Oral Language and Stories

Mark Kalluak was a respected community leader and Inuktitut specialist who was passionate about sharing Inuit culture. This book is a compilation of Kalluak’s works on traditional Inuit stories and beliefs from his home community of Arviat, Nunavut. These tales and cultural outlooks were thoughtfully collected, written in Inuktitut and English, and illustrated by Kalluak. From the origins of darkness and light, to cautionary tales of how to treat others, to explanations of taboos, this book is a noteworthy collection of traditional Inuit stories and beliefs.

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216 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | Hardcover

Restoring Relations Through Stories introduces, synthesizes, and analyzes traditional stories by Diné and Dene storytellers in orature and film. The book conceptualizes narrative autonomy as hane’tonomy and visual storytelling from a Diné perspective, offering a map for re-storying that resists inauthentic and misappropriated stories. Watchman centres Indigenous narratives and examines how these narratives are tied to land and relations.

In the book’s final movement, the author explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene, across time and space, through re-storying of relations.

Reviews
“Watchman shows how the old stories, maintained over centuries . . . tie together the Diné and Dene through ancestral and linguistic connections. The works that are surveyed herein reinforce the import of remembering, retelling, and revising the old stories so that they are germane today.” —Luci Tapahonso, inaugural Poet Laureat of the Navajo Nation

“Restoring Relations Through Stories shows how land-based storying among Diné and Dene peoples is strong and continues in the twenty-first century and beyond. It demonstrates how Indigenous peoples continue to remain connected to the land and sustain distinctive ways of life through their narratives, lands, and filmmaking.” —Lloyd L. Lee, author of Diné Identity in a Twenty-First Century World

“Renae Watchman’s Restoring Relations Through Stories introduces readers to the powerful force of ‘Hane’tonomy’ and the work of Diné creatives who refuse misappropriated and inauthentic views by advancing decisive versions of their world. Hane’tonomy provides us all with a new framework for understanding complex works such as Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest, Blackhorse Lowe’s 5th World, or Hollywood’s deracinating obsession with the Navajo Nation and Shiprock as a backdrop. It moves toward a meaningful, though potentially daunting, provocation in forging new connections through restorying with ancestral kin of the Diné in present-day Canada.” —Jeff Berglund, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature

“An affirmation of our continued connections to the Mother Earth through prayers, songs, and stories. The connections to each other as Diné and Dene are remembered in Watchman’s stories of placemaking.” —Jennifer Nez Denetdale, professor and Chair of American Studies, University of New Mexico

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356 pages | 5.00" x 8.00"| Paperback 

The first book published in Tsuut’ina—a critically endangered language—in over a century!

With fewer than 150 speakers, Tsuut’ina is a critically endangered language. Isúh Áníi / As Grandmother Said brings together nine traditional narratives and historical accounts in the Tsuut’ina language, originally narrated by Elders Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis (1883–1987) and Ninàghá Tsìtł’á Willie Little Bear (1912–1989). At once an act of language preservation and a learning resource, each story is retold in Tsuut’ina by Dit’óní Didlíshí Dr. Bruce Starlight and is presented with English translations and a Tsuut’ina-to-English glossary.

The narratives included in this collection cover considerable ground, ranging from the creation of the world in the caring hands of Xàlítsa-tsii and his animal helpers, to accounts of separation, migration, and cross-cultural contact that mark major turning points in Tsuut’ina history, and to important cultural and ceremonial items and practices that the Tsuut’ina Nation maintains to this day.

These stories will be of lasting value to Tsuut’ina language learners and teachers, and will share the legacy of Elders Bessie Meguinis and Willie Little Bear with generations of Tsuut’ina to come.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the First Nation Language Readers series. With a mix of traditional and new stories, each First Nations Language Reader introduces an Indigenous language and demonstrates how each language is used today. 

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186 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

In this poignant display of the resilience of language, culture, and community in the face of the profound changes brought by settlers, Kluane First Nation Elders share stories from their lives, knowledge of their traditional territory (A si Keyi, "my grandfather's country"), and insights on the building of their self-governing First Nation.

With generosity, diligence and deep commitment to their community, Elders from Lhu'aan Man Keyi (Kluane First Nation) recorded oral histories about their lives in the southwest Yukon. They shared wisdom, stories and songs passed down from grandparents, aunties and uncles, in Dan k'e (Southern Tutchone, Kluane dialect) and English. This years-long project arose from the Elders' desire for their children and future generations to know the foundations of language, culture, skills and beliefs that will keep them proud, healthy and strong. The Elders speak of life before the Alaska Highway, when their grandparents drew on thousands of years of traditional knowledge to live on the land through seasonal rounds of hunting and gathering; the dark years after the building of the Alaska Highway, when children were taken away to residential schools and hunting grounds were removed to form the Kluane Game Preserve and National Park; and the decades since, when the community worked through the Yukon land claims process to establish today's self-governing First Nation.

Inclusivity is a key community value. The Elders' stories are accompanied by the voices of youth and citizens of all ages, along with a history of the Kluane region. The book is beautifully illustrated with Elders' photographs, historical images and art work, and photos showing breathtaking views of Kluane mountains, lakes, sites, trails, and activities in the community today. With passionate and deeply informed voices, this is a stirring portrait created by a community that has shown resilience through massive changes and remains dedicated to preserving their culture, language and lands for the generations to come.

Awards

• 2024 Indigenous History Book Prize 

Educator Information
Some of the wisdom, stories, and songs are in Dan k'e (Southern Tutchone, Kluane dialect).

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384 pages | 11.25" x 9.00"| 150 colour and b&w photos | Hardcover 

Curious, uncanny tales blending Indigenous oral storytelling and meticulous style, from an electric voice in Canadian fiction.

These are stories that are a little bit larger than life, or maybe they really happened. Tales that could be told 'round the campfire, each one-upping the next. Tales about a car that drives herself, ever loyal to her owner. Tales about an impossible moose hunt. Tales about the Real Santa(TM) mashed up with the book of Genesis, alongside SPAM stew and bedroom sets from IKEA.

G.A. Grisenthwaite's writing is electric and inimitable, blending meticulous literary style with oral storytelling and coming away with a voice that is entirely his own. Tales for Late Night Bonfires is truly one of a kind, and not to be missed.

Reviews
"Tales for Late Night Bonfires is funny, dark, and rich all at once; each story is immense and alive. Grisenthwaite shows us what fiction can be when story leads the way." - QUILL & QUIRE starred review

"With his first book, Home Waltz, G.A. Grisenthwaite had arrived. With Tales for Late Night Bonfires, he has fully moved in. His writing is so vivid and fresh that the reader inhabits his characters, in their homes, on the land, in their talking cars. Gord has a great gift for dialogue and he writes with flinty humour and such love. I felt more completely human when I finished this book." - SHELAGH ROGERS founding host and co-creator, The Next Chapter, CBC Radio

"Grisenthwaite is a master storyteller, with a voice capable of roasting us and all the other ‘two-leggeds’ while keeping us at the bonfire, hungry for more. The lives of these unforgettable characters are at once comic and heart-crushing, precarious and buoyed by the undying embrace of interlaced dimensions, imbricate worlds." - SUSAN HOLBROOK author of Throaty Wipes and Ink Earl

"Gordon has a voice that is authentic campfire. I felt like I was holding a mug of tea in one hand, and enjoying a fish fry with the other - while waiting for his words to paint a vibrant canvas of characters. Sitting around the campfire, and ingesting memory with stories that need to be told, and retold. These stories visit places in the heart, where we each share, words that need to be said, words that beg to be read." - CAROL ROSE GOLDENEAGLE author of Bearskin Diary and Essential Ingredients

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232 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | Paperback 

A residential school survivor finds his way back to his language and culture through his family’s traditional stories.

When reflecting on forces that have shaped his life, Solomon Ratt says his education was interrupted by his schooling. Torn from his family at the age of six, Ratt was placed into the residential school system—a harsh, institutional world, operated in a language he could not yet understand, far from the love and comfort of home and family. In kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember, Ratt reflects on these memories and the life-long challenges he endured through his telling of âcimisowin—autobiographical stories—and also traditional tales.

Written over the course of several decades, Ratt describes his life before, during, and after residential school. In many ways, these stories reflect the experience of thousands of other Indigenous children across Canada, but Ratt’s stories also stand apart in a significant way: he managed to retain his mother language of Cree by returning home to his parents each summer despite the destruction wrought by colonialism.

Ratt then shifts from the âcimisowina (personal, autobiographical stories) to âcathôhkîwina, (sacred stories) the more formal and commonly recognized style of traditional Cree literature, to illustrate how, in a world uninterrupted by colonialism and its agenda of genocide, these traditional stories would have formed the winter curriculum of a Cree child’s education.

Presented in Cree Th-dialect Standard Roman Orthography, syllabics, and English, Ratt’s reminiscences of residential school escapades almost always end with a close call and a smile. Even when his memories are dark, Ratt’s particularly Cree sense of humour shines, making kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân /The Way I Remember an important and unique memoir that emphasizes and celebrates Solomon Ratt’s perseverance and life after residential school.

Reviews
"Sol is an international treasure the whole world should enjoy." —Buffy Sainte-Marie

"The Way I Remember is inarguably the most important book yet to be published for the preservation of the Cree language and an understanding of the importance of the oral tradition to Cree culture and education." —Jesse Archibald-Barber, First Nations University of Canada

"As he looks back over his life journey reclaiming, breathing new and old life back into our beautiful language, Solomon credits the late Reverend Edward Ahenekew for helping me "to put the pieces together." kista meena dear Solomon, ekosi aytotumawiyak. This is an important book because you have also put pieces together for us so that we can have a good journey. Kinahnaskomtin." —Maria Campbell, author of Halfbreed

"A gift to future generations...Full of humour and resilience in equal measure, these Cree/English stories offer us a glimpse into a world as it was, and future that could be" —Chelsea Vowel, author of Indigenous Writes

Educator & Series Information
Presented in Cree Th-dialect Standard Roman Orthography, syllabics, and English.

This book is part of the Our Own Words series.

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

A first-hand account of a Swampy Cree boy’s experiences growing up in the Saskatchewan River Delta, one of the world’s largest inland deltas and one of North America’s most important ecosystems.

Depicting an Indigenous lifestyle that existed in Northern Saskatchewan way past the Fur Trade era, Ken Carriere shares his first-hand account of experiences as a young boy helping his father trapping, fishing, and hunting in the Saskatchewan River Delta.

Opimōtēwina wīna kapagamawāt Wītigōwa / Journeys of The One to Strike the Wetigo contains interviews with elders, stories, personal photographs, and poetry, along with some original Swampy Cree translations.

Creating a vivid portrait of what it was like to live off the land, Carriere also reveals how hydro-electric dams and other Western endeavours have impacted the livelihoods of so many Northern communities.

Reviews
"Wow! This is an excellent resource for those engaged in, or interested in, land-based education. It gives a wonderful, engaging account of living on the land in the past and, to some extent, in the present day. It's also a good resource for N-dialect speakers." —Solomon Ratt, author of The Way I Remember and Beginning Cree

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328 pages | 5.00" x 8.00" | Paperback

Serpents and Other Spiritual Beings is the second book in a series by renowned Ojibwe storyteller Bomgiizhik Isaac Murdoch, following on The Trail of Nenaboozhoo and Other Creation Stories (2019). Serpents and Other Spiritual Beings is a collection of traditional Ojibwe/Anishinaabe stories transliterated directly from Murdoch's oral storytelling. Part history, legend, and mythology, these are stories of tradition, magic and transformation, morality and object lessons, involving powerful spirit-beings in serpent form. The stories appear in both English and Anishinaabemowin, with translations by Patricia BigGeorge. Murdoch's traditional-style Ojibwe artwork provides beautiful illustrations throughout.

Reviews
"'When the Thunderbirds and Serpents fight, they feed off each other, you know great medicine gets cast across the land. We get our life from that.' So writes storyteller Isaac Murdoch as he shares his Elders' stories about tunnels beneath the earth, rich laws, philosophies, teachings, power from up there, down there, and all around us, until we too hear the thunders as they bring us into the world of wahkotowin, all our relations. How privileged and blessed we are to be able to read the Ahtyokaywina of our people."--Maria Campbell, author of Halfbreed

"Gather around, for here are oral stories transcribed so they retain the flavour of a narrative spoken aloud, and translated into Anishinaabemowin; perfect for language-learners. I love the way these stories infuse the spirit world into an every-day context, these are not dusty old legends, but a living way of seeing the world around us in the here and now."--Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler, author of Ghost Lake

Educator & Series Information
Dual-Language: English and Anishinaabemowin.

Anishinaabemowin translation by Patricia BigGeorge, who is an Anishinaabemowin speaker and translator.

This book is Vol. 2 in the Ojibwe History Series.

Additional Information
100 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 20 illustrations | Paperback 

An important language resource that helps intermediate nêhiyawêtan learners begin to understand more advanced grammar of the language.

Let’s keep on speaking Cree:
In our language is our life;

Let’s keep on speaking Cree:
In our language is our identity.

Building on mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree, Solomon Ratt’s first influential Cree language resource, âhkami-nêhiyawêtân / Let’s Keep Speaking Cree helps intermediate nêhiyawêtan learners begin to understand more advanced grammar of the language. The textbook is more than a language textbook though: it includes a series of the author’s original stories written in Cree, complete with comprehension questions, making it ideal for self-study as well as classroom use.

Educator & Series Information
This book builds on mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree.

Latest Cree language workbook by highly respected author and educator Solomon Ratt, intended for intermediate readers/speakers/
learners

First title in the Continuing Language series, which will build upon our introductory Indigenous language learner texts

Includes sections on going to the doctor, Cree culture and values, protocols, faith, humility, teachings, and more.

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304 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | Spiral Bound

Châhkâpâs: A Naskapi Legend shares the story of Châhkâpâs, a heroic figure in First Nations storytelling, who performs feats of strength and skill in spite of his diminutive size.

The book shares this traditional legend as originally recorded in the Naskapi community in northern Quebec in 1967 when it was narrated by John Peastitute, a Naskapi Elder and accomplished storyteller. Transcribed in the Naskapi language and syllabic orthography, the book offers a literary resource for the Naskapi language community, and the English translation enables those unfamiliar with the language, or the story, to discover this important legend.

The book also contains extensive analysis of stories about Châhkâpâs, notes about the provenance of the recordings, a biography of the storyteller, and a history of the Naskapi people. Lavish illustrations from Elizabeth Jancewicz—an artist raised in the Naskapi community—provide a sensitive and accurate graphical account of the legend, which has also been approved by Naskapi speakers themselves.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the First Nation Language Readers series. With a mix of traditional and new stories, each First Nations Language Reader introduces an Indigenous language and demonstrates how each language is used today. 

By John Peastitute
Edited by Marguerite MacKenzie
Translated by Julie Brittain and Silas Nabinicaboo 
Illustrated by Elizabeth Jancewicz 
Contributions by Bill Jancewicz

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

A collection of narratives as told in the nêhiyawêwin (Cree) language by Elder Mary Louise Rockthunder, spanning her rich life and extensive knowledge of her traditions and culture.

Mary Louise (née Bangs) Rockthunder, wêpanâkit, was an Elder of Cree, Saulteaux, and Nakoda descent. Born in 1913, raised and married at nēhiyawipwātināhk / Piapot First Nation, Mary Louise, a much-loved storyteller, speaks of her memories, stories, and knowledge, revealing her personal humility and her deep love and respect for her family and her nêhiyawêwin language and culture. 
 
The recordings that are transcribed, edited, and translated for this book are presented in three forms: Cree syllabics, standard roman orthography (SRO) for Cree, and English. A full Cree-English glossary concludes the book, providing an additional resource for those learning the nêhiyawêwin language.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Our Own Words series. Our Own Words is a new Indigenous language series that seeks to present longer, more extensive Indigenous texts for both intermediate and advanced learners of the language.

Additional Information
264 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Translated by Jean L. Okimasis and Arok Wolvengrey | Paperback

One man’s story of growing up in the hunting and gathering society of the Ojibways and surviving the residential school system, woven together with traditional legends in their original language.

Members of Eli Baxter’s generation are the last of the hunting and gathering societies living on Turtle Island. They are also among the last fluent speakers of the Anishinaabay language known as Anishinaabaymowin. Aki-wayn-zih is a story about the land and its spiritual relationship with the Anishinaabayg, from the beginning of their life on Miss-koh-tay-sih Minis (Turtle Island) to the present day. Baxter writes about Anishinaabay life before European contact, his childhood memories of trapping, hunting, and fishing with his family on traditional lands in Treaty 9 territory, and his personal experience surviving the residential school system. Examining how Anishinaabay Kih-kayn-daa-soh-win (knowledge) is an elemental concept embedded in the Anishinaabay language, Aki-wayn-zih explores history, science, math, education, philosophy, law, and spiritual teachings, outlining the cultural significance of language to Anishinaabay identity. Recounting traditional Ojibway legends in their original language, fables in which moral virtues double as survival techniques, and detailed guidelines for expertly trapping or ensnaring animals, Baxter reveals how the residential school system shaped him as an individual, transformed his family, and forever disrupted his reserve community and those like it. Through spiritual teachings, historical accounts, and autobiographical anecdotes, Aki-wayn-zih offers a new form of storytelling from the Anishinaabay point of view.

Reviews
"Aki-wayn-zih will educate not only Canadians but the world as to what my people went through during this tragic part of history. I recommend this book wholeheartedly, and I hope that it inspires our young people and the public to learn more about Indigenous Peoples, our history, and why we remain strong in our culture, our languages, our lands, and our nations." — David Paul Achneepineskum, Matawa First Nations

"Eli Baxter eloquently weaves us through his life on the land. This is not just a book, but also a record of Anishinaabay customs and beliefs. What also makes this an incredible treasure is the fact that it is expressed in the language. No doubt a language resource for many generations to come, the information in this book is sacred and will transform lives." — Isaac Murdoch, Onaman Collective

"I truly enjoyed reading this book: its way of storytelling drew me in from the opening page. Aki-wayn-zih sets up the storytelling approach of the Anishinaabay language, offering important teachings in a subtle way, and bringing in a strongly experientially grounded sense of the language and its importance for healing and connecting with the spirit of land relations." — Timothy Brian Leduc, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond

"Aki-wayn-zih will help many North American settlers and immigrants understand the history of the Anishinaabay people and the land that now sustains all of us. This book is eloquent and well written and offers perspectives that range from supporting dominant narratives to providing important contrasting views. It is clearly the work of an articulate storyteller respected in and beyond his community." — Margaret Ann Noodin, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and author of What the Chickadee Knows

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 5 photos, 1 map | Hardcover 

“Our identity, our sense of belonging, our understanding of being human, is all connected to our relationship with the land. And our relationship with these lands span millennia. Our grandfathers and grandmothers that came before us walked these same ridges, valleys, and trails. They fished the same lakes, streams, and rivers. They cherished memories carried in the pungent smell of the fall tundra, in wafts of spruce, cottonwood, and willow smoke. They ventured throughout these lands until their final rest. Our ancestors are literally part of this land. We are part of this land.” –Evon Peter

The North is changing at an unprecedented rate as industrial development and the climate crisis disrupt not only the environment but also long-standing relationships to the land and traditional means of livelihood. Memory and Landscape: Indigenous Responses to a Changing North explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples in the Arctic have adapted to challenging circumstances, including past cultural and environmental changes. In this beautifully illustrated volume, contributors document how Indigenous communities in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia are seeking ways to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity while also embracing forces of disruption.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors bring together oral history and scholarly research from disciplines such as linguistics, archaeology, and ethnohistory. With an emphasis on Indigenous place names, this volume illuminates how the land—and the memories that are inextricably tied to it—continue to define Indigenous identity. The perspectives presented here also serve to underscore the value of Indigenous knowledge and its essential place in future studies of the Arctic.

Contributions by Vinnie Baron, Hugh Brody, Kenneth Buck, Anna Bunce, Donald Butler, Michael A. Chenlov, Aron L. Crowell, Peter C. Dawson, Martha Dowsley, Robert Drozda, Gary Holton, Colleen Hughes, Peter Jacobs, Emily Kearney-Williams, Igor Krupnik, Apayo Moore, Murielle Nagy, Mark Nuttall, Evon Peter, Louann Rank, William E. Simeone, Felix St-Aubin, and Will Stolz.

Additional Information
448 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | 172 Colour Illustrations | Paperback

Authenticity Note: This work contains contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors. It is up to readers to determine if this is an authentic work for their purposes.

"I hear so much power in these pages. I also feel it." —Richard Van Camp

We Remember the Coming of the White Man chronicles the history of the Sahtú (Mountain Dene) and Gwinch’in People in the extraordinary time of the early 20th century. This 2021 Special Edition of the book recognizes the anniversary of the signing of Treaty 11, which is greatly controversial due to the emotional and economic fallout for the People.

The remastered film “We Remember,” is included with the book, on DVD and as digital Vimeo links. As well as poignant essays on Treaty 11, the book includes transcripts of oral histories by Elders. They talk about the early days of fur trading and guns; the flu pandemic; and dismay about the way oil and uranium discoveries and pipelines were handled on their land. A new section of stories is included as well — stories by Leanne Goose, Antoine Mountain, Raymond Yakeleya, and George Blondin.

Dene Elders in the book (now all deceased) are Joe Blondin, John Blondin, Elizabeth Yakeleya, Mary Wilson, Isadore Yukon, Peter Thompson, Jim Sittichinli, Sarah Simon, Johnny Kay, and Andrew Kunnizzi. Dene translation is by Bella Ross.

Reviews
"We Remember The Coming of the White Man should be crucial reading for anyone in Canada because it speaks to the resiliency of the Dene and Metis people of Denendeh. It's also a testament to the power of memory carried in the oral tradition. To think what our ancestors have seen in one lifetime: relations with the Hudon's Bay Company, TB, Influenza, Treaty signings, the first musket loader, Residential Schools, the first radio, the first TV, a man on the moon. It is staggering. I hear so much power in these pages. I also feel it. I am grateful to everyone involved in this project because it is a life's work honouring the witnessing of so much change in so little time. Mahsi cho, everyone. I am grateful. We will have and celebrate this book and the DVD that accompanies it forever."— Richard Van Camp, Author

"Our traditional knowledge is recorded in the stories of our ancestors since time immemorial. In this book, you will read our oral history and traditions that are our Dene parables, used to guide ourselves and our People.” — Norman Yakeleya, Dene National Chief

“All Canadians are enriched by the stories in this collection. By listening to these stories, we take a step together towards reconciliation. We are learning the truth and building an understanding. We are nurturing respect and reciprocity. We are honouring our relations in a good way.”—­Colette Poitras, Chair of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations Indigenous Matters Committee

Educator Information
Author royalties for this edition are being used to create a scholarship for an emerging Indigenous writer in conjunction with Northwords Writers Festival.

Keywords: Indigenous, Dene Nation, Elders, Treaty 11, Hudson Bay Company, Missionaries, Northwest Territories.

Contains DVD of film We Remember.

Editors: Sarah Stewart & Raymond Yakeleya
Foreword : Walter Blondin,
Elders: Elizabeth Yakeleya, Sarah Simon, Mary Wilson, Joe Blondin, John Blondin, Isadore Yukon, Johnny Kaye, Jim Edwards Sittichinli, Peter Thompson, Andrew Kunnizzi
Storytellers and Authors: Colette Poitras, Leanne Goose, George Blondin, Raymond Yakeleya, Antoine Mountain
Artists: Antoine Mountain, Ruth Schefter, Deborah Desmarais

This book is part of the Indigenous Spirit of Nature series.

Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 100 b&w photographs, 10 b&w line drawings 

A narrative of resistance and resilience spanning seven decades in the life of a tireless advocate for Indigenous language preservation.

Life histories are a form of contemporary social history and convey important messages about identity, cosmology, social behaviour and one’s place in the world. This first-person oral history—the first of its kind ever published by the Royal BC Museum—documents a period of profound social change through the lens of Sti’tum’atul’wut—also known as Mrs. Ruby Peter—a Cowichan elder who made it her life’s work to share and safeguard the ancient language of her people: Hul’q’umi’num’.

Over seven decades, Sti’tum’atul’wut mentored hundreds of students and teachers and helped thousands of people to develop a basic knowledge of the Hul’q’umi’num’ language. She contributed to dictionaries and grammars, and helped assemble a valuable corpus of stories, sound and video files—with more than 10,000 pages of texts from Hul’q’umi’num’ speakers—that has been described as “a treasure of linguistic and cultural knowledge.” Without her passion, commitment and expertise, this rich legacy of material would not exist for future generations.

In 1997 Vancouver Island University anthropologist Helene Demers recorded Sti’tum’atul’wut’s life stories over nine sessions. The result is rich with family and cultural history—a compelling narrative of resistance and resilience that promises to help shape progressive social policy for generations to follow.

Additional Information
240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Strong women dominate these reminiscences: the grandmother taught the girl whose mother refused to let her go to school, and the life-changing events they witnessed range from the ravages of the influenza epidemic of 1918–20 and murder committed in a jealous rage to the abduction of a young woman by underground spirits who on her release grant her healing powers.

A highly personal document, these memoirs are altogether exceptional in recounting the thoughts and feelings of a Cree woman as she copes with the challenges of reserve life but also, in a key chapter, with her loneliness while tending a relative’s children in a place far away from home – and, apparently just as debilitating, away from the company of other women. Her experiences and reactions throw fresh light on the lives lived by Plains Cree women on the Canadian prairies over much of the twentieth century.

The late Sarah Whitecalf (1919–1991) spoke Cree exclusively, spending most of her life at Nakiwacîhk / Sweetgrass Reserve on the North Saskatchewan River. This is where Leonard Bloomfield was told his Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree in 1925 and where a decade later David Mandelbaum apprenticed himself to Kâ-miyokîsihkwêw / Fineday, the step-grandfather in whose family Sarah Whitecalf grew up.

In presenting a Cree woman’s view of her world, the texts in this volume directly reflect the spoken word: Sarah Whitecalf’s memoirs are here printed in Cree exactly as she recorded them, with a close English translation on the facing page. They constitute an autobiography of great personal authority and rare authenticity.

Educator Information
Table of Contents
PART I Becoming a Cree woman

Ch. 1—êkosi nikî-pê-ay-itâcihonân / This has been our way of life

Ch. 2—êkosi nikî-tâs-ôy-ohpikihikawin / This is the way I was raised

Ch. 3—mêh-mêskoc nikî-pimohtahikawin / I was taken back and forth

Ch. 4—miton ê-kî-pê-na-nêhiyaw-ôhpikihikawiyân / I was truly raised as a Cree woman

PART II Being a Cree woman

Ch. 5—êwak ôm ê-kî-ay-itâcimisot awa nikâwiy / This is my mother’s own story

Ch. 6—iyikohk ê-kî-sôhkêpayik anima nipahtâkêwin / So horrible was that murder

Ch. 7—ê-nipahi-kâh-kaskêyihtamân / I was desperately lonesome

Ch. 8—pikw êkwa niya / Now I had to take charge

PART III The spiritual life

Ch. 9—ê-sîkâwîhcikêhk / Observing the mourning ritual

Ch. 10—manitow kâ-matwêhikêt / Where the spirits drum (I)

Ch. 11—manitow kâ-matwêhikêt / Where the spirits drum (II)

Ch. 12—manitow kâ-matwêhikêt / Where the spirits drum (III)

Additional Information
366 pages | 6.50" x 9.75"

In A Short History of the Blockade, award-winning writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices to explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, the beaver—or in Nishnaabemowin, Amik. Moving through genres, shifting through time, amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance, as both a negation and an affirmation. Widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation, Simpson’s work breaks open the intersections between politics, story, and song, bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. A Short History of the Blockade reveals how the practice of telling stories is also a culture of listening, “a thinking through together,” and ultimately, like the dam or the blockade, an affirmation of life.

Educator Information
Subjects & Keywords: Social Sciences, Literary Criticism, Indigenous Studies; Indigenous resistance, blockades, beaver dams, Nishnaabeg storytelling, regeneration, generative resistance, Canadian Indigenous literature, land defenders, water defenders, practice of wisdom, Indigenous stories, Indigenous authors.

Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools collection for grades 10 to 12 for these subjects: Social Studies, English Language Arts, English First Peoples

Additional Information
88 pages | 5.25" x 9.00"

The stories of the Lushootseed-speaking people of Puget Sound represent an important part of the oral tradition by which one generation hands down beliefs, values, and customs to another. Vi Hilbert grew up when many of the old social patterns survived and everyone spoke the ancestral language.

Haboo, Hilbert’s collection of thirty-three stories, features tales mostly set in a time before the world transformed. Animals, plants, trees, and even rocks had human attributes. Prominent characters like Wolf, Salmon, and Changer and tricksters like Mink, Raven, and Coyote populate humorous, earthy stories that reflect foibles of human nature, convey serious moral instruction, and comically detail the unfortunate, even disastrous consequences of breaking taboos.

Beautifully redesigned and with a new foreword by Jill La Pointe, Haboo offers a vivid and invaluable resource for linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, future generations of Lushootseed-speaking people, and others interested in Native languages and cultures.

Reviews
"The wisdom and teachings found in Haboo continue to offer a . . . resource that highlights a way of being in the world that we have strayed from, and they remain as relevant today as they have been for generations." - from the foreword by Jill La Pointe

Additional Information
232 pages | 6.50" x 9.00" | 20 b&w illustrations, 1 map | Translated and Edited by Val Hilbert, Foreword by Jill La Pointe, Introduction by Thom Hess | 2nd Edition

The stories in this book relate the traditional tales which Mr. James Wallas has learned from his elders, who lived in Quatsino Sound and on Hope Island. Mr. Wallas's forefathers are members of a people known generally as the Kwakiutl, although the term is misleading because it originally referred to a sub-group living at Fort Rupert. The Kwakiutl inhabit an area which at present includes Campbell River at the southern extreme, Quatsino Sound at the western extreme, various inlets of mainland B.C. at the eastern extreme, and Smiths Inlet at the northern extreme. Traditionally, the Kwakiutl lived in villages located in this general area (excluding Campbell River an Cape Mudge) which were organized into tribes. Today, most of them live on reserves near towns, maintaining some remote villages for food preparation and preserving during the spring, summer and fall.

Additional Information
216 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 11 Colour Line Drawings

The Skeena, second longest river in the province, remains an icon of British Columbia’s northwest. Called Xsien (“water of the clouds”) by the Tsimshian and Gitksan, it has always played a vital role in the lives of Indigenous people of the region. Since the 1800s, it has also become home to gold seekers, traders, salmon fishers and other settlers who were drawn by the area’s beauty and abundant natural resources.

Voices from the Skeena takes readers on a journey inspired directly by the people who lived there. Combining forty illustrations with text selected from the pioneer interviews CBC radio producer Imbert Orchard recorded in the 1960s, the book follows the arrival of the Europeans and the introduction of the fur trade to the Omineca gold rush and the building of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad.

Open the pages to meet Robert Cunningham, an Anglican missionary who would later become the founder of the thriving Port Essington. Here too is a man called Cataline, a packer for whom no settlement was too remote to reach, and the indominable Sarah Glassey, the first woman to pre-empt land in British Columbia. At the heart of these stories is the river, weaving together a narrative of a people and their culture. Pairing the stories with Roy Henry Vicker’s vibrant art creates a unique and captivating portrait of British Columbia that will appeal to art lovers and history readers alike.

Additional Information
112 pages | 11.00" x 8.00" | 40 colour illustrations

This work has received the Authentic Indigenous Text label because of the interviews/contributions with Indigenous people like Vicky Sims and Chief Jeffrey H. Johnson. It is up to readers to determine if this work is authentic for their purposes.

Nenaboozhoo left us many gifts.

Nenaboozhoo, the creator spirit-being of Ojibway legend, gave the people many gifts. This collection of oral stories presents legends of Nenaboozhoo along with other creation stories that tell of the adventures of numerous beloved animal spirits. The Trail of Nenaboozhoo is a book of art and storytelling that preserve the legends of the Anishinaabe people. Each story is accompanied by strikingly beautiful illustrations by revered Indigenous artists Isaac Murdoch and Christi Belcourt.

Educator & Series Information
From the Forward, by Isaac Murdoch:
"Everything we have can be accredited to the gifts from the spirit world. As we are now in abrupt climate change we can see the world-wide ecological collapse happening before our very eyes. How important was the birch bark canoe? The wigwam? How important were those gifts that were given to us? I think they were very important. They were more than important; they were sacred.

And so its with great hopes and encouragement that I offer these stories as a map to understand how to go back to the old ways. The old people always said we are going to go back to the old ways and I truly believe the time is now. We mustn’t wait.

Nenaboozhoo is a spirit that was brought to the earth who is highly respected to this day by my people. They say when he was in spirit form he went through four levels of power. Through each power he went through he went back to the centre saying he didn’t want to leave. But the Great Mystery told him, “'keep going, keep going, you’re needed somewhere.'

And he made his way through those four powers and ended up on earth. His life here on earth was magical. All the rivers, all of the mountains all of the beautiful colours that we see, were created with Nenaboozhoo and his magical trail on earth. They say one day ten men will go fasting and call Nenaboozhoo back and the world will be new again.

Nothing can stop the power that is here."

This book is part of the Ojibwe History Series.

Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2020/2021 resource list for grades 7 to 12 for English Language Arts and Science.

Most stories appear in English and with an Anishinaabemowin translation, but some stories are in English only.

Additional Information
55 pages | 9.00" x 9.00" | 20 illustrations

In this deeply engaging oral history, Doug Williams, Anishinaabe elder, teacher and mentor to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, recounts the history of the Michi Saagiig Nisnaabeg, tracing through personal and historical events, and presenting what manifests as a crucial historical document that confronts entrenched institutional narratives of the history of the region. Edited collaboratively with Simpson, the book uniquely retells pivotal historical events that have been conventionally unchallenged in dominant historical narratives, while presenting a fascinating personal perspective in the singular voice of Williams, whose rare body of knowledge spans back to the 1700s. With this wealth of knowledge, wit and storytelling prowess, Williams recounts key moments of his personal history, connecting them to the larger history of the Anishinaabeg and other Indigenous communities.

Reviews
"This book gives us an alternative perspective on historical record that is both personal and collective. Doug Williams reminds us of the generations of Indigenous knowledge keepers and of a history that stretches back prior to European contact-including the disruption of contact. This book is his gift to the Michi Saagiig and to all Anishinaabek. It is also a gift to Canadians who want to help decolonize this country. - Armand Garnet Ruffo

"Storytelling is not just a gift. It's not just an art. It's also a responsibility: the weaving together of history, philosophy, culture and humour frequently highlighting a culture's perspective on the world. Doug Williams has been doing this as long as I can remember. He lives the culture, not just talks about it. The people and places he talks about in Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg are more a part of our history then all the things going on in Ottawa." - Drew Hayden Taylor

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2019-2020 resource list as being useful for grades 9 to 12 for Creative Writing, English Language Arts, Media Studies, and Social Studies.

Additional Information
168 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Our parents always taught us well. They told us to look on the good side of life and to accept what has to happen. 

The Man Who Lived with a Giant presents traditional and personal stories told by Johnny Neyelle, a respected Dene storyteller and Elder from Déline, Northwest Territories. Johnny Neyelle used storytelling to teach Dene youth and others to understand and celebrate Dene traditions and identities. Johnny’s entertaining voice makes his stories accessible to readers young and old, and his wisdom reinforces the right way to live: in harmony with people and places. Storytelling forms the core of Dene knowledge-keeping. A volume dedicated to making Dene culture strong, The Man Who Lived with a Giant is a vital book for Dene readers, researchers working with Indigenous cultures and oral histories, and scholars preserving Elders’ stories. Even more, it is a book for the Dene people of today and tomorrow.

Additional Information
152 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is an interdisciplinary collection that gathers the work of scholars and performance practitioners who together explore questions about the oral, written, and visual. The book includes the voices of oral performance practitioners, while the scholarship of many of the academic contributors is informed by their participation in oral storytelling, whether as poets, singers, or visual artists. Its contributions address the politics and ethics of the utterance and text: textualizing orature and orality, simulations of the oral, the poetics of performance, and reconstructions of the oral.

Reviews
"The essays in this collection cut boldly across disciplinary boundaries as they explore, from a myriad of perspectives—some familiar, some startlingly unfamiliar—the deep, fundamental connections that exist among the oral, verbal, and visual arts. As innovative as they are provocative, and as illuminating as they are engaging, the wide-ranging essays gathered here individually and collectively invite the reader to join in a polyphonous, multi-media conversation/sensory experience. Gingell and Roy deserve our thanks for putting together a volume that not only reflects the vibrancy, and diversity of oral studies in Canada, but opens numerous windows onto the richness of the many traditions considered in the collection. This volume is certain to change the way we look at and think about the dynamic interconnectivity of the oral, the written, and other verbal and visual media.''- Mark C. Amodio, Vassar College, New York, author of Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England

"Energy and optimisim...characterize Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy's Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond, a collection of epic proportions.... The editors do precisely what they intend...break down barriers between the written, the oral and the visual, and destabilize the hierarchies between genres.... Gingell and Roy display a staggering breadth of knowledge of their field—something that could only be achieved by established and experienced scholars.... Continually playing with language, the editors invite readers to move ‘toward a more fully embodied knowing, a knowing that issues from attending to the complete sensorium and thus pleasures the knower with a knowing that doesn't forget to have fun.”... The editors, by including both analytical and creative works in the collection, and by placing analyses of such diverse things as dub poetry, medieval English, Serbian guslars, and Cree ‘story bundles’ side by side, succeed in opening doors and shifting perceptions.... The participatory, democratic nature of the text comes through in the conversational elements, and in spite of their expertise, the editors approach their material with a humility that conforms to their goals.... How might a text of this scope be of use to teachers and scholars of literature? It really does shift the parameters of artistic production and reception, which opens up possibilities for teaching in particular. The collection ‘unsettles’ generic limitations, and promotes a return to the sensual that is too often absent from the analysis of literary production and reception.''- Heather Macfarlane, Canadian Literature, 217, Summer 2013

Educator Information
Includes some Indigenous content.

Useful for these courses or subject areas: Sociolinguistics, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Opening the Door to Transdisciplinary, Multimodal Communication | Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy
Listening Up: Performance Poetics
Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi young and Oni Joseph | George Elliott Clarke
the storyteller’s integrity | d’bi.young.anitafrika
Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage: Insights from Slam | Helen Gregory
Poetry and Overturned Cars: Why Performance Poetry Can’t Be Studied (and Why We Should Study It Anyway) | Hugh Hodges
Echohomonymy: A Poetics of Ethos, Eros, and Erasure | Adeena Karasick
Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance: The Case of William Barnes | T.L. Burton
The Speech-Music Continuum | Paul Dutton
Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality
Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa: The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng | Gugu Hlongwane
The Ballad as Site of Rebellion: Orality, Gender, and the Granuaile Aislingi | Naomi Foyle
“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”: Inferring Pronuntiatio and Actio from the Text of John Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon | Brent Nelson
“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story: Challenges to the Tyranny of the Written in Contemporary Canadian Fiction | Wendy Roy
What’s In a Frame?: The Significance of Relational Word Bundles in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow | Mareike Neuhaus
Towards an “Open Field”: The Ethics of the Encounter in Life Lived Like a Story | Emily Blacker
Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual
Becoming the Storyteller: Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance | Waziyatawin
Re-si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature: Photographs in The Days of Augusta | Cara DeHaan
Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in Neal McLeod’s Writing of the Oral? | Susan Gingell
A Nexus of Connections: Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest | Kimberly Blaeser
Contributors
Index

Additional Information
388 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 19 colour illustrations

Text Content Note: There is some, but limited, Indigenous content in this work (i.e., "Becoming the Storyteller: Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance" from Waziyatawin)

This groundbreaking anthology from territory that is now Saskatchewan, kisiskâciwan, includes rich oral narratives from Cree, Saulteaux, Nakoda, Dakota, Dene, and Métis cultures; early writings from Cree missionaries; speeches and letters by Treaty Chiefs; stories from elders; archival discoveries; and contemporary literary works in all genres.

Historically and culturally comprehensive, voices include Big Bear, Thunderchild, Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont, Edward Ahenakew, Maria Campbell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Rita Bouvier, Harold Johnson, Gregory Scofield, Warren Cariou, Louise Halfe, and many more.

Educator Information
The collected works in this anthology would be useful for high school and college/university courses.  All the works in this anthology are connected to Saskatchewan in some way.  Some themes include Residential Schools, family, resilience, the Sixties Scoop, and coming of age.

Recommended resource for Grades 10-12 for these subjects: Drama, English Language Arts, Social Studies.

Caution: Some of the works in this anthology contain mature subject matter, such as discussion of abuse, violence, sexuality, etc. 

Additional Information
300 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Authenticity Note: This work is labelled as containing Authentic Indigenous Text because of the contributions from Indigenous Peoples.

An enthralling collection of traditional Blackfoot stories revealing the frailty of mankind and the enduring power of narrative.

Napi, the Old Man of the Blackfoot Nation, appears prominently in mythology, sometimes as a quasi-Creator, sometimes a fool, and sometimes a brutal murderer. Although Napi is given credit for creating many of the objects and creatures on Earth, and indeed the Earth itself, the Blackfoot do not consider him to be god-like. Napi stories tell of this mythical figure creating the world and everything in it, but getting into trouble when he starts tinkering with his own creation. Perhaps for this reason, anthropologists have labelled him a trickster/creator.

For thousands of years, people have gathered around the campfire and listened to stories of how Napi blundered and schemed his way through Blackfoot country. They laugh at how Napi was outwitted by a lame fox, how he tried to fly with the geese only to look down when he was told not to and fell to the earth. He makes a perfect subject for telling, listening, and enjoying—and for teaching.

Hugh Dempsey, venerable historian and strong ally of the Blackfoot Nation, has gathered together a number of Napi stories passed on through oral tradition, many recorded and analysed by outsiders, but used by permission of Blackfoot elders. These stories offer complex insight into an ancient and still-thriving culture through the figure of a flawed yet powerful creature—a mirror of humankind itself.

Reviews
"By gathering together a sizeable collection of stories passed down through oral tradition, Dempsey and Koski offer insight into a venerable and still-thriving culture, as well as a piece of history to be kept and passed on to younger generations for years to come." — Vue Weekly

Additional Information
144 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" 

Francis Pegahmagabow (1889–1952), a member of the Ojibwe nation, was born in Shawanaga, Ontario. Enlisting at the onset of the First World War, he became the most decorated Canadian Indigenous soldier for bravery and the most accomplished sniper in North American military history. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing, Ontario. He served his community as both chief and councillor and belonged to the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, an early national Indigenous political organization. Francis proudly served a term as Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government, retiring from office in 1950.

Francis Pegahmagabow’s stories describe many parts of his life and are characterized by classic Ojibwe narrative. They reveal aspects of Francis’s Anishinaabe life and worldview. Interceding chapters by Brian McInnes provide valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historic insights that give a greater context and application for Francis’s words and world. Presented in their original Ojibwe as well as in English translation, the stories also reveal a rich and evocative relationship to the lands and waters of Georgian Bay.

In Sounding Thunder, Brian McInnes provides new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.

Awards

• Fred Landon Award, Ontario Historical Society (2018)
• American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (2017)

In 1941, Angeline Williams, an Anishinaabe elder left her home on an island in the St. Mary’s River between Michigan and Ontario and travelled south to North Caroline to teach the Ojibwe (Chippewa) language. At the Linguistic Institute, a summer school of linguistics, Angeline Williams spoke words and sentences and told anecdotes and stories to give the students practice in transcribing an analyzing the structure of an unwritten language.

The Dog’s Children includes twenty stories dictated to the class and the teaching staff, Charles F. Voegelin, and Leonard Bloomfield, as later edited by Bloomfield. The manuscript from which this edition has been prepared is now at the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Presented in Ojibwe, with English translations by Bloomfield. The volume also contains an Ojibwe-English glossary and other linguistic study aids.

Reviews
"This book is tremendously valuable as a tool for understanding not only linguistic research but for understanding the life and culture of an Ojibwe woman. Angeline Williams, Biidaasigekwe or "Sunlight Woman," came to Virginia in 1941 from Sugar Island on the St. Mary's River to teach the Ojibwe language to Leonard Bloomfield. Bloomfield's subsequent translations and understanding of the Algonquian language family led to significant advances and changes in the study of linguistics. This series of Ojibwe stories and their up-to-date translations to English illustrate the thoroughness of Bloomfield's linguistic research.... The Ojibwe word inaajimowin means "story" in English. Throughout this book, Angeline Williams weaves Ojibwe "stories" that are influenced by myth, regionality, and family. The oral quality of her stories is rich in meaning and humor. More important these stories remain as an ethnographic record of her life and her contributions tofurther cultural understanding of the Ojibwe people. The updated version of Bloomfield's notes and the orthography installed by Nichols serves to enhance the fine translations and culturally rich Ojibwe stories. The notes on inflectional endings and the glossary with a dictionary of Ojibwe-to-English and English-to-Ojibwe translations make the book even more valuable as a linguistic resource tool. The mirror-like lay-out of the book also aids in understanding the translations. With alternating pages of Ojibwe and English, it is easy to compare the translations paragraph by paragraph, even line by line." - Paul C. Brooke, Department of English, Iowa State University

Additional Information
268 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

A lyrical, epic narrative about Aboriginal knowledge and education.

we are narrators narratives voices interlocutors of our own knowings 
we can determine for ourselves what our educational needs are 
before the coming of churches residential schools prisons 
before we knew how we knew we knew

In a gesture toward traditional First Nations orality, Peter Cole blends poetic and dramatic voices with storytelling. A conversation between two tricksters, Coyote and Raven, and the colonized and the colonizers, his narrative takes the form of a canoe journey. Cole draws on traditional Aboriginal knowledge to move away from the western genres that have long contained, shaped, and determined ab/originality. Written in free verse, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is meant to be read aloud and breaks new ground by making orality the foundation of its scholarship.

Cole moves beyond the rhetoric and presumption of white academic (de/re)colonizers to aboriginal spaces recreated by aboriginal peoples. Rather than employing the traditional western practice of gathering information about exoticized other, demonized other, contained other, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is a celebration of aboriginal thought, spirituality, and practice, a sharing of lived experience as First Peoples.

Reviews

Additional Information
352 pages | 7.00" x 9.50"

Following on two previous collections— Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989) and Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (2004)—Living by Stories is the third volume of oral narratives by Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson. This third collection documents how the arrival of whites forever altered the Salish cultural landscape.

Living by Stories includes a number of classic stories set in the “mythological age” about the trickster/transformer, Coyote, and his efforts to rid the world of bad people— spatla or “monsters,” but this new volume is more important for its presentation of historical narratives set in the more recent past. As with the mythological accounts, there is much chaos and conflict in these stories, mainly due to the arrival of new quasi-monsters—“SHAmas” (Whites)—who dispossess “Indians” of their lands and rights, impose new political and legal systems, and erect roads, rail lines, mines, farms, ranches and towns on the landscape.

With permission from Harry Robinson, Wendy Wickwire began recording Robinson's oral stories in 1977. Robinson took his role as a storyteller very seriously and worried about the survival of the oral tradition and his stories. “I’m going to disappear”, he told one reporter, “and there’ll be no more telling stories.”

Review
Whenever I need to be reminded that language is magic and that stories can change the world, I go to Robinson.
- Thomas King

Additional Information
288 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Stories from Harry Robinson
Edited and compiled by Wendy Wickwire

Indigenous Poetics in Canada broadens the way in which Indigenous poetry is examined, studied, and discussed in Canada. Breaking from the parameters of traditional English literature studies, this volume embraces a wider sense of poetics, including Indigenous oralities, languages, and understandings of place.

Featuring work by academics and poets, the book examines four elements of Indigenous poetics. First, it explores the poetics of memory: collective memory, the persistence of Indigenous poetic consciousness, and the relationships that enable the Indigenous storytelling process. The book then explores the poetics of performance: Indigenous poetics exist both in written form and in relation to an audience. Third, in an examination of the poetics of place and space, the book considers contemporary Indigenous poetry and classical Indigenous narratives. Finally, in a section on the poetics of medicine, contributors articulate the healing and restorative power of Indigenous poetry and narratives.

Awards

• 2014 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism winner.

Reviews
"Indigenous Poetics in Canada is that rare book of scholarship that speaks to the heart and spirit as well as the mind. The selections in this collection offer powerful individual and collective insight into the ways that diverse traditions of Indigenous poetics animate our imaginative possibilities and extend our cultural understandings across time, space, and difference. To study Indigenous poetics is to be forcefully reminded of both our historical traditions and their continuing significance, and the poets, writers, scholars, and story-makers featured in this volume are among the most eloquent and insightful voices on the topic today. This is a transformative intervention in Indigenous literary studies as well as the broader canon of Canadian literature, reminding us that questions of aesthetics are always in dynamic relationship with the lived experience of our politicized imaginations in the world."— Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), April 2014

"Conversations about Indigenous literatures will be forever enriched by this stunning new collection. Here, the leading voices in Indigenous literary studies draw upon deep currents of inspiration—both ancient and contemporary—as they reflect upon and powerfully perform the act of re-making the world through language. Joyful, humbling, and wonderfully diverse, Indigenous Poetics in Canada welcomes readers and writers into a re-indigenized rhetorical landscape-and I cannot wait to see what takes place there.'"— Keavy Martin, April 2014

"In a fine introduction, McLeod does an admirable job of framing the essays and interviews to come while giving readers less familiar with indigenous poetics insight into some of the tropes and rhetorical strategies practitioners use, including kiskino (‘things...pointed to, but never completely articulated’), kakêskihkêmowina
(‘counselling narratives’), and aniskwâcimopicikêwin (‘the process of connecting stories together’). That this collection exists is at once a challenge to the white publishing world that has long refused to recognize indigenous poetic practices as ‘poetry’ and a testament to the health and vibrancy of the living word of indigenous consciousness.... Summing up: Highly recommended."— B. Carson, Choice, December 2014, December 2014

Educator Information
This book would be useful for the following subject areas or courses: Indigenous Studies, Poetry, Canadian Literature, and Literary Criticism.

Additional Information
416 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Edited by Neal McLeod.

Read, Listen, Tell brings together an extraordinary range of Indigenous stories from across Turtle Island (North America). From short fiction to as-told-to narratives, from illustrated stories to personal essays, these stories celebrate the strength of heritage and the liveliness of innovation. Ranging in tone from humorous to defiant to triumphant, the stories explore core concepts in Indigenous literary expression, such as the relations between land, language, and community, the variety of narrative forms, and the continuities between oral and written forms of expression. Rich in insight and bold in execution, the stories proclaim the diversity, vitality, and depth of Indigenous writing.

Building on two decades of scholarly work to centre Indigenous knowledges and perspectives, the book transforms literary method while respecting and honouring Indigenous histories and peoples of these lands. It includes stories by acclaimed writers like Thomas King, Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen, and Eden Robinson, a new generation of emergent writers, and writers and storytellers who have often been excluded from the canon, such as French- and Spanish-language Indigenous authors, Indigenous authors from Mexico, Chicana/o authors, Indigenous-language authors, works in translation, and "lost" or underappreciated texts.

In a place and time when Indigenous people often have to contend with representations that marginalize or devalue their intellectual and cultural heritage, this collection is a testament to Indigenous resilience and creativity. It shows that the ways in which we read, listen, and tell play key roles in how we establish relationships with one another, and how we might share knowledges across cultures, languages, and social spaces.

Reviews
Edited by experts in Indigenous literature and contextualised beautifully, historical writers like E. Pauline Johnson are placed alongside exciting genres like Indigenous Science Fiction — illustrating the vibrancy and innovation of Indigenous storytelling across time, space and politics. If you want a primer on Indigenous cultural expressions, this is for you. If you want deft, detailed stories in Indigenous written, oral and graphic traditions, these will expand your thinking. Read, Listen, Tell will make you laugh, dream and search for more. — Niigaanwewidam Sinclair

A unique compendium that is the direct result of outstanding and painstaking scholarship, Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island is an impressively informative, deftly organized, and exceptionally well presented volume that is unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library Indigenous Cultural Studies collections and supplemental reading lists. — Midwest Book Review

Read, Listen, Tell collects a brilliant and vast array of indigenous short fiction, bolstered by insightful critical essays that prioritize indigenous voices, culture, and methodologies. — Clarissa Goldsmith, Foreword Reviews, July 2017

Educator Information
• Connects Indigenous writing across colonial settler borders (of Canada, USA, and Mexico) at a time when those borders are hardening in light of security measures.
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission report highlights focus on education, prioritizing Indigenous knowledges, pedagogies, and perspectives—this book provides that.
• Provides curriculum material for new Indigenous content mandates in some provinces (Ontario, BC).
• Includes French-, Spanish-, and Indigenous-language.
• Indigenous authors (in translation).

Additional Information
410 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"
Edited by Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, David Gaertner, and Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill

Like all First Nations languages, Lillooet (Lil'wat) is a repository for an abundantly rich oral literature. In These Are Our Legends, the fifth volume of the First Nations Language Readers series, the reader will discover seven traditional Lillooet sptakwlh (variously translated into English as "legends," "myths," or "bed-time stories.")

These texts are presented in a technical transcription that can be used by linguists, and also in a practical orthography that can be used by Lillooet speakers themselves. An English translation is also given. Basic information on the Lillooet language, its grammar, and a glossary are included in the volume.

With thanks to the Mount Currie Cultural Centre and the Tszil Publishing House.

Series Information
These Are Our Legends is part of the First Nations Language Readers series. With a mix of traditional and new stories, each First Nations Language Reader introduces an Indigenous language and demonstrates how each language is used today. The University of Regina Press’s long-term goal is to publish all 60+ Indigenous languages of Canada.

Additional Information
120 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Narrated by Lillooet Elders | Transcribed and Translated by Jan van Eijk 

Authenticity Note: This book has been labelled as containing Authentic Indigenous Text because of the narration from Lillooet Elders.  It is up to readers to determine if this text will work as an authentic resource for their purposes.

Aboriginal Canadians tell their own stories, about their own people, in their own voice, from their own perspective.

If as recently as forty years ago there was no recognizable body of work by Canadian writers, as recently as thirty years ago there was no Native literature in this country. Perhaps a few books had made a dent on the national consciousness: The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, and the poetry of Pauline Johnson and even Louis Riel. Now, three decades later, Native people have a literature that paints them in colours that are psychologically complex and sophisticated. They have a literature that validates their existence, that gives them dignity, that tells them that they and their culture, their ideas, their languages, are important if not downright essential to the long-term survival of the planet.

Tomson Highway’s From Oral to Written is a study of Native literature published in Canada between 1980 and 2010, a catalogue of amazing books that sparked the embers of a dormant voice. In the early 1980s, that voice rose up to overcome the major obstacle Native people have as writers: they are not able to write in their own Native languages, but have to write in the languages of the colonizer, languages that simply cannot capture the magic of Native mythology, the wild insanity of Trickster thinking. From Oral to Written is the story of the Native literary tradition, written – in multiple Aboriginal languages, in French, and in English – by a brave, committed, hard-working, and inspired community of exceptional individuals – from the Haida Nation on Haida Gwaii to the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island.

Leading Aboriginal author Tomson Highway surveys the first wave of Native writers published in Canada, highlighting the most gifted authors and the best stories they have told, offering non-Native readers access to reconciliation and understanding, and at the same time engendering among Native readers pride in a stellar body of work.

Reviews
“We gratefully acknowledge the work of those artists who have come before, and those that continue, building bridges across our cultures through their authentic words. Tomson Highway’s readings each demonstrate that within our stories, we pass along our teachings and we build upon the strength inside each one of us. We are arriving. Back to our lands, back to our stories, back to our truths, unwrapping old words and sharing wisdom. We, are coming home.” —Terri Mack, Strong Nations

“A rich compilation of Indigenous literature that will be a gift for Canadian school curriculums, also well suited for those Canadians in search of understanding and reconciliation. More importantly this book is what Indigenous people need because, like me, they will discover their lives in the many stories. If I had this as a teenager, I would have understood that I was not alone in the darkness I lived. I would have seen that others found a way out. Bravo, Tomson Highway!”  ―Bev Sellars, author of They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School and Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2019-2020 resource list as a Teacher Resource.

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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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Alexander Wolfe is a Saulteaux/Ojibwa storyteller and the keeper of his family's oral history. These stories belong to his family and include accounts of how the descendents of Pinayzitt, a Saulteaux leader who lived in the Northwest Territories of Canada and the Great Plains of the United States in the 1800s, lived on the land, survived the smallpox and flu epidemics, signed treaties, and were confined to reservations.

The stories blend history with legend and prophecy, giving both the equal weight they occupy in Native oral tradition. In their retelling, Wolfe carries out his responsibility of passing on his family's stories to the next generation, as well as encouraging Natives to record their histories and non-Natives to understand the significance and lessons of these tales.

Earth Elder Stories has proven an excellent resource for students of Native Studies, history, linguistics, and literature.

“That’s Raven Talk”: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures is the first comprehensive study of North American Indigenous languages as the basis of textualized orality in Indigenous literatures in English. Drawing on a significant Indigenous language structure—the holophrase (one-word sentence)— Neuhaus proposes “holophrastic reading” as a culturally specific reading strategy for orality in Indigenous writing. In readings of works by Ishmael Alunik (Inuvialuit), Alootook Ipellie (Inuit), Richard Van Camp (Dogrib), Thomas King (Cherokee), and Louise Bernice Halfe (Cree), she demonstrates that (para)holophrases—the various transformations of holophrases into English-language discourse—textualize orality in Indigenous literatures by grounding it in Indigenous linguistic traditions. Neuhaus’s discussion points to the paraholophrase, the functional equivalent of the holophrase, as a central discourse device in Indigenous writing and as a figure of speech in its own right. Building on interdisciplinary research, this groundbreaking study not only links oral strategies in Indigenous writing to Indigenous rhetorical sovereignty, but also points to ancestral language influences and Indigenous rhetoric more generally as areas for future research.

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336 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"| Paperback

A seminal collection of Haida myths and legends; now in a gorgeous new package.

The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians from the fall of 1900 through the summer of 1901. Together they created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form.

Having worked for many years with these century-old manuscripts, linguist and poet Robert Bringhurst brings both rigorous scholarship and a literary voice to the English translation of John Swanton's careful work. He sets the stories in a rich context that reaches out to dozens of native oral literatures and to myth-telling traditions around the globe.

Attractively redesigned, this collection of First Nations oral literature is an important cultural record for future generations of Haida, scholars and other interested readers. It won the Edward Sapir Prize, awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and it was chosen as the Literary Editor's Book of the Year by the Times of London.

Bringhurst brings these works to life in the English language and sets them in a context just as rich as the stories themselves one that reaches out to dozens of Native American oral literatures, and to mythtelling traditions around the world.

"Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." In his 2003 Massey lectures, award-winning author and scholar Thomas King looks at the breadth and depth of Native experience and imagination. 

Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples.

Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Reviews
"Trust a novelist and English professor to get to the heart of how stories and storytelling shape our perceptions. This is a wonderful study of the power of words." — Booklist

"A collection of thought-provoking essays examining the importance of the oral tradition. Storyteller Thomas King addresses Native cultural concerns and their primal link to storytelling. Intriguing and entertaining. Highly recommended for all tribal college collections and literature classes."— Tribal College Journal

"What is revealed in this graceful, even seductive book of essays about storytelling by the esteemed Cherokee novelist, radio personality, university professor, and Canadian émigré is that what is as important as the stories we tell about the world are the ways in which we interpret those stories." — World Literature in Review

"King’s addresses artfully combine literary and cultural criticism, traditional Native American stories, and personal experience." — The Bloomsbury Review

Educator Information
Essay series that is a study of First Peoples' storytelling in North America. 

Grades 10-12 English First Peoples Resource for various units.

Curriculum Connections: English, Indigenous Studies, Civics and Careers, History, Humanities and Social Sciences.

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208 pages | 5.08" x 8.00"