Indigenous Peoples

Shane works with her mother and their ghost dogs, tracking down missing persons even when their families can’t afford to pay. Their own family was displaced from their traditional home years ago following a devastating flood – and the loss of Shane’s father and her grandparents. They don’t think they’ll ever get their home back.

Then Shane’s mother and a local boy go missing, after a strange interaction with a fairy ring. Shane, her brother, her friends, and her lone, surviving grandparent – who isn’t to be trusted – set off on the road to find them. But they may not be anywhere in this world – or this place in time.

Nevertheless, Shane is going to find them.

Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe launched her career and in the years since has become a beloved favorite. This prequel to Elatsoe, centered on Ellie’s grandmother, deepens and expands Darcie’s one-of-a-kind world and introduces us to another cast of characters that will wend their way around readers’ hearts.

Educator & Series Information
Recommended for ages 12 to 18.

This book is part of the Elatsoe series.

Additional Information
400 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Hardcover 

Rock art – etched in blood-red lines into granite cliffs, boulders, and caves – appears as beguiling, graffiti-like abstraction. What are these signs? The petroglyphs and red-ochre pictographs found across Nlaka’pamux territory in present-day British Columbia and Washington State are far more than a collection of ancient motifs.

Signs of the Time explores the historical and cultural reasons for making rock art. Chris Arnett draws on extensive archival research and decades of work with Elders and other Nlaka’pamux community members, their oral histories and oral tradition, to document the variability and similarity of practices. Rock art was and is a form of communication between the spirit and physical worlds, a way to pass information to later generations, and a powerful protection against challenges to a people, land, and culture.

Nlaka’pamux have used such culturally prescribed means to forestall external threats to their lifeways from as early as the sixteenth century – when they were aware of incipient European encroachment – until well into the twentieth. As this important work attests, rock art remains a signature of resilience and resistance to colonization among Nlaka’pamux today.

As well as providing essential reading for scholars and students of archaeology, cultural and applied anthropology, Indigenous studies, and art history, Signs of the Time will also fascinate rock art specialists and amateur enthusiasts.

Reviews
"Signs of the Time is innovative and provocative, adding dramatically to the discussion of how Western science interacts with and accommodates Indigenous knowledge, concerns, and heritage." — David S. Whitley, author of Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief

"Signs of the Time is informative and accessible, giving equal voice to Indigenous knowledge keepers and academics in presenting the ideas in petroglyphs and pictographs. It is an excellent example of how Eurowestern academics can work alongside Indigenous knowledge experts to understand the Indigenous world. I highly recommend it." — Lorna Wanosts’a7 Williams EdD; OC; OBC; Lil’watul; professor emerita, University of Victoria

Additional Information
256 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 40 b&w photos 

For over twenty years, Nehiyawak-Metis artist and author John Brady McDonald’s day job has been working with youth. Over half of that time was spent as a Frontline Youth Outreach Worker on the streets of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. During that time, John would write down his thoughts and feelings on scraps of paper and in little black hardcover notebooks, chronicling the struggles and traumas of the youth he worked with and which he himself had also experienced. Never being quite the right fit for his other poetry books, John took these poems and hid them away for years, until now. Recently rediscovered in his archives, John has compiled them, using a 54-year-old typewriter, into a work which gives voice to the experiences and resilience of those youth, along with his own experiences, thoughts and recollections of a poet in the midst of a turbulent moment in time amongst the concrete and asphalt of the city.

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

Additional Information
88 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

Denesųłiné Elders Lawrence and Lena Adam have been tanning hides and sharing their knowledge with others for more than four decades. Woodland Cree knowledge carrier Tommy Bird helped his family tan hides on the trapline as a young boy. Together they share their lifetime of experience to guide a new generation of hide tanners to keep the tradition alive. The trouble-shooting tips and hands-on advice in this book will help you to make your own bone tools and turn raw moosehides into smoke-tanned hides soft enough to sew into mitts or moccasins. Combining traditional knowledge with easy-to-follow instructions and detailed colour photos, Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way is a practical guide you will refer to again and again.

Educator Information
The publisher recommends this resource for ages 10+ 

Recommended in the Indigenous Books for Schools catalogue as a valuable resource for Art, Science, and Social Studies in grades 5 to 12.

Themes: Animals, Arts and Culture, Cultural Teachings, Fashion, Traditional Knowledge.

Additional Information
64 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | Spiral Bound

First published in 1983, In Search of April Raintree is a Canadian classic that presents a heart-rending and powerful account of the harsh realities that Indigenous and Métis peoples face.

Written by Anishinaabe educator Christine M’Lot with psychologist Dr. Karlee Fellner, the Teacher Guide for In Search of April Raintree and April Raintree helps teachers create dynamic learning experiences for their students in grades 11 and 12, while maintaining a respectful and dignified approach to Indigenous topics.

In this guide you will find:

• an inquiry based approach with resources for teaching from a trauma-informed stance
• easy-to-use lesson plans, reproducibles, and assessment opportunities
• a focus on wellness and supporting students while learning about difficult topics
• activities that encourage cross-curricular connections and collaboration
• free access to supplemental videos covering wellness topics
• a glossary of terms and suggested resources to extend learning

Educator Information
For use with students in grades 11 and 12.

This teacher guide can be used with either In Search of April Raintree or April Raintree, a version written specifically for teens in grades 9 to 12 that does not contain the graphic graphic scene in the original.

Additional Information
98 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | Spiral Bound

This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.

Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.

Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”

Additional Information
112 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

Tap into guidance from the animal spirit realm and connect to ancestral wisdom with this transformative 44-card deck and guidebook from Indigenous Medicine Woman and author of You Are the Medicine and The Sacred Medicine Oracle, Asha Frost.

Everything is interconnected. All of creation carries a spirit. Indigenous people have always had a sacred relationship with animals and treated them as honored elders. Animal beings in the spirit realm are part of our spiritual support team as allies and medicine keepers, ready to help, waiting to remind you of your humanity and deep connection to the natural world.

With 44 Elder Animals depicted in a richly detailed traditional Ojibway art style, each card carries its own unique medicine. This deck offers meaningful insights and messages to guide you on your path both from the universe and in the voice of an animal spirit guide from the lands of the Ojibway people—from Elder Artic Hare to Elder Wolf. Whether you're seeking clarity, healing, or a deeper connection to your ancestral lineage, these cards provide a bridge to the spirit world.

Use this deck your rituals and ceremonies, do readings with it for your clients and friends, and share it with your communities. As the medicine ripples out, hold Indigenous people in your heart and honor how their history continues to impact your current reality.

Additional Information
128 pages | 3.50" x 5.00" | Card Deck & Guidebook 

The Art of Making: Rediscovering the Blackfoot Legacy is a captivating entry into Jared Tailfeathers’ quest of cultural reclamation. Accompanied by his family and loyal dogs, Tailfeathers delves into his Indigenous heritage through hands-on, land-based exploration. The book traces the evolution of the Blackfoot Confederacy, examining its trade routes, resources, and interactions pre- and post-1800s. It provides intricate details of Blackfoot connections with nature, neighbouring First Nations Peoples, and their rich legacy in tool-making, spiritual knowledge seeking, and artistic expression. Tailfeathers’ research began in 2019, driven by a deep desire to reacquaint himself with his cultural and historical identity as a Blackfoot man navigating a post-colonial world. This book is a journey into the heart of Blackfoot culture, told by a man who walks the ancestral trails with his dogs.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Indigenous Spirit of Nature series.

Additional Information
208 pages | 7.25" x 9.25" | Colour Illustrations | Paperback 

TO: Angel Wilson (LawAngel@IBLO.gov)
FROM: Stevie Henry (shenry@gmail.com)
Thanks for coming to see me; but by the time you read this, it will be too late. No one will have started to panic, yet; but in less than two months nothing will be the same. What came first, The Chicken or the Egg Flu? I wish it mattered. But let’s just say, maybe go back to wearing a mask, bathing in sanitizer, and avoid birds and eggs for a bit…

I did not kill my brother. I did quite the opposite, really.

It’s the year 2052. Stevie Henry is a Cherokee girl working at a museum in Texas, trying to save up enough money to go to college. The world around her is in a cycle of drought and superstorms, ice and fire … but people get by. But it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

When a mysterious boy shows up at Stevie’s museum saying that he’s from the future -- and telling her what is to come -- she refuses to believe him. But soon she will have no choice.

From the author of the Walter Award-winning Man Made Monsters comes a YA novel that conjures our futures in startling life – the ones that we are headed towards, and the ones we can still work towards.

Educator Information
Young Adult Fiction

Additional information
400 pages | 5.95" x 8.55" | Hardcover 

Thrust into the foster care system from an early age, Apple moves from house to house on Prince Edward Island without finding a home until she's a teenager and taken in by a couple who never managed to have children themselves. When she falls pregnant, her foster parents are keen to raise the baby with Apple still in the house—to live as a family.

That opportunity is torn from Apple by members of the Catholic Church along with social workers and government officials. Their vicious practices take the babies of unwed mothers and give them to wealthy families in exchange for large "donations" to the church. Apple's beloved baby ends up with a rich couple in the U.S., and is lost to her.

The Baby Train traces her life in the aftermath of that loss, raising subsequent children, creating deep bonds of friendship with other women struggling against society's rigid norms, and carrying underneath it all an unending love for her firstborn child.

We also follow her baby's path, and watch his affluent, neglected childhood and then adulthood unfold. He never knows that his birth mother still yearns for him, still lights him birthday candles every year.

The shameful legacy of forced and coerced adoption in Eastern Canada is brought to life in this sweeping novel.

Educator Information
PEI's birth alert practice allowed hospitals or social workers to flag expectant parents whom they felt might put their newborns at risk. Generally, this practice targeted Indigenous and unwed women.

Additional Information
224 pages | 5.75" x 8.00" | Paperback 

Based on an Inuit traditional story passed down orally for generations, The Cannibal tells the horrific tale of a family experiencing starvation when the animals they rely on for survival disappear. While the wife stays alive by eating plants she gathers daily, the husband does the unthinkable, resorting to murder and cannibalism. Horrified, and terrified for her life, the wife eventually finds herself alone in camp with her husband. She knows what will happen to her if she does not find a way to escape. Hatching a plan, the exhausted wife embarks on the journey with her murderous husband in pursuit. After safely arriving at a nearby camp, she shares the story of what has become of her camp, and her own children. Soon the husband arrives, and the camp must decide how to deal with the cannibal. Both horrific and poignant, this cautionary traditional story provides a window into the at times harsh realities of traditional life.

Reviews
"The Cannibal by Solomon Awa and Louise Flaherty is a stark and compelling novel centred on an Inuit family facing extreme survival challenges in the Arctic. When the family’s father, driven by desperation, begins to resort to cannibalism to stay alive, the story delves into harrowing themes of survival, morality, and the impact of isolation on human behaviour. This topic is suitable for an older audience, not younger students." - David D., Indigenous Educator & Administrator, Indigenous Books for Schools 

Educator Information
The publisher labels this work as an "Adult Graphic Novel."

Recommended in the Indigenous Books for Schools catalogue as a valuable resource for grades 10 to 12 for English Language Arts and Social Studies.

Themes: Animals, Death, Environment, Loss, Reconciliation

Caution: Contains cannibalism

Additional Information
44 pages | 7.00" x 10.50" | Paperback

In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Manitoulin Island to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world.

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

The boundaries between the virtual and the real world become dangerously blurred for a young Indigenous girl in the follow-up to the YA fantasy debut Walking in Two Worlds from bestselling Indigenous author Wab Kinew.

Devastated by the loss of her beloved older brother to cancer, Bugz returns to the place where she can always find solace and strength: the Floraverse. Over the past year, she has gained back all that she had lost in that virtual world, and while the remaining ClanLess members still plot against her, she is easily able to overcome their attacks. Even better, she's been secretly working on a bot that will be both an incredible weapon and a source of comfort: Waawaate.

With the Waawaate bot looking exactly like the brother she misses so much — even acting so much like him — Bugz feels ready to show him off to Feng, who has become a constant companion in the Verse, and she cannot wait to team up with both friend and bot to secure her dominance once and for all. But Feng has his own issues to deal with, especially when news that his parents are alive and want to contact him threatens to send his new life on the Rez into upheaval.

As they work through their complicated feelings of grief and loss, Feng and Bugz find themselves becoming ever closer. But disturbances in the Floraverse cannot be ignored, especially when Bugz realizes that her Waawaate bot is growing in powers beyond her control . . .

Educator & Series Information
Recommended for ages 12+.

This book is part of The Floraverse series.

This book is available in French: La Route sans fin

Additional Information
272 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Paperback 

The Secwépemc term le estcwicwéy̓ (the missing) was given by Secwépemc elders who dedicated their knowledge and time to guide the community through the hell they were forced to endure in May 2021. Garry Gottfriedson’s The Flesh of Ice picks up the thread of his 2021 collection, Bent Back Tongue, describing the history and relationship of Indigenous people in Canada with the Canadian government and the Catholic church. Here is the story of those who survived Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS), and stories of descendants of KIRS who remembered "the missing” in the wake of the discovery of unmarked graves at the KIRS. Here, in hauntingly visceral poems, are the living conditions, policies and practices of the school itself, the stories of those who lived there, and the names of practitioners of the school, called out and cursed. Lastly, personal stories are given space to reclaim the narrative, taking readers on a journey of resilience, survival, pain and joy.

Reviews
"Drawing on the work of the late legal scholar Patricia Monture-Angus, I find fitting words for this book and for the former students of KIRS: first we were victims, then we were survivors and now we are warriors. Those warriors have now become teachers—teachers for those who learn to listen to the voices in this book."—from the prologue by Celia Haig-Brown

Additional Information
126 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

A lively recounting of the tough men and heroic but overworked packhorses who broke open B.C. to the big business of the 19th-century fur trade.

Facing a gruelling thousand-mile trail, the brigades of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) pushed onward over mountains and through ferocious river crossings to reach the isolated fur-trading posts. But it wasn't just the landscape the brigades faced, as First Nations people struggled with the desire to resist, or assist, the fur company's attempts to build their brigade trails over the Aboriginal trails that led between Indigenous communities, which surrounded the trading posts. Nancy Marguerite Anderson reveals how the devastating Cayuse War of 1847 forced the HBC men over a newly-explored overland trail to Fort Langley. The journey was a disaster-in-waiting.

Additional Information
280 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | archival images, maps | Paperback