First Nations

Coalesce is a fusion of distinct Anishinaabeg aesthetics of the Great Lakes region with refuse from Western society’s technological and digital age in order to intentionally shift an object’s materiality and its accepted paradigm within the physical world. It is through the integration and juxtaposition of recognizable materials used in the making of Anishinaabeg material culture, such as glass beads and porcupine quills, with new-found materials, such as electronic components (capacitors and resistors), that this body of work disproves any notion of Anishinaabeg cultural stasis. Coalesce demonstrates the continuum of Anishinaabeg innovation and expression by making use of disparate materials that knowingly coalesce and segue seamlessly into contemporary Anishinaabeg artistic tradition and material culture.

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48 pages | 7.00" x 8.50"

In this timely collection, the authors examine Indigenous peoples’ negotiations with different cosmologies in a globalized world. Dussart and Poirier outline a sophisticated theory of change that accounts for the complexity of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with Christianity and other cosmologies, their own colonial experiences, as well as their ongoing relationships to place and kin. The contributors offer fine-grained ethnographic studies that highlight the complex and pragmatic ways in which Indigenous peoples enact their cosmologies and articulate their identity as forms of affirmation. This collection is a major contribution to the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and Indigenous studies worldwide.

Contributors: Anne-Marie Colpron, Robert R. Crépeau, Françoise Dussart, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Frédéric Laugrand, C. James MacKenzie, Caroline Nepton Hotte, Ksenia Pimenova, Sylvie Poirier, Kathryn Rountree, Antonella Tassinari, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

Reviews
“Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics advances debates about how Indigenous cosmologies are received, understood, and valued. The contributors consider the complex connections that emerge between religiosity, politics, activism, and the ways in which globalization continues to shape these processes as Indigenous cultures relate with different elements of traditionally European religions.” - Amy Whitehead, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Massey University

Educator Information
Keywords / Subjects: Cosmology; religion; ritual; Indigenous; settler-Indigenous; spiritual; ethnography; Americas; Australia; Malta; Russia; secular; globalization; entanglement; identity politics; Social Science; Comparative Religion, Anthropology; Beliefs

Table of Contents
1 Indigenous Cosmologies, Entangled Religiosities, and Global Connections 1
A Theoretical Overview
FRANÇOISE DUSSART & SYLVIE POIRIER
2 Embracing Christianity, Rejecting Western Individualism? 33
Inuit Leaders and the Limits of Indigenization
FRÉDÉRIC LAUGRAND
3 Engaging Religiosities 59
Relationality, Co-existence, and Belonging among Lander Warlpiri, Central Australia
PETRONELLA VAARZON-MOREL
4 Making People 87
Manipulating Alterity in the Production of the Person among the Karipuna People of Northern Brazil
ANTONELLA TASSINARI
5 Discourses on the Advent of New Times among the Kaingang People of Southern Brazil 111
ROBERT R. CRÉPEAU
6 From Unknown to Hypermediatized 133
Shipibo-Konibo Female Shamans in Western Amazonia
ANNE-MARIE COLPRON
7 Tying Down the Soul of a Potato in the Southern Peruvian Andes 157
Performance and Frictions
INGRID HALL
8 Negotiating Indigenous-Global Relationships in Contemporary Shamanism 187
The Case of Malta
KATHRYN ROUNTREE
9 Indigenous Cosmologies and Social Media 219
Creativity, Self-Representation, and Power of the Image for First Nations Women Artists
CAROLINE NEPTON HOTTE & LAURENT JÉRÔME
10 Human Remains and Indigenous Religiosity in the Museum Space 253
Ritual Relations to the Altaian Mummy in the Anokhin National Museum of the Altai Republic, Russia
KSENIA PIMENOVA
11 Shaman, Christian, Bureaucrat, Cop 285
Maya Responses to Modern Entanglements
C. JAMES MACKENZIE
Contributors 311
Index 317

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344 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing—or at least attempting to.

The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try—and ultimately fail—to articulate them. Hunt gestures to the movements, speech acts and relations that exceed available vocabularies, that may be housed within words like joy, but which the words themselves cannot fully convey. This debut collection is vital in the context of a colonial aesthetic designed to perpetually foreclose on Indigenous futures and erase Indigenous existence.

the Cree word for constellation

is a saskatoon berry bush in summertime

the translation for policeman

in Cree is mîci nisôkan, kohkôs

the translation for genius

in Cree is my kôhkom muttering in her sleep

the Cree word for poetry is your four-year-old

niece’s cracked lips spilling out

broken syllables of nêhiyawêwin in between

the gaps in her teeth 

Reviews
"Here is an ode to northern Alberta, to the kokums and aunties who are worlds unto themselves, to the vastness and profundity of the Cree language. Dallas Hunt’s Creeland is tender and aching and intellectually exciting. Hunt uses the lyric mode to write another kind of public history about the prairies, one in which we Cree are always beautiful and indomitable. I can’t thank him enough for this." — Billy-Ray Belcourt, February 2021

"Dallas Hunt’s debut collection of poetry is work built from the ground up, meaning he has read, loved, studied poetry. He uses language “lived” in his relationships with family, home, community. Creeland feels like home to me. It “[crackles] with love and life.”" — Marilyn Dumont, February 2021

"From index to glossary, this stunning work bends with the possibilities of saplings. Mortally aware, a mind that can be everywhere “wolf willows and pin / cherries,” here is a poet halting the mallets of supremacy. Dallas Hunt aligns “petals of / larkspur” against the “maw of the inferno” to speak of Creeland. Entwined in “pîsim’s luminous / touch,” the poet’s smile returns home. Bringing forth fine, wry and tenderizing poetry, rickety love begets gale winds, and everyday, constellatory magnitudes. A quieting read with dimensional perspective, this book will transport you." — Cecily Nicholson, February 2021

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128 pages | 5.50" x 8.00"

Dadibaajim narratives are of and from the land, born from experience and observation. Invoking this critical Anishinaabe methodology for teaching and learning, Helen Agger documents and reclaims the history, identity, and inherent entitlement of the Namegosibii Anishinaabeg to the care, use, and occupation of their Trout Lake homelands.

When Agger’s mother, Dedibaayaanimanook, was born in 1922, the community had limited contact with Euro-Canadian settlers and still lived throughout their territory according to seasonal migrations along agricultural, hunting, and fishing routes. By the 1940s, colonialism was in full swing: hydro development had resulted in major flooding of traditional territories, settlers had overrun Trout Lake for its resource, tourism, and recreational potential, and the Namegosibii Anishinaabe were forced out of their homelands in Treaty 3 territory, north-western Ontario.

Agger mines an archive of treaty paylists, census records, and the work of influential anthropologists like A.I. Hallowell, but the dadibaajim narratives of eight community members spanning three generations form the heart of this book. Dadibaajim provide the framework that fills in the silences and omissions of the colonial record. Embedded in Anishinaabe language and epistemology, they record how the people of Namegosibiing experienced the invasion of interlocking forces of colonialism and globalized neo-liberalism into their lives and upon their homelands. Ultimately, Dadibaajim is a message about how all humans may live well on the earth.

Reviews
“Dadibaajim is the product of a lifetime of reflection, and the distilled narrative we are presented shares an invaluable part of our Anishinaabe – and larger human – story that might have otherwise never been told. This work brings new value and appreciation for the role and positionality of our senior and traditional Elders, our Indigenous languages, and knowledge building customs and protocols that are inherent to the community." — Brian McInnes

"Dadibaajim is a fascinating story of the people and the land told from a uniquely Anishinaabe perspective. It also gives us hope for the future of these stories and traditions, particularly in the narratives, experiences, and perspectives of the younger generations that are represented." — Brian McInnes

“Dadibaajim is brilliant in its unapologetic incorporation of Anishinaabemowin and its prioritizing of Anishinaabe way of being in the world. It contributes to important decolonial work and challenges settler histories and discourse.” — Brittany Luby and Margaret Lehman

Educator Information
Table of Contents
Ch 1: How We Know

Ch 2: Subjectivity

Ch 3: As Written of Us

Ch 4: Our Anishinaabe Selves

Ch 5: Boreal Narratives

Ch 6: Colonial Identity

Ch 7: Anishinaabe Rectitude

Ch 8: Historical Texts

Additional Information
176 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Black and white illustrations and tables, maps, index, bibliography | Paperback

Daughters of Aataentsic highlights and connects the unique lives of seven Wendat/Wandat women whose legacies are still felt today. Spanning the continent and the colonial borders of New France, British North America, Canada, and the United States, this book shows how Wendat people and place came together in Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and how generations of activism became intimately tied with notions of family, community, motherwork, and legacy from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The lives of the seven women tell a story of individual and community triumph despite difficulties and great loss. Kathryn Magee Labelle aims to decolonize the historical discipline by researching with Indigenous people rather than researching on them. It is a collaborative effort, guided by an advisory council of eight Wendat/Wandat women, reflecting the needs and desires of community members. Daughters of Aataentsic challenges colonial interpretations by demonstrating the centrality of women, past and present, to Wendat/Wandat culture and history. Labelle draws from institutional archives and published works, as well as from oral histories and private collections. Breaking new ground in both historical narratives and community-guided research in North America, Daughters of Aataentsic offers an alternative narrative by considering the ways in which individual Wendat/Wandat women resisted colonialism, preserved their culture, and acted as matriarchs.

Reviews
"Daughters of Aataentsic makes a significant contribution to the historiography of Indigenous women. Labelle has written an important book and her laudatory and exemplary methodology is a model for all people researching and writing on First Nations and Native Americans." — Clifford Trafzer, University of California, Riverside

"Daughters of Aataentsic enriches our understanding of the everyday lives of real women, their families, and communities across time in Quebec and parts of the southwestern and western United States. This book does not denounce the past, holler, and shout, but rather attends to the range of information and knowledge passed down to draw us into times and places we would otherwise not have the privilege of knowing from an Indigenous perspective. Its insights have stuck with me long after my first reading, as I expect they will for others." — Jean Barman, University of British Columbia

Educator Information
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Figures xv
Map xxvi
Introduction 3
1 Cécile Gannendâris (?-1669) 13
2 Marie Catherine Jean dit Vien (1676-1767) 33
3 Margaret Grey Eyes Solomon (1816-1890) 50
4 Mary McKee (1838-1922) 69
5 Eliza Burton Conley Jr (1869-1946) 90
6 Jane Zane Gordon (1871-1963) 115
7 Dr Éléonore Sioui (1924-2006) 132
Epilogue: The Wendat/Wandat Women’s Advisory Council 154
Notes 169
Index 205

Recommended for these subjects: History, Women's History, North American History, Canadian History, Indigenous History, Indigenous Studies, Women's and Gender Studies.

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240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 21 Photos, 7 Diagrams 

The highly anticipated debut poetry collection of Mi'kmaq poems by Prince Edward Island's Poet Laureate, Julie Pellisier-Lush.

This collection will enthrall poetry lovers. Skilled at taking words from hearts and minds to paper, Julie's poems will connect with the reader deeply. Some poems were created with teachings from our Elders and some were created to learn more about the art of words.

At times heart wrenching and other times a call to action for Mother Earth, each poignant poem is paired with vivid artwork crafted by the poet herself.

Take what you like, use what you need, most of all enjoy.

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96 pages | 5.50" x 9.00" | Paperback

There are times in a parent's life when they ask why am I doing this? It's so hard. That is, until those occasions of magic happen, and they always do. Parenthood is a journey with no road map. And it is the children who most often steer the ship. In her new collection of poetry, Essential Ingredients, Carol Rose GoldenEagle recalls when Creator's blessings have truly been bestowed in a parent's shared life with their children. Poems examine hardship and struggle, triumph of spirit and joy, and serve as a reminder to all parents that childhood is fleeting. This beautiful volume is a celebration of parenthood, in the form of love letters to the poet's children. It is ultimately a tribute to the memories of those many magic moments which define love, purpose and pride.

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100 pages | 6.00" x 7.50" | Paperback

Nowhere in the texts on counselling, recovery, or lifespan development does it make links between well-being and not having your land stolen. When an entire people are generally portrayed as mentally ill, because that is, of course, what it means to have a diagnosis of clinical depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder, it is easy for the State to view these people as unfit to manage their lives. Then, all sorts of functions are performed on Indigenous families that are tantamount to victim-blaming formulations that, in the end, deny opportunities associated with full citizenship.

The author goes beyond offering social analysis, and possible pathways toward healing, and shares her own experience as an Indigenous woman with Metis, Cree and Gwichin heritage. She talks about her approach to a second cancer diagnosis, and explores the way she characterized her experience of chemotherapy and radiation in a way that cast the journey as personal and heroic, rather than merely medical and out of her control.

One of the main contributions of this book is a discussion of how mainstream counselling and the helping professions have overlooked important facts about oppression, including the reminder from Gloria Steinem that the personal is political.

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135 Pages | 6” x 9” | Paperback

Stories are medicine. During a time of heightened isolation, bestselling author Richard Van Camp shares what he knows about the power of storytelling—and offers some of his own favourite stories from Elders, friends, and family.

Gathering around a campfire, or the dinner table, we humans have always told stories. Through them, we define our identities and shape our understanding of the world.

Master storyteller and bestselling author Richard Van Camp writes of the power of storytelling and its potential to transform speakers and audiences alike.

In Gather, Van Camp shares what elements make a compelling story and offers insights into basic storytelling techniques, such as how to read a room and how to capture the attention of listeners. And he delves further into the impact storytelling can have, helping readers understand how to create community and how to banish loneliness through their tales. A member of the Tlicho Dene First Nation, Van Camp also includes stories from Elders whose wisdom influenced him.

During a time of uncertainty and disconnection, stories reach across vast distances to offer connection. Gather is a joyful reminder of this for storytellers: all of us.

Reviews
“Stories and storytellers are an important part of what makes us human. Van Camp’s stories, whether they feature light comedy, family discord and reconciliation or his vivid images of the legendary Wheetago monsters, revived by global warming and horrifically hungry for human flesh, are gifts to the reader.” —Vancouver Sun
 
“Van Camp is…a brilliant weaver of tales.” —Quill & Quire

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162 pages | 5.00" x 8.50"

For 34 years, Lynn Gehl fought against the sex discrimination built into Canada’s Indian Act. This is the story of her challenges and eventual success.

A follow-up to Claiming Anishinaabe, Gehl v Canada is the story of Lynn Gehl’s lifelong journey of survival against the nation-state’s constant genocidal assault against her existence. While Canada set up its colonial powers—including the Supreme Court, House of Commons, Senate Chamber, and the Residences of the Prime Minister and Governor General—on her traditional Algonquin territory, usurping the riches and resources of the land, she was pushed to the margins, exiled to a life of poverty in Toronto’s inner-city.

With only beads in her pocket, Gehl spent her entire life fighting back, and now offers an insider analysis of Indian Act litigation, the narrow remedies the court imposes, and of obfuscating parliamentary discourse, as well as an important critique of the methodology of legal positivism. Drawing on social identity and Indigenous theories, the author presents Disenfranchised Spirit Theory, revealing insights into the identity struggles facing Indigenous Peoples to this day.

Reviews
“Congratulations . . . to Dr. Lynn Gehl for her successful challenge of the Indian Registrar’s refusal to allow her to be registered under the Indian Act. . . . Good win, Lynn!”—The Honourable Murray Sinclair

“With knowledge and experience from years of advocacy before Parliament as well as the courts, and the depth of perception typical of all her scholarly work, Dr. Gehl assesses what more is needed before the Indian Act system can be truly egalitarian. Her book is unique and inspiring.” —Mary Eberts, from the foreword

“[R]emarkable . . . a monument in Indigenous struggles with the colonial Crown.” —Veldon Coburn, Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies at University of Ottawa

“Gehl embodies essential Indigenous wisdom, bravery, and responsibility in her work to dismantle the systems of colonial oppression. Her work serves as a beacon in a network of pathways for our people to make their way home.” —Chief Wendy Jocko, Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation
 
“The legal decision in Gehl v Canada will have profound effects for the future, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous mothers will be able to pass their status on to their children. This victory, the product of decades of struggle by Lynn Gehl, is chronicled here. Read it and learn!” —Bonita Lawrence, author of Fractured Homeland

Educator Information
This is the follow-up to Claiming Anishinaabe.

Centres Anishinaabe methods of personal truth over western academia.

Introduces readers to the paternity policy of the Indian Art, explaining how this policy was sexual discrimination and bloodless genocide. The paternity policy of the Indian Act required individuals claiming Status to demonstrate the lineage of both parents. Harmful to Indigenous mothers and children, and imposing a high evidentiary burden on Indigenous people claiming Status, it was overturned on April 20, 2017, in what is now known as the Gehl decision. 

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288 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Go Down Odawa Way is a poetry collection that explores the physical, historical, and cultural spaces that make up the southwestern traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy. This is the region currently inhabited by southwestern Ontario and southeastern Michigan. Individual poems and sections of this collection explore the documented villages, history, and mythologies of the Odawa, Ojibway, Huron/Wendat, and Pottawatomi nations that were lost to the process of colonization and relocation. The project speaks to the history of the region that predates contemporary Canadian and American borders and namings as well as carves out a history that extends back past the mere couple of centuries of European colonization. The narrative focal point of the pieces find their roots in the traditional Lenape vantage point of the author and seeks to draw on the experiences of a modern day urban Indian in connection with the manner that land has changed with non-Indigenous settlement and those that inhabit it.

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76 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Disability, death and divorce are part of a string of losses that leave this award-winning musician fundamentally changed as she learns to navigate her grief and find a way forward.

Christa Couture lost a piece of herself—in more ways than one. She lost a leg to amputation from childhood bone cancer. She lost a son to complications at birth. She lost another son to a heart defect. She lost a husband to divorce. Each of these losses has left her altered.

In her debut memoir, Couture relives these tragedies alongside the joys that fill the spaces in between. With a quiet wisdom, she explores the dichotomies of grief—how a dismantling necessitates growth, how trauma will at once harden and soften a person. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, How to Lose Everything reflects on the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership and change.

Couture’s story is an offering of kinship to anyone touched by loss, be that the loss of a physical ability, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a relationship or the loss of one’s sense of self. With gentleness and generosity, How to Lose Everything bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with grief, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters.

Reviews
"Christa’s voice and the things that make her remarkable are so tangible in her narrative: it is bravely open, it is generous when retelling of great sadness, it is candid and kind, with a sharp and quick humour that sneaks up on you in the most delightful way, at the right time. " — Gabrielle Papillon, singer and songwriter

"An astoundingly generous and compelling memoir. I could not put this book down, and I know I will return to these stories over and over again. How to Lose Everything is for anyone who has ever lost someone; for you, perhaps, who have come to know grief; for all of us who have had to learn how to walk again, after falling to the ground." — Smokii Sumac, author of YOU ARE ENOUGH: LOVE POEMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

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208 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

In this unique collection of writings from Ininew Dream Keeper (Pawami niki titi cikiw) Wilfred Buck, he illustrates through astounding stories, four separate stages of personal experience. The stories in I Have Lived Four Lives... are designed as aids to assist in discovery and healing for Indigenous youth, but instead of being didactic, they encompass a range of hilarious and vivid recollections that revolve around visions and dreams, and that ultimately trace Buck's path to becoming a teacher in Indigenous cosmology and astronomy. Beginning by explaining how the word Ininew refers to the phrase mixing of four, Buck embarks upon this series of dazzling stories: herein is the story of how I lived and how I died and how I lived again along with the dreams I have dreamed and the visions I have seen.

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6.00" x 9.00"

A compelling political memoir of leadership and speaking truth to power by one of the most inspiring women of her generation.

Jody Wilson-Raybould was raised to be a leader. Inspired by the example of her grandmother, who persevered throughout her life to keep alive the governing traditions of her people, and raised as the daughter of a hereditary chief and Indigenous leader, Wilson-Raybould always knew she would take on leadership roles and responsibilities. She never anticipated, however, that those roles would lead to a journey from her home community of We Wai Kai in British Columbia to Ottawa as Canada’s first Indigenous Minister of Justice and Attorney General in the Cabinet of then newly elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

Wilson-Raybould’s experience in Trudeau’s Cabinet reveals important lessons about how we must continue to strengthen our political institutions and culture, and the changes we must make to meet challenges such as racial justice and climate change. As her initial optimism about the possibilities of enacting change while in Cabinet shifted to struggles over inclusivity, deficiencies of political will, and concerns about adherence to core principles of our democracy, Wilson-Raybould stood on principle and, ultimately, resigned. In standing her personal and professional ground and telling the truth in front of the nation, Wilson-Raybould demonstrated the need for greater independence and less partisanship in how we govern.

"Indian” in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power is the story of why Wilson-Raybould got into federal politics, her experience as an Indigenous leader sitting around the Cabinet table, her proudest achievements, the very public SNC-Lavalin affair, and how she got out and moved forward. Now sitting as an Independent Member in Parliament, Wilson-Raybould believes there is a better way to govern and a better way for politics—one that will make a better country for all.

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352 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover

Igniting the $100 billion Indigenous economy

It is time. It is time to increase the visibility, role, and responsibility of the emerging modern Indigenous economy and the people involved. This is the foundation for economic reconciliation. This is Indigenomics.

Indigenomics lays out the tenets of the emerging Indigenous economy, built around relationships, multigenerational stewardship of resources, and care for all. Highlights include:

• The ongoing power shift and rise of the modern Indigenous economy
• Voices of leading Indigenous business leaders
• The unfolding story in the law courts that is testing Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples
• Exposure of the false media narrative of Indigenous dependency
• A new narrative, rooted in the reality on the ground, that Indigenous peoples are economic powerhouses
• On the ground examples of the emerging Indigenous economy.

Indigenomics calls for a new model of development, one that advances Indigenous self-determination, collective well-being, and reconciliation. This is vital reading for business leaders and entrepreneurs, Indigenous organizations and nations, governments and policymakers, and economists.

Awards

• 2022 First Nations Community Reads Award

Educator Information
This book is centered within the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Indigenomics is a new topic and a previously unpublished contribution to new economic thought.

This book is an important work in the emerging modern Indigenous economy. It is a guide to fully realizing the potential of the emerging Indigenous economy. It lays out the emerging power shift and rise of Indigenous economic empowerment. It acknowledges the unfolding story shaping Canada through the law courts that is testing the foundation of the Crown relationship with Indigenous peoples.

Includes interviews with six business leaders, all exceptional in their field.

Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 20 b&w illustrations