Fiction

This beautiful, 93 page Grassroots Anthology Volume I, is now available in a revised, paperback-sized version.

With this anthology we hope to inspire young people to develop and pursue their own creative aspirations so they may also share their stories.

Strong, sassy women and hard-luck, hard-headed men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by award-winning author Thomas King. Alberta, Eli, Lionel and others are coming to the Blackfoot reservation for the Sun Dance. There they will encounter four Indian elders and their companion, the trickster Coyote—and nothing in the small town of Blossom will be the same again...

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480 pages

A story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger . . . and a band of marauding raccoons.

Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens. Until the day a handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle – and turns Otter Lake completely upside down. Maggie, the Reserve’s chief, is swept off her feet, but Virgil, her teenage son, is less than enchanted. Suspicious of the stranger’s intentions, he teams up with his uncle Wayne – a master of aboriginal martial arts – to drive the stranger from the Reserve. And it turns out that the raccoons are willing to lend a hand.

Reviews
“A near-perfect debut, a masterful mythic-comedy balancing contemporary issues and realities with magic and history. . . . Motorcycles & Sweetgrass is a trickster story, but it’s also a fundamentally human account of individuals and of a people struggling to find a place for themselves in the world. . . . A broad, bawdy, raucous, deeply felt and utterly involving narrative, a genuine pleasure to read. . . . Motorcycles & Sweetgrass positively crackles with life, love and magic. What more can you ask of a book?”  — Robert J. Wiersema, Edmonton Journal

“Drew Hayden Taylor’s got no qualms about poking fun at his Native roots, and that’s what makes Motorcycles & Sweetgrass such a pleasure. It’s playful yet soulful, with a narrative that keeps those pages turning. . . . A fun, rollicking book, and Taylor’s voice is fresh and unique.” — NOW (Toronto)

“Taylor brings a modern twist to ancient native folklore. Motorcycles & Sweetgrass is a charming story about the importance of balance and belief—and a little bit of magic—in everyone’s life.”— Quill & Quire

“If the great Ojibway trickster Nanabush wrote fiction, I imagine he’d write just like Drew Hayden Taylor. You will find much sadness just below the laughs, and sly humour masked by sorrow. A wisdom exists in these pages that only comes from someone who writes from his heart.” — Joseph Boyden

“Fast-paced, uproariously funny and genuinely thrilling. Drew Hayden Taylor is one of Canada’s finest and funniest writers.”— Ian Ferguson, author of Village of the Small Houses

“Funny, heartfelt, hopeful and illuminating. Motorcycles & Sweetgrass made me laugh and made me think, sometimes in the same sentence. Drew Hayden Taylor is a master storyteller.”— Terry Fallis, author of The Best Laid Plans

“Drew Hayden Taylor has woven an epic tale of magic, mystery and charm for the world to discover in Motorcycles & Sweetgrass. This is a novel to savor. A complete delight!” — Richard Van Camp, author of The Moon of Letting Go and The Lesser Blessed

Educator Information
Grades 11-12 BC English First Peoples resource for the unit What Creates Family?

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360 pages | 5.19" x 7.99"

Referencing a classic Haida oral narrative, this stunning full-colour graphic novel documents the powerful story of Red, a leader so blinded by revenge that he leads his community to the brink of war and destruction.

Set in the islands off the northwest coast of B.C., it tells the tale of orphan Red and his sister, Jaada. When raiders attack their village, Red, still a boy, escapes dramatically. But Jaada is whisked away. The loss of Jaada breeds a seething anger, and Red sets out to find his sister and exact revenge on her captors.

Red blends traditional Haida imagery into a Japanese manga-styled story. Tragic and timeless, it is reminiscent of such classic stories as Oedipus Rex, Macbeth and King Lear.

This innovation in contemporary storytelling consists of 108 pages of hand-painted illustrations. When arranged in a specific order, the panels of the narrative create a Haida formline image four metres long. The sequence for this complex design is displayed on the inside jacket.

Educator & Series Information
Haida manga is a contemporary style of Haida comics and print cartoons that explores the elements of both traditional North Pacific Indigenous arts and narrative, while also adapting contemporary techniques of artistic design from the western portion of the North Pacific, namely the Japanese manga from which its name derives.

This book is available in French: Red: Un manga haïda 

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120 pages | 8.00" x 8.75"

The short stories celebrate healing through modern day rituals that honour ancestry. Powerful voices are spoken, a violent aboriginal gangster has an astonishing spiritual experience, a single mother is protected, and a group of young men pay tribute to a friend. Stories are set in the NWT, Vancouver, and rural BC.

"Spotting her target, the lady in uniform took Gmiwan by the arm and began to shuffle him toward Mary. Mary gave herself a shake to break the spell, and with Sonny pasted to her side, took a few steps forward. Obviously something had happened to Gmiwan."

Moving back through three decades, through World War II, the Depression and years spent in the horrific residential Mohawk Institute, Where Mary Went is the first half of a two-volume work of a brilliant and compelling new First Nations storyteller. This is the story of Mary Fisher, an engaging young girl who turns into a tough yet tender young wife and mother. It is also the story of the men in her life: her father, a proud and gentle man who loses his children through no fault of his own; her husband Gmiwan, a sensitive artist not made for the rigors of war; and Tom Dunsby, the mayor of Jackson, whose unrequited love for Mary knows no bounds. Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of fears of displacement, hunger and death, Where Mary Went is a sensual novel of relationships that offers up inspiring revelations, heart-breaking twists and boundless expression of spirit.

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A collection of articles that examine many of the struggles that Aboriginal women have faced, and continue to face, in Canada. Sections include: Profiles of Aboriginal Women; Identity; Territory; Activism; Confronting Colonialism; the Canadian Legal System; and Indigenous Knowledges.

Photographs and poetry are also included.

There are few books on Aboriginal women in Canada; this anthology provides a valuable addition to the literature and fills a critical gap in the fields of Native Studies, Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies.

Set on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine—the first novel by bestselling, National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich—is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.

With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.

Filled with humor, magic, injustice and betrayal, Erdrich blends family love and loyalty in a stunning work of dramatic fiction.

James Nathan and Jake Noland have been best friends for their entire lives. Like most residents in their small northern Gwich’in community, they like to get drunk, get high and sleep around. It helps them forget the past—a horrific past full of painful memories. At times just one bullet to the temple away from a self-inflicted death, James and Jake fumble through life, tormented and haunted by the demons of their residential school abuse.

The decision by one man to publicly disclose his abuse causes upheaval within the community and forces other victims to consider their options: either share their secret and begin healing, or maintain their silence and suffer alone. Raw and gripping, Porcupines and China Dolls is impossible to put down.

Educator Information
Resource for English First Peoples 11-12.

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312 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing “the same story over and over again” in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck.

A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack of proper identification. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, become forever changed.

Ragged Company is a journey into both the future and the past. Richard Wagamese deftly explores the nature of the comforts these friends find in their ideas of “home,” as he reconnects them to their histories.

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384 pages | 5.20" x 7.99"

Poetic tales that unfold through the voice of ê-kwêskît, Turn-Around Woman--tales imbued with vital themes of Indigenous experience: culture, language, colonialism, residential schools and more. The poems of The Crooked Good are threaded throughout with names, phrases, and verses in Cree; its personal stories framed within the fireside tales of Rolling Head Woman, who is both nightmare and culture hero. Evocative, moving, and powerful poetry from a master poet.

Know my child, the mountains make your dreams. Keep decent and proper.
Serve your guest tea, scones, Never forget you’re Cree.

Reviews
“For those who might not know, you cannot be a student of Indigenous poetry without reading the words of Louise Halfe, and The Crooked Good is one of those books that needs to be near the top of your reading list. And for those, like myself, who have returned to this book many years after the first reading, what a gift and a blessing. Once again, after all these years. There are stories that are fossilized in their time and place, and then there are those stories that renew themselves and renew us, too, each time we return to them. Louise Halfe has given us one of those renewing stories. It is, too, a story about stories: how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, as individuals and cultures, can enrich our sense of self with the sacred, or how they can threaten to destroy and consume the good in us. Sometimes when the stories we tell ourselves have been colonised by others, we become meat in their gaping jaws. And then there is The Crooked Good, a song-story of violence and resilience, of lust and love, of the persistence of what’s ancient and the necessity of the ancient for our contemporary lives. Though the path we walk be a crooked one, always too, it is a good path to walk. Hay hay, Sky Dancer!”—Randy Lundy, author of Field Notes for the Self

“Cree mythoi animate Louise Halfe’s lustrous poetry. They are the existential materials of her works and worlds, and in their arrangements of consciousness, they assemble the present. All presents. In Halfe’s texts, one is compelled/pressed by these forms of apprehending. First, they structure the poetry and then they restructure the reader, the listener. Line after relentless line, thought after shattering thought, one encounters all that is lethal and all that is generative. The brilliant power of Halfe’s poetry is that it contains both the wound and its medicine—alive.”—Dionne Brand, poet, novelist, essayist.

“The best poetry makes the world larger, more vivid. It makes our crooked good hearts expand with understanding, compassion and vital lifeforce even while it tells us how it is, how it can be. This book enlarges. It expands our world. Energizes. More than good, in this brilliant and moving collection, Sky Dancer Louise B. Halfe makes the good larger.”—Gary Barwin, author of Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

Educator Information
This brand new third edition (2021) has been beautifully redesigned and includes a new foreword by Kimberley Anderson, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Relationships at the University of Guelph.

Louise Bernice Halfe was named Parliamentary Poet for Canada in February of 2021.

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155 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 3rd Edition

When Blue Bird and her grandmother leave their family’s camp to gather beans for the long, threatening winter, they inadvertently avoid the horrible fate that befalls the rest of the family. Luckily, the two women are adopted by a nearby Dakota community and are eventually integrated into their kinship circles. Ella Cara Deloria’s tale follows Blue Bird and her daughter, Waterlily, through the intricate kinship practices that created unity among her people.

Waterlily, published after Deloria’s death and generally viewed as the masterpiece of her career, offers a captivating glimpse into the daily life of the nineteenth-century Sioux. This new edition features an introduction by Susan Gardner and an index.

Irreverently funny and brutally honest Governor General's Award-winning play about loss and redemption. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

Taylor's powerful, haunting and incredibly entertaining stories in Fearless Warrior are a full frontal assault on stereotypes of all kinds--an edifying affirmation of humanity unlike anything else. More than anything else, these stories shine with a wisdom, an understanding of the human condition, that is rare among writers courageous enough to take on these themes.

Internationally acclaimed as a playwright, screen-writer, comic and sardonic commentator on the endless gaffs, absurdities and the profound and painful misunderstandings that continue to characterize social interactions between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples, Taylor’s stories in Fearless Warriors are a full frontal assault on stereotypes of all kinds and an edifying affirmation of humanity unlike anything else in fiction.

Each of these stories is as remarkably different in terms of its unique narrative tone, origin and direction, as are the characters of his plays, making Taylor’s singular collection of fictions quite intentionally much more than the sum of their parts. By degrees dramatic, shocking, tender, chilling, affirmative and tragic, each story takes on a different cliché or “common sense understanding” of inter-racial and inter-cultural relations, all of them suffused with the incomparable wit, gentle and generous humour, mercilessly critical edge and profound emotional empathy of a master story-teller.

No quarter is given, nor is it taken—Native stereotypes of White culture are as fair a species of game for this writer as any other. Ultimately, each of these narratives becomes a bridge of understanding between cultures, giving its readers access to the seemingly inexplicable actions of characters at the distant edges of our imaginations—even just one of these stories, “The Boy in the Ditch,” does more to illuminate the tragedy of the pre-teen gasoline sniffing culture of Davis Inlet than any number of Royal Commissions will ever do.

Educator Information
Grades 10-12 BC English First Peoples resource for the units How Do We Define Ourselves and Place Conscious Learning - Exploring Texts through Local Landscape.

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192 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" 

Kiss of the Fur Queen is a powerful and beautiful tale of siblings and tricksters, culture and trauma, and finding yourself in a world that tries to tell you who you are.

Born into a magical Cree world in snowy northern Manitoba, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis are all too soon torn from their family and thrust into the hostile world of a Catholic residential school. Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are abused by priests.

As young men, estranged from their own people and alienated from the culture imposed upon them, the Okimasis brothers fight to survive. But wherever they go, the Fur Queen--a wily, shape-shifting trickster--watches over them as they fulfill their destiny to become artists.

Educator Information
Grade 11/12 English First Peoples resource for the unit Further Steps toward Reconciliation - Understanding Residential Schools through Text.

Note: This novel contains mature and challenging material (profanity, coarse language, depictions of sex, sexual abuse, violence, etc.). 

This resource is also available in French: Champion et Ooneemeetoo.

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328 pages | 5.17" x 7.98"