seek to discover the impact of colonization, remove its psychological baggage, and recover ancestral traditions. These eight short stories of "Metis futurism" explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Metis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.

Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | Paperback