First Nations

In this second installation of the Overhead Series, Lucy Haché once again transports the reader with intimate revelations on identity by exploring both her personal and ancestral relationship to the sky and stars. Hache's prose is extraordinary in its combination of self-awareness yet unselfconscious honesty and skillful restraint, creating a sense of connection under the vastness of the stars above. Masterfully illustrated by artist Michael Joyal, his evocative astronomic drawings contribute to the overall sensory and transcendent experience.

Reviews
"[Hache] uses the stars to remember not only the tribulations of the past - Residential Schools and the loss of her traditional village - but also to remember the happiness of her grandmothers and to remember her language. Her poetic prose if full of imagery so rich that the reader can feel swept away with the power of the language." - Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2018-2019

"Indigenous People have always had a strong relationship with the sky. Here, Joyal's stark, beautiful illustrations combine perfectly with Haché's voice as she sings a story of loss, and ultimately, reclamation." --David A. Robertson, author of When We Were Alone (winner 2017 Governor General's Literary Award) and Strangers

Educator & Series Information
Recommended resource for Grades 8-12 for these subject areas: English Language Arts. 

A Kwak'wala language glossary is found at the back of the book.

This book is part of the Overhead Series.

Additional Information
80 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

The tragic consequences of systemic racism.

Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. At the heart of this story is a thirty-four-hour period in September 2008. During that day and a half Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Manitoba’s capital city, arrived in the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg’s major downtown hospital, was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection. His death reflects a particular structure of indifference born of and maintained by colonialism.

McCallum and Perry present the ways in which Sinclair, once erased and ignored, came to represent diffuse, yet singular and largely dehumanized ideas about Indigenous people, modernity, and decline in cities. This story tells us about ordinary indigeneity in the city of Winnipeg through Sinclair’s experience and restores the complex humanity denied him in his interactions with Canadian health and legal systems, both before and after his death.

Structures of Indifference completes the story left untold by the inquiry into Sinclair’s death, the 2014 report of which omitted any consideration of underlying factors, including racism and systemic discrimination.

Contents

Introduction: Thirty-Four Hours
Ch. 1: The City
Ch. 2: The Hospital
Ch. 3: Brian Sinclair
Conclusion

Reviews
“You can’t really sugarcoat the colonial genealogy that killed Brian Sinclair. Structures of Indifference is a necessary book. It offers a short, direct framing of the death of Brian Sinclair as a clear instance of racism, a racism that is the basis of Canadian settler colonialism.” – Sherene H. Razack, UCLA, author of Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody

Additional Information
192 pages | 4.25" x 7.12"

The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small northern B.C. mill town in the 1960s. They portray identical characters and action from entirely different gender and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the two separate works are inter-related coming-of-age stories, with transformation as a key theme.

The central action in both plays involves an Aboriginal girl, Roberta Bob, who escapes from a residential school and hides out by the river. In Nelson Gray’s Talker’s Town, the story is conveyed by a teenage non-Indigenous boy whose friend has had a relationship with the girl and whose attempts to hush up the affair lead to disastrous consequences.

In Marie Clements’s The Girl Who Swam Forever, the action unfolds from the perspective of the girl, who – to claim her past and secure her future – must undergo a shape-shifting transformation and meet her grandmother’s ancestral spirit in the form of a hundred-year-old sturgeon.

Employing a single setting and working with the same set of characters, the playwrights have created two radically different fictional worlds, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal. Published together, the plays form a fascinating diptych that reveals rifts between Indigenous and colonial/settler histories and provides a vehicle for cultural exchange. As a starting point for trans-cultural dialogue, this set of plays will be of interest to educators, theatre directors, and the general reader interested in the current discourse arising from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Idle No More, and the Indigenous Rights Movement happening throughout North America. Read as a set, these two plays also invite conversations about negotiating creative boundaries, particularly with respect to eco-centric politics and cultural appropriation.

Talker’s Town: cast of 5 men and 1 woman.

The Girl Who Swam Forever: cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2019-2020 resource list for grades 11 and 12 for Drama and English Language Arts.

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

The ancient landscapes of Eastern North America are reflected in the language and cultural expressions of its Indigenous peoples, the Mi'kmaq. The rhythms, sounds and patterns of their language are inextricably bound with the seasonal cycles of the animals, plants, winds, skies, waterways and trade routes.

The Language of this Land, Mi'kma'ki is an exploration of Mi'kmaw world view as expressed in language, legends, song and dance. Using imagery as codes, these include not only place names and geologic history, but act as maps of the landscape. Sable and Francis illustrate the fluid nature of reality inherent in its expression - its embodiment in networks of relationships with the landscape integral to the cultural psyche and spirituality of the Mi'kmaq.

Language has sustained the Mi'kmaq to the present day, a product of a lineage of Elders who spoke it, who danced the dances and walked this land, Mi'kma'ki, carrying its traditions forward despite centuries of cultural disruption, discrimination and degradation.

Additional Information
132 pages | 7.50" x 9.25"

The Rumour is a collection of poetry that exposes many important issues of Indigenous discrimination, poverty, drug abuse, brutal violence, love, family, and complex human relationships. As a skilled painter, Joseph A. Dandurand portrays the essence of strong connections with rich Indigenous history, culture, traditions, and family values with broad but precise strokes. The poems come from author's lifetime experience living on the Kwantlen First Nation reserve and give a true picture of the resilience and the struggles Indigenous people experience in everyday life.

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

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Karen Lee White holds the torch brightly as a new and powerful voice, her style and sensibility encompassing the traditional and the contemporary. In The Silence, with the Yukon as a canvas, she engages in a deep empathy for characters, emergent Indigenous identity, and discovery that employs dreams, spirits, songs, and journals as foundations for dialogue between cultures.

Leah Redsky is a Salteaux/Salish woman living in Vancouver who struggles with identity and the difficult intercultural dynamics of having a non-Indigenous boyfriend and working for the government. Often conflicted, at odds with her past and current life, things unravel and she suffers a breakdown—the unexpected life twist that is the key to coming to terms with her past. Through a diary, she discovers something terrible happened, yet what that is is unclear until she begins to have dream encounters with Tlingit/Tagish spirits who she knew in the north when she lived a traditional life on the land. Leah must find the strength to accept and integrate past and present so she may move into the future. She will find her power as an Indigenous woman, heal her spiritual and psychological wounds through the resolution of previous traumas, and reconcile her ability to communicate with those in the next world as she comes to understand she has been chosen to be a Medicine Woman/Elder/Cultural Leader. As an added bonus feature, the book comes with an original music CD by the author/musician.

Additional Information
176 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Includes a CD

Like the night sky above, Tipiskawi Kisik holds a myriad of tales rooted in an Ininew (Cree) perspective. An exploration of stars and constellations—and their associated mythologies—will greet you with age-old knowledge held by Indigenous people prior to European contact. Through Wilfred Buck’s creative, spiritual, and intelligent understanding of the stars, it will be easy to imagine yourself flying inside the Milky Way with Niska (the Goose) or chasing Mista Muskwa (the Great Bear), just like Tepakoop Pinesisuk (the Seven Birds). Above all, these stories can be passed on to the next generation, so they will know of the rich history, science practices, and culture of the Ininew people.

Additional Information
This is a collection of short stories (approximately 25 pages long) with supporting artwork/illustrations. While not aimed at young readers in terms of reading level, this book would support educators in their teaching of Indigenous astronomy to younger audiences, especially since each short story would work well as a read aloud and includes useful illustrations/diagrams of the night sky.

Towards a New Ethnohistory engages respectfully in cross-cultural dialogue and interdisciplinary methods to co-create with Indigenous people a new, decolonized ethnohistory. This new ethnohistory reflects Indigenous ways of knowing and is a direct response to critiques of scholars who have for too long foisted their own research agendas onto Indigenous communities. Community-engaged scholarship invites members of the Indigenous community themselves to identify the research questions, host the researchers while they conduct the research, and participate meaningfully in the analysis of the researchers’ findings.

The historical research topics chosen by the Stó:lō community leaders and knowledge keepers for the contributors to this collection range from the intimate and personal, to the broad and collective. But what principally distinguishes the analyses is the way settler colonialism is positioned as something that unfolds in sometimes unexpected ways within Stó:lō history, as opposed to the other way around.

This collection presents the best work to come out of the world’s only graduate-level humanities-based ethnohistory fieldschool. The blending of methodologies and approaches from the humanities and social sciences is a model of twenty-first century interdisciplinarity.

Reviews
“At a time when Indigenous sovereignty has come to the fore, this volume sets the ‘gold standard’ for ethical scholarship and provides a roadmap and manifesto for sensible and sensitive decolonization.”– Chris Friday, Professor of History, Western Washington University

“The strength of the collection is its appreciation for and attention to interpreting history with reference to Stó:lō interpretative frames.” – Tyler McCreary, BC Booklook 

“In a time when many scholars are looking to decolonize their approaches to research—especially when working with Indigenous communities—this book stands as a clear exemplar of community-engaged research and demonstrates how it can be done well.”– Jennifer Megan Markides, University of Calgary, Qualitative Research in Education

“Exemplifies a new, transdisciplinary approach to ethnohistory, in which the researcher recognizes not only the legacy of settler colonialism in Canada, but also the subjectivity and relativity of their own views and western knowledge as a whole. This new ethnohistory aims to work with the community at all levels of research and form and sustain relationships that last long after fieldwork is conducted. Its hope is to produce scholarship that is cutting edge, complex, accessible and relevant to members of the community.”– Daniel Sims, NICHE 

“Settler scholars concerned with disciplinary crises need look no further than this excellent anthology for models of respectful intercommunity engagement, radical methodology and pedagogy, and a paradigm for solidarity work that chooses to develop respectful relationships over moribund agonizing.”– Madeleine Reddon, Canadian Literature 

Educator Information
Table of Contents
Introduction

Ch. 1—Kinship Obligations to the Environment

Ch. 2—Relationships

Ch. 3—Crossing Paths

Ch. 4—Stó:lō Ancestral Names, Identity and the Politics of History

Ch. 5—Disturbing the Dead

Ch. 6—Food as a Window into Stó:lō Tradition and Stó:lō-Newcomer Relation

Ch. 7—’Bringing Home all That Has Left’

Ch. 8—Totem Tigers and Salish Sluggers

Ch. 9—’I Was Born a Logger’

Ch. 10—’They Are Always Looking for the Bad Stuff’

Ch. 11—Next Steps in Indigenous Community-Engaged Research

Additional Information
304 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

The supposed extinction of the Indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland in the early nineteenth century is a foundational moment in Canadian history. Increasingly under scrutiny, non-Indigenous perceptions of the Beothuk have had especially dire and far-reaching ramifications for contemporary Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Tracing Ochre reassesses popular beliefs about the Beothuk. Placing the group in global context, Fiona Polack and a diverse collection of contributors juxtapose the history of the Beothuk with the experiences of other Indigenous peoples outside of Canada, including those living in former British colonies as diverse as Tasmania, South Africa, and the islands of the Caribbean. Featuring contributions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers from a wide range of scholarly and community backgrounds, Tracing Ochre aims to definitively shift established perceptions of a people who were among the first to confront European colonialism in North America.

Following the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted Son of a Trickster comes Trickster Drift, the second book in Eden Robinson's captivating Trickster trilogy.

Jared Martin, seventeen, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: the temptation to slip is constant (thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom, Maggie). He's being stalked by David, his mom's ex--a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And Maggie, a witch as well as a badass, can't protect him like she used to because he's moved from Kitimat to Vancouver for school.

He figures that in order to be safe from both magic, addiction and David, he's got to get his grades up, find a job that doesn't involve selling weed cookies, and learn how to live with his Aunt Mave, who has been estranged from the family ever since she tried to "rescue" him as a baby from his mother. Though she smothers him with hugs, Mave is blind to the real dangers that lurk around them--the spirits and supernatural activity that fill her apartment.

As the son of a Trickster, Jared is a magnet for magic, whether he hates it or not. He sees ghosts, he sees the monster moving underneath his Aunt Georgina's skin, he sees the creature that comes out of his bedroom wall and creepily wants to suck his toes. He also still hears his father in his head, and other voices too. When David finally catches up with him, Jared can't ignore his true nature any longer. And neither can anyone else he loves.

Reviews
“As with the first book, Trickster Drift is most memorable for its set pieces. . . . The mix of sharp comedy, quick character sketches, and unsettling horror is note-perfect.” —Nathan Whitlock, Quill & Quire.

"The great strength of Trickster Drift is that humanity and empathy, but let’s be clear: there are monsters here, both human and otherwise. The novel builds to a climax that is simultaneously thrilling and thought-provoking, one which overturns much of what we have come to know. The third novel can’t come soon enough." — Robert J. Wiersema, The Star

Educator & Series Information
This is the second book in Eden Robinson's Trickster Trilogy.  It is preceded by Son of a Trickster.

Additional Information
384 pages | 5.18" x 8.00" | Paperback

In his debut poetry collection you are enough: love poems for the end of the world, Smokii Sumac has curated a selection of works from two years of a near daily poetry practice. What began as a sort of daily online poetry journal using the hashtag #haikuaday, has since transformed into a brilliant collection of storytelling drawing upon Indigenous literary practice, and inspired by works like Billy Ray Belcourt's This Wound is a World, and Tenille Campbell's #IndianLovePoems.

The poems follow the haiku format, often stringing together three lines to tell a story. With sections dealing with recovery from addiction and depression, coming home through ceremony, and of course, as the title suggests, on falling in and out of love, Sumac brings the reader through two years of life as a Ktunaxa Two-Spirit person. This collection will move you as Sumac addresses the grief of being an Indigenous person in Canada, shares timely (and sometimes hilarious) musings on consent, sex, and gender, introduces readers to people and places he has loved and learned from, and through it all, helps us all come to know that we are enough, just as we are.

Awards

• 2019 Indigenous Voices Awards Winner for Published Poetry in English

Additional Information
108 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

In this bilingual English-Innu poetry collection, Joséphine Bacon challenges our traditional notions of culture and perception, landscape and wilderness, the limits of experience, and the nature of human being. With a surreal blend of emotions and memories, A Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat portrays a complex and ever-shifting landscape of possibilities. The author passionately reveals a finely wrought sensibility, which elevates the subtle scenery of life's everyday events.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Canadian Aboriginal Voices series.

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Translated by Donald Winkler 

The first-ever collection of Anniiih/Gros Ventre narratives to be published in the Aaniiih/Gros Ventre language, this book contains traditional trickster tales and war stories. Some of these stories were collected by Alfred Kroeber in 1901, while others are contemporary, oral stories, told in the past few years. 

As with the previous titles in the First Nations Language Readers series, Aaniiih/Gros Ventre Stories comes with a complete glossary and provides some grammar usage. Delightfully illustrated, each story is accompanied by an introduction to guide the reader through the material.

The Aaniiih/Gros Ventre people lived in the Saskatchewan area in the 1700s, before being driven south during the 1800s to the Milk River area in Montana, along the USA/Canada border.

Educator & Series Information
This book is published in the Aaniiih/Gros Ventre language. An English glossary is provided at the back of the book. 

The Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools list recommends this resource for Grades 10-12 for these subjects: English Language Arts, Indigenous Language Studies, Language Studies.

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

Additional Information
120 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Compiled and Edited by Terry Brockie and Andrew Cowell