Books

Frank Surprenant is a Cree Elder from the Sucker Creek Band on Lesser Slave Lake in Alberta, Canada. He is a Pipe Carrier and Sweat Lodge Keeper. For more than 30 years Frank has been involved in Medicine Wheel Gatherings across Canada and his Teachings have been listened to by countless people. He decided it was time to set these Teachings down in writing and make them more widely accessible.

Medicine Wheel Teachings is an easy-to-follow guide explaining what a Medicine Wheel is and how it is relevant to our lives today. Frank’s vision for this book is that it will be an invaluable tool to understand the connectedness with all things – human, animal, mineral, plant, insect, and more.

The book explains the Medicine Wheel layer by layer. Each layer is illustrated with a diagram. These diagrams build up a complete Medicine Wheel. Each part explains how to find your place on the Medicine Wheel and what you can learn from it – beginning from a starting point of something as simple as your date of birth. The final section gives ideas on making a personal Medicine Wheel.

This book will act as a spark and ignite a further pursuit of Medicine Wheel Teachings and Indigenous Knowledge. Moving forward with healing, understanding and reconciliation.

Additional Information
75 Pages 

Many Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island recognize the Medicine Wheel as a sacred symbol. The Medicine Wheel has four equal areas; black, white, red and yellow. These areas represent the four directions, four seasons, four elements, four stages of life and four sacred plants. The Medicine Wheel represents unity and balance between all things, including living a healthy life mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. By understanding the teachings of the Medicine Wheel we can gain a deeper understanding of our holistic health.

Through a careful selection of teachings, followed by interactive activities, the Medicine Wheel Workbook: Finding Your Healthy Balance will encourage children to live well and find their healthy balance. This workbook can be used as a teacher resource in your classroom or by parents teaching their children at home. Lessons and activities may be photocopied to use within your classroom or home.

Educator Information
Publisher recommends this work for grades 2 to 7.  Activities are adaptable.

This book is available in French: Cahier d'exercices la roue medicinale: Trouve un equilibre sain

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74+ pages | 8.50" x 11.00"

This is the Teacher Lesson Plan that accompanies the book Meet Your Family. Includes comprehension questions, group activities, wordsearch, colouring pages etc. Mother Earth, we come from her, we go to her, without her we wouldn't be here, she gives all of us life and because of her we are all one family. In many segments of Indigenous life we speak of Mother Earth, Father Sky, Grandfather Sun, and Grandmother Moon.

Meet Your Family is a rhythmic poem that will enlighten readers on how to view these important figures and share a greater concept of seeing the world as our natural family. Meet Your Family is presented in both English and Ojibway. An additional softcover book written in Ojibway with a phonetics guide is included inside this hardcover book.

Educator Information
Includes:

– Brainstorming Activity

– Letter Writing

– Comprehension Questions

– Colouring

– Crossword Puzzle

– Word Search

The license allows the use of this lesson plan within a single school. It can be copied and shared within one school but is not to be shared beyond that.

The student resource is available here: Meet Your Family / Gikenim Giniigi'igoog

Additional Information
12 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | b&w illustrations 

“Our identity, our sense of belonging, our understanding of being human, is all connected to our relationship with the land. And our relationship with these lands span millennia. Our grandfathers and grandmothers that came before us walked these same ridges, valleys, and trails. They fished the same lakes, streams, and rivers. They cherished memories carried in the pungent smell of the fall tundra, in wafts of spruce, cottonwood, and willow smoke. They ventured throughout these lands until their final rest. Our ancestors are literally part of this land. We are part of this land.” –Evon Peter

The North is changing at an unprecedented rate as industrial development and the climate crisis disrupt not only the environment but also long-standing relationships to the land and traditional means of livelihood. Memory and Landscape: Indigenous Responses to a Changing North explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples in the Arctic have adapted to challenging circumstances, including past cultural and environmental changes. In this beautifully illustrated volume, contributors document how Indigenous communities in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia are seeking ways to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity while also embracing forces of disruption.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors bring together oral history and scholarly research from disciplines such as linguistics, archaeology, and ethnohistory. With an emphasis on Indigenous place names, this volume illuminates how the land—and the memories that are inextricably tied to it—continue to define Indigenous identity. The perspectives presented here also serve to underscore the value of Indigenous knowledge and its essential place in future studies of the Arctic.

Contributions by Vinnie Baron, Hugh Brody, Kenneth Buck, Anna Bunce, Donald Butler, Michael A. Chenlov, Aron L. Crowell, Peter C. Dawson, Martha Dowsley, Robert Drozda, Gary Holton, Colleen Hughes, Peter Jacobs, Emily Kearney-Williams, Igor Krupnik, Apayo Moore, Murielle Nagy, Mark Nuttall, Evon Peter, Louann Rank, William E. Simeone, Felix St-Aubin, and Will Stolz.

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448 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | 172 Colour Illustrations | Paperback

Authenticity Note: This work contains contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors. It is up to readers to determine if this is an authentic work for their purposes.

In a gorgeously illustrated exploration of the art of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Mischief Making disproves any notion that play is frivolous. Deploying mischievous tactics, Yahgulanaas shines a spotlight on serious topics.

Expressive and exuberant, comic and imaginative: these characteristics suffuse the work of the internationally recognized creator of Haida manga. His distinctive style stretches, twists, and flips the formlines of classic Haida art to create imagery that resonates with the graphic vitality of Asian manga. Mischief Making delineates the evolution of the artist’s visual practice into a uniquely hybrid aesthetic, uncovering its philosophical underpinnings. Initially focused on paper-based narratives, his work has expanded into painted canvases, mixed-media installations, repurposed automobile parts, large-scale public art projects, and animated forms. Yet despite its mutability, Yahgulanaas’s art is consistently engaged with contemporary cultural concerns, investigating the intersections of Indigenous and other worldviews, the politics of land, cultural heritage, and global ecological affairs.

Mischief Making reveals the artist’s deep understanding of the seriousness of play. His refiguring of lines and stories opens up a realm in which the disruption of what’s expected allows different ways of experiencing, knowing, and seeing the world to emerge.

Reviews
"This is an exciting journey through the refreshing life’s work of one of Canada’s foremost Indigenous artists. Learning from Nicola Levell’s insightful analysis opens the eyes to a wondrous world beyond stale and superseded categories of ‘tradition’, ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’! Highly recommended!" — Arnd Schneider, professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

"The Northwest Coast dances with the East and 8.5 tons of stainless steel/copper/marble, then strides to Emma Lake. A comprehensive look at the work of Yahgulanaas – we witness in text, he is doing what he can – just like the hummingbird."

Strong women dominate these reminiscences: the grandmother taught the girl whose mother refused to let her go to school, and the life-changing events they witnessed range from the ravages of the influenza epidemic of 1918–20 and murder committed in a jealous rage to the abduction of a young woman by underground spirits who on her release grant her healing powers.

A highly personal document, these memoirs are altogether exceptional in recounting the thoughts and feelings of a Cree woman as she copes with the challenges of reserve life but also, in a key chapter, with her loneliness while tending a relative’s children in a place far away from home – and, apparently just as debilitating, away from the company of other women. Her experiences and reactions throw fresh light on the lives lived by Plains Cree women on the Canadian prairies over much of the twentieth century.

The late Sarah Whitecalf (1919–1991) spoke Cree exclusively, spending most of her life at Nakiwacîhk / Sweetgrass Reserve on the North Saskatchewan River. This is where Leonard Bloomfield was told his Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree in 1925 and where a decade later David Mandelbaum apprenticed himself to Kâ-miyokîsihkwêw / Fineday, the step-grandfather in whose family Sarah Whitecalf grew up.

In presenting a Cree woman’s view of her world, the texts in this volume directly reflect the spoken word: Sarah Whitecalf’s memoirs are here printed in Cree exactly as she recorded them, with a close English translation on the facing page. They constitute an autobiography of great personal authority and rare authenticity.

Educator Information
Table of Contents
PART I Becoming a Cree woman

Ch. 1—êkosi nikî-pê-ay-itâcihonân / This has been our way of life

Ch. 2—êkosi nikî-tâs-ôy-ohpikihikawin / This is the way I was raised

Ch. 3—mêh-mêskoc nikî-pimohtahikawin / I was taken back and forth

Ch. 4—miton ê-kî-pê-na-nêhiyaw-ôhpikihikawiyân / I was truly raised as a Cree woman

PART II Being a Cree woman

Ch. 5—êwak ôm ê-kî-ay-itâcimisot awa nikâwiy / This is my mother’s own story

Ch. 6—iyikohk ê-kî-sôhkêpayik anima nipahtâkêwin / So horrible was that murder

Ch. 7—ê-nipahi-kâh-kaskêyihtamân / I was desperately lonesome

Ch. 8—pikw êkwa niya / Now I had to take charge

PART III The spiritual life

Ch. 9—ê-sîkâwîhcikêhk / Observing the mourning ritual

Ch. 10—manitow kâ-matwêhikêt / Where the spirits drum (I)

Ch. 11—manitow kâ-matwêhikêt / Where the spirits drum (II)

Ch. 12—manitow kâ-matwêhikêt / Where the spirits drum (III)

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366 pages | 6.50" x 9.75"

With more species of fungi than any other region in Canada, British Columbia is a rich playground for mushroom hunters. Now there’s Mushrooms of British Columbia, the newest handbook from the Royal BC Museum. It’s perfect for anyone wanting to know more about BC mushrooms—whether for study, harvest, photography or appreciation.

Authors and mushroom experts Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther bring a practical and playful approach to helping people quickly and confidently identify the mushrooms of British Columbia. Common names trump technical terminology, fungi are grouped by overall shape, and written descriptions of more than 350 common species are reinforced with carefully curated diagnostic images.

This is the go-to guidebook for anyone, amateur or expert, who loves to study, draw, photograph and eat BC mushrooms.

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504 pages | 5.25" x 8.50" | Paperback

In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.

“Some girls just don’t know how to die…”

Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.

Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.

Series Information
This is the first book in The Indian Lake Trilogy.

Additional Information
416 pages | 5.50" x 8.37" | Paperback

A celebratory, slyly funny, and bluntly honest take on sex and romance in NDN Country.

nedi nezu (Good Medicine) explores the beautiful space that being a sensual Indigenous woman creates - not only as a partner, a fantasy, a heartbreak waiting to happen but also as an auntie, a role model, a voice that connects to others walking the same path. From the online hookup world of DMs, double taps, and secret texts to earth-shakingly erotic encounters under the northern stars to the ever-complicated relationship Indigenous women have with mainstream society, this poetry collection doesn't shy away from depicting the gorgeous diversity in decolonized desire. Instead, Campbell creates the most intimate of spaces, where the tea is hot and a seat is waiting, surrounded by the tantalizing laughter of aunties telling stories.

These wise, jubilant poems chronicle many failed attempts at romance, with the wry humour needed to not take these heartbreaks personally, and the growth that comes from sitting in the silence of living a solo life in a world that insists everyone should be partnered up. With a knowing smile, this book side-eyes the political existence and celebrates the lived experience of an Indigenous woman falling in love and lust with those around her -but, most importantly, with herself.

nedi nezu is a smart, sensual, and scandalous collection dripping in Indigenous culture yet irresistible to anyone in thrall to the magnificent disaster that is dating, sex, and relationships.

Reviews
"Since I was hit on by someone using lines from #IndianLovePoems and immediately went out to buy it, I've been eagerly waiting for Tenille K. Campbell's next collection. What a joy and a blessing to find myself in pages as intimate as staying up late with your best friend sharing truths, as hot as meeting your next lover's gaze, and as sharp as a mean auntie. nedi nezu cements Campbell's reputation as the matriarch of decolonized desire." -Eden Robinson, author of Trickster Drift

"There are many kinds of intimacy in Tenille Campbell's delicious second collection: that of laughing lovers entangled in damp sheets under the star-strewn northern sky; that of a Dene/Metis woman dreaming her relations with the living land, its histories, and its futures; that of a formidably talented woman in all her complex contexts - poet, scholar, mother, lover - who shifts with ease between evocations of knee-trembling desire, wry humour, tender kindness, and aching loneliness. The poems are a love-language that honours the messy, meaningful complexities of sensual self-determination, the fierce assertion of an Indigenous woman's embodied and visionary power. We are lucky indeed to have the restorative gift of Campbell's work in this ever more alienating world. Read it, share it, be transformed." -Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

"Dare we all have such an opportunity to revel in the intimate oratories of Tenille K. Campbell's matriarchy. She asks us to 'know that we are in ceremony' as she undertakes an album of sensual and sexual vignettes rinsed clean of seeds in gentle spring waters. Alternatively, she interrogates fatphobia, Indigenous masculinities, academia, heteropatriarchy, and untangles the ways in which poetry hinges on the pervasive in the stratosphere of social media. Campbell shows us yet again why Indigeneity is wholly and irrevocably erotic by nature." -Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

Educator Information
Caution: Mature language. 

Additional Information
92 pages | 6.00" x 8.00"

Modern Indigenous cuisine from the renowned Native foods educator and former chef of Mitsitam Native Foods Café at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian

From Freddie Bitsoie, the former executive chef at Mitsitam Native Foods Café at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and James Beard Award–winning author James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen is a celebration of Indigenous cuisine. Accompanied by original artwork by Gabriella Trujillo and offering delicious dishes like Cherrystone Clam Soup from the Northeastern Wampanoag and Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin from the Pueblo peoples, Bitsoie showcases the variety of flavor and culinary history on offer from coast to coast, providing modern interpretations of 100 recipes that have long fed this country.

Recipes like Chocolate Bison Chili, Prickly Pear Sweet Pork Chops, and Sumac Seared Trout with Onion and Bacon Sauce combine the old with the new, holding fast to traditions while also experimenting with modern methods. In this essential cookbook, Bitsoie shares his expertise and culinary insights into Native American cooking and suggests new approaches for every home cook. With recipes as varied as the peoples that inspired them, New Native Kitchen celebrates the Indigenous heritage of American cuisine.

Reviews
“To seek and understand Indigenous foods is to dwell in the lands of our ancestors, to taste the earth and all that grows, from roots to leaf, from field and stream, to even the birds of the sky. Freddie not only has been immersed in this knowledge but has been a true, joyous steward of Native culture through food. This is going to be a staple in my house and will be a great gift for friends, family, and colleagues! I love Freddie!” — Irene Bedard, Iñupiat, Yupik, Métis-Cree, actor, activist, storyteller

“I have always used food as my entry point to learning more about cultures both outside of and within my own—and in New Native Kitchen, Freddie Bitsoie is an exceptional guide, showing off the vibrant, regional native cooking of what is now the United States, giving context to the people who created it while showing off the beautiful ingredients of a truly exciting and diverse cuisine.” — Noah Galuten, chef and author of forthcoming The Don’t Panic Pantry Cookbook

Additional Information
288 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | 150 Color Photos | Hardcover 

A neurotic party girl's coming-of-age memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.

Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can’t stay sober. She’s terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired.

Then, in the autumn following her twenty-seventh birthday, an abnormal lump discovered in her left breast serves as the catalyst for a journey of rigorous self-questioning. Waiting on a diagnosis, she begins an intellectual assessment of her life, desperate to justify a short existence full of dumb choices. Armed with her philosophy degree and angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by and winds up writing a searingly honest memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.

Reviews
"This delightful book, appropriately enough, works like your favourite mixtape. It's got everything you want, and somehow it all fits. The arrangement is unexpected but, in retrospect, seems obviously right. Here is softness and pain, intimacy and revulsion, flourishing and sickness. And McGowan-Ross just sounds so good." — Sasha Chapin, author of All The Wrong Moves

"Tara McGowan-Ross is an unpretentious poet and philosopher weaving together meaning from the pain, grief, heartache, as well as simple joy of being alive. Nothing Will Be Different is a meditation on amor fati: the love of fate, the love of what is. By being with all of it: trauma, profound loss, the reality of death, addiction, precarity, the gig economy, hard work, love both dizzying and secure, sex, and insatiable desire, Tara shows us that transformation comes not through a battle against what is, but from the willingness to be changed by it." — Clementine Morrigan, author of Love Without Emergency

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240 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

The writing and relations between Syilx women and settler women, largely of European descent, who came to inhabit the British Columbia southern interior from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Educator Information
Okanagan Women’s Voices features the writing and stories of seven women: Susan Moir Allison (1845-1937), Josephine Shuttleworth (1866-1950), Eliza Jane Swalwell (1868-1944), Marie Houghton Brent (1870-1968), Hester Emily White (1877-1963), Mourning Dove (1886-1936) and Isabel Christie MacNaughton (1915-2003).

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6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

A collection of authentic Orange Shirt Day books from the founder of the Orange Shirt Day movement, Phyllis Webstad. Package includes four books and three accompanying lesson plans, The Orange Shirt Story, Phyllis's Orange Shirt, Orange Shirt Day and Beyond the Orange Shirt Story.

Educator Information
Includes picture books for children, as well as books for young adults.  Review individual titles for more information about each include:

• The Orange Shirt Story
• Phyllis's Orange Shirt
• Orange Shirt Day
• Beyond the Orange Shirt Story

Additional Information
9.00" x 12.00"

Outdoor School features recent works of contemporary environmental art and writing by more than twenty-five Canadian and Indigenous artists who propose radical new ways of thinking and being outdoors together.

For more than a decade, the Outdoor School project has provided a framework for interdisciplinary artists to come together and share projects that reimagine ways of relating with the landscape.

The experiential and community-based art projects described in Outdoor School present an alternative to scientific, commercial and colonial conceptions of land and nature in the face of climate change and mass extinction. These art practices include activities like mushroom foraging, water witching, trespassing, pumpkin-boat sailing, cloud identifying, ravine running, honey extracting, spell conjuring, rabbit hunting, coyote walking and more. The project calls attention to creative, counter-cultural works that are focused on education, community and place, and blur the boundaries between art and life, nature and culture.

Featuring interviews, essays and over 150 photographs, Outdoor School is an important contribution to discussions of contemporary art and ecology, foregrounding work that is marginal and ephemeral by nature.

Artists featured in Outdoor School include Alana Bartol, Diane Borsato, Bill Burns, Carolina Caycedo, Sameer Farooq, FASTWÜRMS, Ayumi Goto, Maggie Groat, Gabrielle Hill, Peter Morin, Public Studio, Helen Reed, Genevieve Robertson, Jamie Ross, Aislinn Thomas, Vibrant Matter, Jay White, Tania Willard, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson and D'Arcy Wilson.

Educator Information

Additional Information
192 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | colour photographs

Authenticity Note: This work has received the Authentic Indigenous Text label because of the Indigenous contributions to this work.  Non-Indigenous contributors are also featured, and the editors are not Indigenous.  It is up to readers to determine if this resource is authentic for their purposes.

The exhaustive, definitive history and stories of the Cega‘ K´i na Nakoda Oyáté (Carry The Kettle Nakoda First Nation), told by the people themselves.

Born out of a meticulous, well-researched historical and current traditional land-use study led by Cega̔ K´iɳna Nakoda Oyáté (Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation), Owóknage is the first book to tell the definitive, comprehensive story of the Nakoda people (formerly known as the Assiniboine), in their own words. From pre-contact to current-day life, from thriving on the Great Plains to forced removal from their traditional, sacred lands in the Cypress Hills via a Canadian “Trail of Tears” starvation march to where they now currently reside south of Sintaluta, Saskatchewan, this is their story of resilience and resurgence.

Educator Information
Based on a comprehensive traditional and current land-use study and history of the Carry The Kettle First Nation, combining oral history from Nation Elders and historical/anthropological research.

The destruction of the bison on the Canadian plains, disease, and Canada’s various damaging colonial policies brought profound changes and hardships to the Nakoda; this book chronicles the changes they faced and illustrates their endurance throughout history.

Most of the victims of the Cypress Hill Massacre were ancestors of the Carry The Kettle Nakoda First Nation, and many were forced out of their traditional lands on a Canadian Trail of Tears in 1882–83.

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