Family and Community

Following the bestselling success of the inspiring All the Way, pioneering Inuit NHLer Jordin Tootoo begins the process of healing in the wake of the suicide and violence that marks his family, only to discover the source of all that trauma in his father's secret past.

For some hockey players, retirement marks the moment when it’s all over. But Jordin Tootoo is not most hockey players.

Having inspired millions when he first broke into the league, Tootoo continued to influence people throughout his career—not only through his very public triumph over alcoholism, but also his natural charisma. And now, years after hanging up his skates, he is more committed to doing things the right way and speaking about it to others, whether it’s corporate executives or Indigenous youth.

But the news of unmarked graves on the grounds of residential schools brought back to life many of the demons that had haunted his family. In a moment of realization that left him rattled and saddened, Tootoo fit the pieces together. The years that were never spoken of. The heavy drinking. The all too predictable violence. His father was a survivor, marked by what he had survived.

As he travels back to Nunavut to try to speak with his father about what haunts him, he encounters the ghosts of the entire community. Still, as Tootoo says, we are continuously learning and rewriting our story at every step. He has learned from his mistakes and his victories. He has learned from examples of great courage and humility. He has learned from being a father and a husband. And he has learned from his own Inuk traditions, of perseverance and discipline in the face of hardship.

Weaving together life’s biggest themes with observations and experiences, Jordin shares the kind of wisdom he has had to specialize in—the hard-won kind.

Additional Information
208 pages | 6.20" x 9.37" | Hardcover

Drawing on ancient Aboriginal wisdom, a leading Indigenous Australian healer and an Elder show you how to find contentment, purpose, and healing by learning to reconnect with your story—and ultimately the universe.

Dr. Paul Callaghan belongs to the land of the Worimi people who live north of Sydney along the east coast of Australia. Raised to live the western way, Paul found himself mired in deep depression—struggling to find meaning while raising a family and working as a senior education executive. Desperate to break free of his restlessness, he made a drastic change: He “went bush” and connected with his elders to “walk Country” and learn Aboriginal traditions. Twenty years later, Paul is an expert healer and spiritual guide eager to share the wisdom of his ancestors and the insights he discovered on his life journey.

In this affirming, empowering, and transformative book, he teaches you about the Dreaming Path—a connection to the earth and the universe, past, present, and future that has always been there, but can be difficult to find amid the chaos of the modern world.

The Dreaming Path offers tips, practices, inspiration, and motivation that can enable you to achieve a profound state of mind, body, and spirit wellness, while encouraging you to think deeply about essential life topics, including:

• Caring for our place and the importance of story
• Relationships, sharing, and unity
• Love, gratitude, and humility
• Learning and living your truth
• Inspiration and resilience
• Being present and healing from the past
• Contentment
• Leading

The Dreaming Path reminds us that we are our stories; by learning to recognize that we are all an indelible part of something much larger, we can begin to heal ourselves and our communities.

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320 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover

In the dense rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Somass River (c̓uumaʕas) brings sockeye salmon (miʕaat) into the Nuu-chah-nulth community of Tseshaht. C̓uumaʕas and miʕaat are central to the sacred food practices that have been a crucial part of the Indigenous community’s efforts to enact food sovereignty, decolonize their diet, and preserve their ancestral knowledge.

In A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other, Charlotte Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization in the context of broader efforts to re-Indigenize contemporary diets on the Northwest Coast. Coté offers evocative stories of her Tseshaht community’s and her own work to revitalize relationships to haʔum (traditional food) as a way to nurture health and wellness. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation, and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounds healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty: berry picking, salmon fishing, and building a community garden on reclaimed residential school grounds. This book is for everyone concerned about the major role food plays in physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness.

Reviews
"A powerful philosophy of food sovereignty. Coté successfully navigates myriad scholarly and nonscholarly voices, telling a compelling comprehensive story that helps us understand the practices and policies needed to make change in our food systems." — Kyle Whyte, Michigan State University

"Adeptly uses a deep storytelling method, including both lived experience and critical analysis of history and theory, to examine experiences and transformations of Indigenous foodways." — Hannah Wittman, University of British Columbia

"I am so grateful for Charlotte Cote’s A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other, which creates a path into the living foodways and thoughtways of her people. Her warm, storytelling voice and sharing of collective knowledge embody the generous spirit of a feast, and this book itself, is a feast." — Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry

Additional Information
208 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 17 b&w illustrations | 2 maps | Paperback

A hands-on guide for parents and caregivers to develop best practices in revitalizing and teaching Cree to young children.

In nēhiyawētān kīkināhk / ​Speaking Cree in the Home, Belinda Daniels and Andrea Custer provide an introductory text to help families immerse themselves, their children, and their homes in nēhiyawēwin—the Cree language.

Despite the colonial attacks on Cree culture, language, and peoples, Custer and Daniels remind readers that the traditional ways of knowing and transferring knowledge to younger generations have not been lost and can be revived in the home, around the table, every day.

nēhiyawētān kīkināhk / ​Speaking Cree in the Home is an approachable, hands-on manual that helps to re-forge connections between identity, language, family, and community—by centering Indigenous knowledge and providing Cree learners and speakers with a practical guide to begin their own journey of reclaiming and revitalizing Cree in the home.

Readers are guided through methods for language learning, the basics of reading Cree and Standard Roman Orthography, pronunciation of vowels, engaging language-learning games, and examples of high-frequency words and phrases that can easily be incorporated into daily routines and taught to children young and old.

Reviews
“This is a welcome book for all who are interested in learning the Cree language, either for themselves alone or for themselves and their families. The book offers good guidance on the best practices in language learning based on the authors’ personal experiences in their respective language journeys.” —Solomon Ratt, author of mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree

“A major contribution, this book will be a useful resource in Cree classes, at both high school and university levels. But it is also useful for home use, as it describes the practical application of speaking Cree in the home and provides in an easy-to-read format and details a hands-on approach too.” —Dorothy Thunder (Plains Cree, Little Pine First Nation), Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta

“The activity-based learning lessons that are presented here should serve as a model not only for teaching the language in a family setting, but in any other formal and informal settings, because they cover all aspects of teaching and learning; the content, variety of methods, appropriate timing and setting. . . . The pioneering in Cree language acquisition and revival has begun and hopefully this book reaches all interested individuals.” —Ken Paupanekis, author of Pocket Cree: A Phrasebook for Nearly All Occasions

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122 pages | 4.72" x 7.27" | Paperback

Through traditional stories, Grandmothers' understandings guide and nurture parents and children as they grow together. 

Sali'j is a Mi'kmaw woman. She is strong, she is happy. Happy to be part of a loving family, happy to be Mi'kmaq. She begins to notice changes to her body, subtle at first, then more noticeable. She realizes that she is pregnant. She and her husband rejoice to think of welcoming a child into their lives. She goes to her Mother, to her Grandmother, to her Godmother. She tells them she is pregnant. They hug her in joy.

They gather their knowledge and their wisdom from teachings passed down from woman to woman, over the generations; they share this knowledge, little by little, story by story. This is the Mi'kmaw way.

Educator Information
Dual-language: English and Mi'kmaq.

This book is created by Prune Harris from the words and wisdom of four Grandmothers from the Mi’kmaw Nation of Eskasoni. They are Diana Denny, Murdena Marshall, Susie Marshall and Veronica (Flo) Young.

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64 pages | Paperback

Selected speeches from Indigenous leaders around the world--necessary wisdom for our times, nourishment for our collective, and a path away from extinction toward a sustainable, interconnected future.

Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations. Editors Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez present 28 powerful excerpted passages from Indigenous leaders, including Mourning Dove, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Winona LaDuke, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. Accompanied by the editors’ own analyses, each chapter reflects the wisdom of Indigenous worldview precepts like:

• Egalitarian rule versus hierarchical governance

• A fearless trust in the universe, instead of a fear-based culture

• The life-sustaining role of ceremony

• Emphasizing generosity and the greater good instead of pursuing selfish goals and for personal gain

• The laws of nature as the highest rules for living

The editors emphasize our deep need to move away from the dominant Western paradigm--one that dictates we live without strong social purpose, fails to honor the earth as sacred, leads with the head while ignoring the heart, and places individual “rights” over collective responsibility. Restoring the Kinship Worldview is rooted in an Indigenous vision and strong social purpose that sees all life forms as sacred and sentient--that honors the wisdom of the heart, and grants equal standing to rights and responsibilities.

Inviting readers into a world-sense that expands beyond perceiving and conceiving to experiencing and being, Restoring the Kinship Worldview is a salve for our times, a nourishment for our collective, and a holistic orientation that will lead us away from extinction toward an integrated, sustainable future.

Reviews
“Humans have a particular ecological niche, a role as the custodial species of this earth. We must return our species to this niche within the next decade, or perish. This book is a perfect place to start—the foundation is good relations, making kin both human and nonhuman—and here we have story from a gathering of some of the finest Indigenous thinkers on the planet. Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez have a particular way of bringing the right people together for such purposes.” —TYSON YUNKAPORTA, author of Sand Talk, senior research fellow at Deacon University, woodcarver, and poet

“Mahalo Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez for this collection, this eloquence and grace through time so we can recognize and honor the common sense and purpose of continuity. All of it is needed now. We are all meant to wake up together.” —MANULANI ALULI MEYER, director of Indigenous education, University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu

“Darcia Narvaez and Four Arrows have gathered an inspiring pastiche of wise Native American voices woven together by their own insightful and heartfelt dialogues to gift us with an invaluable bundle of tenets and templates for the urgent project of decolonizing and rewilding our minds and communities.” —BILL PLOTKIN, PhD, author of Soulcraft, Wild Mind, and The Journey of Soul Initiation

Additional Information
336 pages | 6.00" x 8.95" | Paperback

Scratching River braids the voices of mother, brother, sister, ancestor, and river to create a story about environmental, personal, and collective healing.

This memoir revolves around a search for home for the author’s older brother, who is both autistic and schizophrenic, and an unexpected emotional journey that led to acceptance, understanding and, ultimately, reconciliation. Michelle Porter brings together the oral history of a Métis ancestor, studies of river morphology, and news clippings about abuse her older brother endured at a rural Alberta group home to tell a tale about love, survival, and hope. This book is a voice in your ear, urging you to explore your own braided histories and relationships.

Reviews
"Michelle Porter’s Scratching River is a stunning and ruminative poetic work of creative non-fiction that moves across time, geography, Métis history, and kinship. Porter honours her Métis family and ancestors through past, present, and future poetics. The interwoven narratives wrap around Porter’s mother, Porter’s own story as a daughter and sister, and her relationship with her older brother, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic and autistic, and abused in a rural Alberta group home. Scratching River illustrates the powerful journey of reconciliation, as Porter’s family reconnects amongst their ongoing movement, and relocation to find their way back to the river they share." — "Shannon Webb-Campbell, author of Lunar Tides and I Am a Body of Land"

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184 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | Paperback

A son who grew up away from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to their family's trapline, and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but creates a new future.

The son of a Cree father and a non-Indigenous mother, David A. Robertson was raised with virtually no knowledge or understanding of his family’s Indigenous roots. His father, Don, spent his early childhood on a trapline in the bush northeast of Norway House, Manitoba, where his first teach was the land. When his family was moved permanently to a nearby reserve, Don was not permitted to speak Cree at school unless in secret with his friends and lost the knowledge he had been gifted while living on his trapline. His mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town with not a single Indigenous family in it. Then Don arrived, the new United Church minister, and they fell in love.

Structured around a father-son journey to the northern trapline where Robertson and his father will reclaim their connection to the land, Black Water is the story of another journey: a young man seeking to understand his father's story, to come to terms with his lifelong experience with anxiety, and to finally piece together his own blood memory, the parts of his identity that are woven into the fabric of his DNA.

Reviews
“An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity, and love.” — Cherie Dimaline

“When someone lives their life in a good way, the Haisla call them handsome people. David A. Robertson’s biography is the perfect example of someone who takes care with his words and speaks respectfully; he tackles identity and racism, family bonds and breaks, with nuance and honesty. The power of this approach makes Black Water an essential and timely book.” — Eden Robinson, bestselling author of The Trickster Trilogy

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288 pages | 5.31" x 8.00" | Paperback

These are the Stories is a memoir presented in short chapters, comprising the life of a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith reveals her experiences in the child welfare system and her journey towards healing in various stages of her life. As an adult, she was able to reconnect with her birth mother. Though her mother passed shortly afterward, that reconnection allowed the author to finally feel "complete, whole, and home." The memoir details some of the author's travels across Canada as she eventually made a connection with the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba.

A memoir in the vein of Colleen Hele Cardinal's Raised Somewhere Else and Alicia Elliot's A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, These are the Stories is an inspirational and courageous telling of a life story.

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

Collective Care provides an ethnographic account of urban Indigenous life and caregiving practices in the face of Saskatchewan’s HIV epidemic. Based on a five-year study conducted in partnership with AIDS Saskatoon, the book focuses on the contrast between Indigenous values of collective kin-care and non-Indigenous models of intensive maternal care. It explores how women and men negotiate the forces of HIV to render motherhood a site of cultural meaning, personal and collective well-being, and, sometimes, individual and community despair. It also introduces readers to how HIV is Indigenized in western Canada and how all HIV-affected and -infected mothers must negotiate this cultural and racialized terrain.

Featuring in-depth narrative interviews, notes from participant observation in AIDS Saskatoon’s drop-in centre, and a photovoice component, this book offers an accessible account of an engaged anthropologist’s work with a community that is both vulnerable and resilient. Each chapter begins with an ethnographic vignette that introduces central concepts, including medical anthropology, syndemics, kinship, and Indigeneity, with the overall aim of humanizing those affected by HIV in western Canada and beyond.

Reviews
"By sharing perspectives that are often ignored, this work provides important insight not found elsewhere. The reliance on the words of Indigenous women is a wonderful example of the kind of allyship we have been calling for. Rather than speaking for the women, Pamela J. Downe has created a literary space where they can speak for themselves. The truth of their stories comes through in vibrant quotes about loving and raising children in a collective way." — Dawn Lavell-Harvard, Director of the First Peoples House of Learning, Trent University, and former President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada

"Collective Care icontributes to our understanding of Indigenous family life and the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS. Because the book focuses on family relationships and care in a context that is somewhat familiar to students, yet different from more frequently studied communities with HIV/AIDS. This book will be a useful tool for teaching." — William McKellin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia

Educator Information
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Beginning
Chapter 2: Family
Chapter 3: Motherhood
Chapter 4: Fatherhood
Chapter 5: Loss
Chapter 6: Love
Chapter 7: Closing
References

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

Helen Knott, a highly accomplished Indigenous woman, seems to have it all. But in her memoir, she offers a different perspective. In My Own Moccasins is an unflinching account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, and the wounds brought on by sexual violence. It is also the story of sisterhood, the power of ceremony, the love of family, and the possibility of redemption.

With gripping moments of withdrawal, times of spiritual awareness, and historical insights going back to the signing of Treaty 8 by her great-great grandfather, Chief Bigfoot, her journey exposes the legacy of colonialism, while reclaiming her spirit.

Reviews
"A beautiful rendering of how recovery for our peoples is inevitably about reconnecting with Indigenous identities, lands, cultural and healing practices." —Kim Anderson, author of Reconstructing Native Womenhood

"In My Own Moccasins never flinches. The story goes dark, and then darker. We live in an era where Indigenous women routinely go missing, our youth are killed and disposed of like trash, and the road to justice doesn’t seem to run through the rez. Knott’s journey is familiar, filled with the fallout of residential school, racial injustice, alcoholism, drugs, and despair. But she skillfully draws us along and opens up her life, her family, and her communities to show us a way forward. It’s the best kind of memoir: clear-eyed, generous, and glorious….Bear witness to the emergence of one of the most powerful voices of her generation." —Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster and Monkey Beach (from the foreword)

“Helen Knott speaks truth to the experience of Indigenous women living through the violence of colonized spaces and she does so with grace, beauty and a ferocity that makes me feel so proud.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of This Accident of Being Lost

“Helen writes beautifully and painfully, about her own life and the lives of many of our sisters. A strong, gentle voice removing the colonial blanket and exposing truth.” —Maria Campbell, author of Halfbreed

“An incredible debut that documents how trauma and addiction can be turned into healing and love. I am in awe of Helen Knott and her courage. I am a fan for life. Wow.” —Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed

“Heartfelt, heartbreaking, triumphant and raw, In My Own Moccasinsis a must-read for anyone who's ever felt lost in their life… Actually, it's a must-read for anyone who appreciates stories of struggle, redemption and healing. Knott’s writing is confident, clear, powerful and inspiring.”—Jowita Bydlowska, author of Guy: A Novel and Drunk Mom

Additional Information
366 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"