Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 8 - 12 2014-2015

A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, an exploration emerges of the roles of woman within local as well as historic literary and global situations. The poems draw together diverse figures from world literature, world religions and myths to lay open the experience of human beings within the “brown-feminine.” Identifying and synthesizing connections across a wide palette of human experience, this collection challenges the divisions of personal and global, indigenous and “everyone else,” all the while celebrating both the humanity and the divinity of the Lady. Playful, erotic and occasionally harrowing, this collection bundles together experimental and inspirational work from a longstanding voice of conscience in Canadian letters. Once again, Arnott carries us into the most intimate terrain, casts her net widely, catches us up.

Aboriginal rights do not belong to the broader category of universal human rights because they are grounded in the particular practices of aboriginal people. So argues Peter Kulchyski in this provocative book from the front lines of indigenous people’s struggles to defend their culture from the ongoing conquest of their traditional lands. Kulchyski shows that some differences are more different than others, and he draws a border between bush culture and mall culture, between indigenous people’s mode of production and the totalizing push of state-led capitalism.

Aboriginal Rights Are Not Human Rights provides much needed conceptual and historical analysis of aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada, and offers concrete suggestions to transform the current policy paradigm into one that supports and invigorates indigenous cultures in a contemporary context.

In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson’s characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive the historical and ongoing injustices of racism and colonialism. Told with voices that are rarely recorded but need to be heard, and incorporating the language and history of her people, Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love is a profound, important, and beautiful book of fiction.

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148 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

maskisina: A Guide to Northern-Style Métis Moccasins is a follow-up to the highly successful wapikwaniy: A Beginner’s Guide to Métis Floral Beadwork. Much like wapikwaniy, maskisina guides readers, step-by-step, on how to create their very own moccasins. It contains detailed photographs along with each step. It also includes a historic overview of moccasins by Sherry Farrell Racette. Patterns for cutting the correct sizes for the soles and vamps are included in the book.

Educator Information
Grade Level: Secondary/Post Secondary/Adult

Contemporary, imaginative interpretations of First Nations cuisine, including lighter, healthier, and more nutritious versions of traditional recipes.

Native American cuisine comes of age in this elegant, contemporary collection that reinterprets and updates traditional Native recipes with modern, healthy twists. Andrew George Jr. was head chef for Aboriginal foods at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver; his imaginative menus reflect the diverse new culinary landscape while being mindful of an ages-old reverence for the land and sea, reflecting the growing interest in a cuisine that is rapidly moving into the mainstream to become the "next big thing" among food trends. Andrew also works actively at making Native foods healthier and more nutritious; his recipes are lighter, less caloric, and include Asian touches, such as bison ribs with Thai spices, and a sushi roll with various cooked fish wrapped in nori. Other dishes include venison barley soup, wild berry crumble, sea asparagus salad, and buffalo tourtiere.

Full of healthy, delicious, and thoroughly North American fare, Modern Native Feasts is the first Aboriginal foods cookbook to go beyond the traditional and take a step into the twenty-first century.

Reviews
"Modern Native Feasts fuses traditional recipe preparations like brining, smoking, and curing with using fresh, local, seasonal ingredients readily available in many supermarkets. Meals reflect a diverse new culinary landscape built on an age-old reverence for the land and sea." — Gastrotraveling.com, December 2013

"The resulting recipes are unfussy yet often elegant, perfect for either a potlatch or a potluck ... George keeps his intros blessedly short, while still telling the background of each dish; the cookbook is beautifully designed, with a rustic look that's carried throughout." — The Oregonian, November 2013

"Whatever you have in mind when you conjure up the image created by the title Modern Native Feasts, you won't be imagining anything quite like this. Chef George has taken the best of his indigenous Canadian culture and traditions and fused it with his modern training, plus a generous helping of very real talent and created a cuisine that, while it may be distinctly his, could feasibly represent a beautiful -- and delicious -- future ... This is sophisticated contemporary food perfectly informed by the chef's heritage and own sensibilities." ―January Magazine 

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192 pages | 8.00" x 9.00"

Pīsim Finds Her Miskanow is about a week in the life of Pīsim, a young Cree woman living in the late 1600s. The 1993 archaeological excavation of the remains of a woman and her belongings from Nagami Bay at South Indian Lake, Manitoba, was the inspiration for the story. In the story, Pīsim begins to both recognize her purpose for being and develop her gifts for fulfilling her purpose. This beautifully illustrated book includes drawings of artifacts, definitions and descriptions, historical facts and information, Cree songs and words, maps, recipes, and much more.

Short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Banff Mountain Book Award and winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction.

With Enbridge Inc.'s Northern Gateway proposal nearing approval, supertankers loaded with two million barrels of bitumen each may soon join herring, humpbacks and salmon on their annual migration through the tumultuous waters off British Columbia's Central Coast -- a place no oil tanker has been before. The contentious project has aroused intense opposition, pitting local First Nations, a majority of British Columbia's urban population, and environmental groups across the country against an international consortium led by Enbridge and backed by a federal government determined to make Canada an "energy superpower."

Arno Kopecky sails into the controversy aboard a forty-one-foot cutter for a closer look at a legendary region with a knife at its throat. Without any prior sailing experience, Kopecky and his sailing companion -- photographer Ilja Herb -- struggle to keep afloat as they make their way through a volatile labyrinth of fjords, inlets, and evergreen islands known as the Great Bear Rainforest. This amphibious ecosystem is among the last great wildernesses on earth, housing a quarter of the world's temperate rainforest and a thriving ocean environment that together host forty per cent more biomass per hectare than the Amazon. But as Kopecky soon discovers, the politics of Big Oil and First Nations can be every bit as treacherous to navigate as the shifting currents and hidden reefs for which the Northern Gateway tanker route is known.

In this rich evocation of ecology, culture, and history, Kopecky meditates on the line between impartial reportage and environmental activism, ultimately arguing that there are some places oil tankers should never go.

Caution: Includes some profanity and use of marijuana.

In the early 1930s, Oscar Wolf, a 13-year-old Native from the Chippewas of Rama Indian Reserve, sets fire to the business section of his village north of Toronto in a fit of misguided rage against white society, inadvertently killing his grandfather and a young maid. Tortured by guilt and fearful of divine retribution, Oscar sets out on a lifetime quest for redemption.

His journey takes him to California where he works as a fruit picker and prizefighter during the Great Depression, to the Second World War where he becomes a decorated soldier, to university where he excels as a student and athlete, and to the diplomatic service in the postwar era where he causes a stir at the United Nations in New York and in Colombia and Australia.

Beset by an all-too-human knack for making doubtful choices, Oscar discovers that peace of mind is indeed hard to find in this saga of mid-20th-century aboriginal life in Canada and abroad that will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and ages.

First Nations are the fastest growing population in the country. There are thousands upon thousands of young First Nations people growing up today who, together with the kind of individuals whose stories are told in this book, represent a future for this country that is brighter than it has been for a long, long time.--from the foreword by Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations

Since 2004, journalist Katherine Palmer Gordon has interviewed dozens of young First Nations people living in British Columbia--artists and community leaders, comedians and consultants, musicians and lawyers, people who are household names and those known only within their own communities. We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us collects sixteen candid stories gleaned from those interviews, stories of people who share an unshakeable belief in the importance of their cultural heritage to their well-being, to their success at what they do, and to their everyday lives.

Included are Kim Baird, former chief of the Tsawwassen First Nation; Lisa Webster-Gibson, spoken word artist and rock-and-roll drummer with Delaware-Mohawk and Scottish-Canadian heritage who lives and works on Gabriola Island as an Environmental Assessment Professional; and John Marston (Qap'u'luq), an artist and storyteller from the Chemainus First Nation who learned to carve from his father. "What I put into each piece," he says, in his interview with Gordon, "is 100 percent me."

Shattering stereotypes, We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us gathers the thoughts and hopes of young native people living in twenty-first century Canada. Each has a compelling, meaningful story that deserves to be told, understood and, above all, celebrated.

Authenticity Note: The author of this book is not Indigenous; however, those who contributed the stories for the book are Indigenous.  It is up to readers to determine if this will work as an authentic text for their purposes.

One of the first lines of X, Shane Rhodes' sixth book of poetry, is a warning: "this book of verse demands more of verse, this book demands perversity."

In X, Rhodes takes poetry from the comfortable land of the expected to places it has seldom been. Writing through the detritus of Canada's colonization and settlement, Rhodes' writes poems to and with Canada's original documents of finding and keeping. He writes a poem to each of the eleven numbered treaties (the Post Confederation Treaties between many of Canada's First Nations and the Queen of England)--he writes to the fonts he finds in Treaty 5, the river he finds in Treaty 6, and the chemicals he finds in Treaty 8. Rhodes' writes poems to and with the Indian Act.

Beyond the treaties, Rhodes writes formal poetry using Indian status registration forms. He writes to the memory of Oka. He writes to the Government of Canada's Apology for the Indian Residential School System. He writes to the procreating beavers he finds in the Royal Charter of the Hudson Bay Company. X culminates in "White Noise," a long poem grown from Canada's collective rants, threats, cries and shouts in response to the Idle No More protests and the hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence.

Through out the book, Rhodes surprises with what poetry and art can actually do with the seemingly unsalvageable and un-poetic that surrounds us. The design of X is also exhilarating. Not only is the book reversible--it must be read in two directions--but every page bursts with design, interference and thought.

X sings a new national anthem for Canada, an anthem stripped of patriotic fervor that truly sings of the past many would rather forget and the current state of Indigenous/settler race relations in Canada, an anthem fit for "a land held by therefores, herebys and hereinafters."

Xwelqwiya is the life story of Rena Point Bolton, a St:lo (or, as they are now called, Xwlmexw) matriarch, artist, and craftswoman. Proceeding by way of conversational vignettes, the beginning chapters recount Point Bolton? early years on the banks of the Fraser River during the Depression. While at the time the St:lo, or Xwlmexw, as they call themselves today, kept secret their ways of life to avoid persecution by the Canadian government, Point Bolton's mother and grandmother schooled her in the skills needed for living from what the land provides, as well as in the craftwork and songs of her people, passing on a duty to keep these practices alive. Point Bolton was taken to a residential school for the next several years and would go on to marry and raise ten children, but her childhood training ultimately set the stage for her roles as a teacher and activist. Recognizing the urgent need to forge a sense of cultural continuity among the younger members of her community, Point Bolton visited many communities and worked with federal, provincial, and First Nations politicians to help break the intercultural silence by reviving knowledge of and interest in Aboriginal art. She did so with the deft and heartfelt use of both her voice and her hands.

Over the course of many years, Daly collaborated with Point Bolton to pen her story. At once a memoir, an oral history, and an "insider" ethnography directed and presented by the subject herself, the result attests both to Daly's relationship with the family and to Point Bolton's desire to inspire others to use traditional knowledge and experience to build their own distinctive, successful, and creative lives.

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320 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

After creating the Mi’kmaqs, the great Glooscap was certain that he had established harmony on earth. But a problem remained: the beavers had built a huge dam across the Restigouche River, preventing the salmon from swimming upriver as far as the camp of the Mi’kmaqs who had come to fish there. Young Mi’kmaq men were convinced they could remedy the situation. However, completely failing to put things right, they asked the loon to call Glooscap to help them. Will the beavers once more outmaneuver Master Glooscap?

Educator Information
Delivered in a triple-language format of English, French, and Mi'kmaw.

Roy has written his version of a Mi’kmaq legend in this story, mentioning special places such as Sugarloaf Mountain.

French Text: Rejean Roy
English Text: Allison Mitcham
Kisi-Mi'kmaw wi'kek Text: Serena M. Sock
Illustrations: Rejean Roy

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22 pages | 8.00" x 8.00"

Métis Soldiers of Saskatchewan greatly contributes to our knowledge of the role played by Saskatchewan’s Métis during Canada’s war efforts. This important commemorative book contains hundreds of photographs as well as a detailed list of more than 1,700 Métis soldiers from Saskatchewan who fought in two World Wars and the Korean war.

Talking Tools: Faces of Aboriginal Oral Tradition in Contemporary Society explores the power of oral tradition in Aboriginal society as a foundational cultural and linguistic tool. Four distinct elements are examined: the story-keepers; the importance of practice; the emergence of new stories; and the challenges of sustainability. Finally, the emergence of new technologies and their relevance to the sustainability of the tradition and art of storytelling are discussed.

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Tilly has always known she’s part Lakota on her dad’s side. She’s grown up with the traditional teachings of her grandma, relishing the life lessons of her beloved mentor. But it isn’t until an angry man shouts something on the street that Tilly realizes her mom is Aboriginal, too—a Cree woman taken from her own parents as a baby.

Tilly feels her mother’s pain deeply. She’s always had trouble fitting in at school, and when her grandma dies unexpectedly, her anchor is gone. Then Abby, a grade seven classmate, invites her home for lunch and offers her “something special” to drink. Nothing has prepared Tilly for the tingling in her legs, the buzz in her head and the awesome feeling that she can do anything. From then on, partying seems to offer an escape from her insecurities. But after one dangerously drunken evening, Tilly knows she has to change. Summoning her courage, she begins the long journey to finding pride in herself and her heritage. Just when she needs it most, a mysterious stranger offers some wise counsel: “Never question who you are or who your people are. It’s in your eyes. I know it’s in your heart.”

Loosely based on author Monique Gray Smith’s own life, this revealing, important work of creative non-fiction tells the story of a young Indigenous woman coming of age in Canada in the 1980s. With compassion, insight and humour, Gray Smith illuminates the 20th-century history of Canada’s First Peoples—forced displacement, residen­tial schools, tuberculosis hospitals, the Sixties Scoop. In a spirit of hope, this unique story captures the irrepressible resilience of Tilly, and of Indigenous peoples everywhere.

Awards

• 2014 Burt Award Winner

Reviews
“What a gorgeous read! Reminiscent of Lee Maracle’s Will’s Garden and Ruby Slipperjack’s Little Voice, Tilly will bring strength, comfort and peace to all who read it. Let it discover and inspire you, too. Wow! I've been waiting for a book like this for years. Mahsi cho, Monique Gray Smith, for digging so deep to create something so loving and nurturing for the world.” —Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed and The Moon of Letting Go

"Gray Smith intricately pieces together stories, traditional teachings and hard-earned personal wisdom, creating a hand-stitched quilt you can’t help but wrap yourself in—a quilt filled with optimism and the assurance that no matter how lost we are, hope, love and guidance surround us at every turn. Delicate with the handling of mature details, but fiercely candid with emotion, Tilly is an ideal resource not only for youth, but also for those who are easily triggered, while its universality will be appreciated by a wider audience. A brave new voice ready to take her place among the great contemporary storytellers, Gray Smith breaks her own trails as she explores what it means to be Indigenous in a modern world." —Christy Jordan-Fenton, author of Fatty Legs, A Stranger at Home and When I Was Eight

Educator Information
Recommended Ages: 15-18.

Grades 10-12 English First Peoples resource for units on Childhood through the Eyes of Indigenous Writers and Exploring Text through Local Landscape.

Additional Information
208 pages | Ages 14+