Personal Narratives

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.” Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.”

Awards

• 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize
• 2018 Indigenous Voices Award - Most Significant Work of Poetry in English

Reviews
"In This Wound is a World, love answers heartbreak, “history lays itself bare” (42) and a world glimmering with decolonial love and queer, Indigenous possibilities is split open. This is poetry at its brightest. It is electric, profound, necessary work. Belcourt bends genre, challenging the cage of colonialism through a poetics of intimacy. It is a collection unafraid to ask questions, exploring grief, desire, queer sexuality and Indigeneity with tender honesty. Belcourt asks us to consider the ways Indigenous bodies can be simultaneously unbound and “rendered again,” (40) how worlds can be made and unmade. These are poems to be returned to again and again with reverence." - PRISM International

Additional Information
64 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

"Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on--and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It's a good way to travel; eventually, I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end." - Richard Wagamese, Embers

In this carefully curated selection of everyday reflections, Richard Wagamese finds lessons in both the mundane and sublime as he muses on the universe, drawing inspiration from working in the bush--sawing and cutting and stacking wood for winter as well as the smudge ceremony to bring him closer to the Creator. Embers is perhaps Richard Wagamese's most personal volume to date. Honest, evocative and articulate, he explores the various manifestations of grief, joy, recovery, beauty, gratitude, physicality and spirituality--concepts many find hard to express. But for Wagamese, spirituality is multifaceted. Within these pages, readers will find hard-won and concrete wisdom on how to feel the joy in the everyday things. Wagamese does not seek to be a teacher or guru, but these observations made along his own journey to become, as he says, "a spiritual bad-ass," make inspiring reading.

Additional Information
140 pages | 6.00" x 8.00"

The legacy of residential schools has haunted Canadians, yet little is known about the day and public schools where most Indigenous children were sent to be educated. In What We Learned, two generations of Tsimshian students – elders born in the 1930s and 1940s and middle-aged adults born in the 1950s and 1960s – add their recollections of attending day schools in northwestern British Columbia to contemporary discussions of Indigenous schooling in Canada. Their stories also invite readers to consider traditional Indigenous views of education that conceive of learning as a lifelong experience that takes place across multiple contexts.

Reviews
"Helen Raptis has written an important book about Tsimshian educational history. It is also a book about building research relationships with Indigenous communities. It is a work that recognizes, implicitly, that Indigenous history does not run in a straight line but is more liquid and circular. The journey to understand the Indigenous past requires deft canoe navigation through riptides and crosscurrents, past colonization’s half-submerged debris. Landing on the beach, one discovers no conventional separation between past, present, and future. There are only the stories—the stories and the sacred landscape." — Michael Marker, University of British Columbia, History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 57 No. 1, February 2017

Educator Information
Helen Raptis is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. The members of the Tsimshian Nation are Mildred Roberts, Wally Miller, Sam Lockerby, Verna Inkster, Clifford Bolton, Harvey Wing, Charlotte Guno, Don Roberts Junior, Steve Roberts, Richard Roberts, Carol Sam, and Jim Roberts

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

This is a story about the fur trade and First Nations, and the development of northern Canada, seen and experienced not only through Leonard Flett's eyes, but also through the eyes of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.The lives of indigenous people in remote areas of northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 1970s are examined in detail. Flett's successful career with both the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company provides an insight into the dying days of the fur trade and the rise of a new retail business tailored to First Nations.

An expression of the people, culture, ceremony and songs along the Fraser, River of Salmon Peoples captures what the Fraser River, and its most valuable resource, the salmon, means to First Nations communities along its basin. The result of nine community engagements, extensive research over two years, and illuminating photographs and artwork, this book includes the oral narratives of each community along the river. While capturing timeless Indigenous stories and legends about the salmon and the river, this book is also an exploration of the future of the salmon and waters of the Fraser River.

Authenticity Note: After a team of researchers gathered a wealth of information from and about the indigenous cultures along the Fraser River, Jeannette Armstrong and Gerry William co-edited River of Salmon Peoples.

This extraordinary story of courage and faith is based on the actual experiences of three girls who fled from the repressive life of Moore River Native Settlement, following along the rabbit-proof fence back to their homelands. Assimilationist policy dictated that these girls be taken from their kin and their homes in order to be made white. Settlement life was unbearable with its chains and padlocks, barred windows, hard cold beds, and horrible food. Solitary confinement was doled out as regular punishment. The girls were not even allowed to speak their language. Of all the journeys made since white people set foot on Australian soil, the journey made by these girls born of Aboriginal mothers and white fathers speaks something to everyone.

Educator Information
Grades 11-12 English First Peoples Resource.

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.00" x 7.75"

For three months in 1987 Michael Poole guided his canoe along the confused and confusing coast of the Inside Passage, living through the sudden gales, opaque fog banks and treacherous rapids. But this book is not merely a sea odyssey. It is also a tale of encounters with the extraordinary people who make their lives in a place where solitude and natural beauty are the bottom line. Michael Poole is an award-winning filmmaker. He lives in North Vancouver and on the Sechelt Peninsula.

Additional Information
258 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

In One Native Life, Wagamese looks back down the road he has travelled in reclaiming his identity and talks about the things he has learned as a human being, a man and an Ojibway in his fifty-two years. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, attending a sacred bundle ceremony or meeting Pierre Trudeau, he tells these stories in a healing spirit. Through them, he celebrates the learning journey his life has been.

Free of rhetoric and anger despite the horrors he has faced, Wagamese’s prose resonates with a peace that has come from acceptance. Acceptance is an Aboriginal principle, and he has come to see that we are all neighbours here. One Native Life is his tribute to the people, the places and the events that have allowed him to stand in the sunshine and celebrate being alive.

Reviews
"One Native Life contains sixty-five stories that are divided into four books: Ahki (Earth), Ishskwaday (Fire),Nibi (Water), andIshpiming (Universe). From this diverse selection emerge accounts not only of disappointment and racial discrimination but also of the transformative power of love and caring." - Sean Carleton, The British Columbia Quarterly

Educator Information
Suggested Grades: 9-12
ABPBC

Grades 10-12 BC English First Peoples Resource for units on First Peoples' Story and Place-Conscious Learning.

Additional Information
272 pages | 5.63" x 8.75"

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.

In this series of linked personal essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.

Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Reviews
"Robin Kimmerer . . . has written as good a book as you will find on a natural history subject. You will want to go outside and get on your knees with a hand lens and begin to probe this Lilliputian world she describes so beautifully." — Seattle Times

"It takes a certain kind of courage and passion to write an entire book on mosses . . . Kimmerer admirably rises to the challenge in her first book, Gathering Moss, opening up a world of rich surprises in the process. What we learn about mosses is breathtaking." — Orion

"An interesting account, both personal and exact, of an area of the vegetable kingdom that I often do not even notice . . . [a] passionate emphasis on something often most successfully appreciated by viewing through a microscope." — Jamaica Kincaid, The New York Times Book Review

"Bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer may well be the next Annie Dillard. She is a wonderful wordsmith as well as a scientist, teacher, mother, and daughter of the Potawatomi tribe. Kimmerer brings all these levels of perception to the miniature landscapes she describes in this collection of essays." — The Olympian

Additional Information
176 pages | 6.25" x 9.00" | Line Drawings, Index | Paperback

I Am Woman represents my personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty, written during a time when that struggle was not over. My original intention was to empower Native women to take to heart their own personal struggle for Native feminist being. It remains my attempt to present a Native woman's sociological perspective on the impacts of colonialism on us, as women, and on my self personally.

Reviews
One of the foremost Native writers in North America, Lee Maracle links her First Nations heritage with feminism in this visionary book. "Maracle has created a book of true wisdom, intense pride, sisterhood and love." -Milestones Review

Additional Information
146 pages | 8.23" x 8.52"