Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Andy and Phyllis Chelsea met during their years spent at the St. Joseph’s Mission School in Williams Lake, BC. Like the thousands of others forced into the church-run residential school system, Andy and Phyllis are no strangers to the ongoing difficulties experienced by most Indigenous peoples in Canada. The couple married in 1964 but brought the trauma of their mission school years into their marriage. The Chelseas’ struggle with alcohol came to an abrupt halt in 1971 when their daughter, Ivy, then aged seven, stated that she and her brothers did not want to live with their parents because of the drinking, that they would stay with their Grandmother, their Kye7e. Andy and Phyllis chose sobriety to preserve their family. This decision sparked a lifetime of activism for the couple, which included overcoming the challenges caused by Canada’s disregard for their community. Throughout the twenty-seven years Andy was Chief of the Alkali Lake Esk’et First Nation, the Chelseas worked to eradicate alcoholism and took steps to overcome the rampant intergenerational trauma that existed for the people of Alkali Lake. Their efforts, their story and the perseverance of the members of their village have inspired Indigenous groups facing similar struggles throughout the world.

Resolve: The Chelsea Story and a First Nation Community’s Will to Heal explores the harrowing, personal journey of the Chelseas. By combining personal interviews and historical records, biographer Carolyn Parks Mintz shares the Chelseas’ transition from residential schools to state-sanctioned reservations to international recognition of their activism in the face of ongoing repression. A simultaneous celebration of strength and a condemnation of systemic racism, Resolve is a personal and deeply moving story that calls for a closer look at the status of Canada’s reconciliation efforts from the Chelseas’ perspective.

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2020/2021 resource list for grades 10 to 12 for English Language Arts, Social Studies, and Social Justice.

Caution: Alcoholisms, trauma, physical and sexual abuse.

Additional Information
240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism.

Although such cities have been denigrated as “ordinary” or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional sites to study Indigenous resurgence. T​he urban centres of the continental plains have featured Indigenous housing and food co-operatives, social service agencies, and schools. The American Indian Movement initially developed in Minneapolis in 1968, and Idle No More emerged in Saskatoon in 2013.

The editors and authors of Settler City Limits, both Indigenous and settler, address urban struggles involving Anishinaabek, Cree, Creek, Dakota, Flathead, Lakota, and Métis peoples. Collectively, these studies showcase how Indigenous people in the city resist ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and create spaces for themselves and their families.

Working at intersections of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, urban studies, geography, and sociology, this book examines how the historical and political conditions of settler colonialism have shaped urban development in the Canadian Prairies and American Plains. Settler City Limits frames cities as Indigenous spaces and places, both in terms of the historical geographies of the regions in which they are embedded, and with respect to ongoing struggles for land, life, and self-determination.

Contributors: Chris Andersen, Nicholas Brown, Elizabeth Comack, Heather Dorries, Nick Estes, Adam Gaudry, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Sharmeen Khan, Corey Laberge, Brenda Macdougall, Tyler McCreary, Lindsey Claire Smith, Michelle Stewart, Zoe Todd, Julie Tomiak

Reviews
“Settler City Limits breaks ground, shattering the powerful authoritative structures of racism that have dichotomized rural and urban space, and Indigenous peoples’ relation to these as a central force sustaining and fortifying settler colonialism.” – Heather A. Howard-Bobiwash, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University, and Affiliated Faculty Centre for Indigenous Studies, University of Toronto

Educator Information
Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1 Land and Politics

Part 2 Contestation, Resistance, Solidarities

Part 3 Policing and Social Control

Part 4 Life and Death

Additional Information
368 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Authenticity Note: Contains contributions from both Indigenous peoples and settlers.

Meditations upon the decimation of the Kwantlen people of western Canada.

This powerful collection, all too relevant today, tells a story that needs to be told. The author writes, "This is the truth of what has happened to my people. The Kwantlen people used to number in the thousands but like all river tribes, eighty percent of our people were wiped out by smallpox and now there are only 200 of us. As a Kwantlen man, father, fisherman, poet and playwright I believe the gift of words was given to me so I can retell our stories?"

These poems tell the story of a Kwantlen man who has been given the gift of healing but is also is a heroin addict.

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2020/2021 resource list for Grades 11 and 12 for English Language Arts.

Caution: Mature subject matter.

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.25"

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

Reviews
"In this anthology, shape matters. It turns the essay into a resistant form, pushing against the myth of the ‘disappearing Native’ and asserting a new narrative, one that isn’t subject to colonizing. . . . Shapes of Native Nonfiction is full of cognitive and emotional work. It turns the essay into something alive and breathing." - Cincinnati Review

"The medium is the message in this formally daring anthology of essays from Native writers, organized into basket-weaving themes such as ‘coiling’ and ‘plaiting.’ In these 27 essays by writers hailing from multiple tribal nations, some established and some newcomers, the Native experience is interrogated, elucidated, and celebrated." - Esquire

"In gathering contemporary Native nonfiction, this book elucidates the roots of the form-conscious essay and brings together the exciting current work of Native writers. In a sweeping decolonizing gesture, this anthology challenges the nonfiction canon as it’s been taught and creates a porous new space in its place." - Essay Daily

"Shapes of Native Nonfiction is. . . an accessible, engaging book, both for those who have read widely on the subject and for those seeking a place to begin." - New York Journal of Books

"This new collection of essays from established and emerging contemporary Indigenous writers is stunning both in-depth and scope. . . . The collection, expertly curated and structured by writer and Cowlitz Indian Tribe member Elissa Washuta (whose incredible essay Apocalypse Logic also appears here) and literary scholar Theresa Warburton, shines in every piece and in its existence as a whole. . . . In these pages, storytelling is a way of developing new Native nonfiction literary possibility." - Literary Hub

"Shapes of Native Nonfiction introduces the reader to a unique collection of voices, telling stories that shift from lost to living language, from history to lived experience. These shifts create new shapes for Indigenous writers to inhabit, explore and share. In this anthology, that shaping makes for a powerful read, and an absolutely necessary one" - High Country News

"In this far-ranging collection of essays, Indigenous writers explore family, home, landscape, identity, trauma, history, and memory. Some of the essays are about writing itself. Others tell stories about particular experiences or moments. Still others are more outwardly focused, exploring art, culture, and politics. Part of what makes this book so unique is the various innovative forms the essays take." - Book Riot

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

Colonialism in settler societies such as Canada depends on a certain understanding of the relationship between time and Indigenous peoples. Too often, these peoples have been portrayed as being without a future, destined either to disappear or assimilate into settler society. This book asserts quite the opposite: Indigenous peoples are not in any sense “out of time” in our contemporary world.

Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii shows how Indigenous peoples in Canada not only continue to have a future but are at work building many different futures – for themselves and for their non-Indigenous neighbours. Through the experiences of the residents of the Haida First Nation community of Old Massett on the islands of Haida Gwaii, Joseph Weiss explores these possible futures in detail, demonstrating how Haida ways of thinking about time, mobility, and political leadership are at the heart of contemporary strategies for addressing the dilemmas that come with life under settler colonialism.

From the threat of ecological crisis to the assertion of sovereign rights and authority, Weiss shows that the Haida people consistently turn towards their possible futures, desirable and undesirable, in order to work out how to live in and transform the present. His book breaks new ground in the exploration of the relationship between time and colonialism as experienced in the day-to-day lives of an Indigenous community.

Educator Information
This book will appeal to scholars and students of Indigenous studies, particularly in anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and history. Researchers planning to work with communities will learn from the author’s reflections on conducting ethnographic fieldwork with First Nations.

This book is the result of five years of fieldwork in Old Massett and Masset with the people of the Haida First Nation. 

Reviews
"Grounded in respectful experience, observation, and interviews with Haida citizens, this book provides scholars with a complex understanding and analysis of how one Indigenous community adapts to and maintains a commitment, however difficult, to imagining and enacting a futurity determined by themselves, not settler colonialism. It will be widely read in Indigenous studies circles." -  Kevin Bruyneel, author of The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations

"An engaging, contemporary ethnography … this lively book, with its rich theoretical bases, has the potential to further reconfigure and unsettle problematic ethnographic and popular texts on the Haida, and Indigenous peoples more generally." - Brian Thom, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria

"In his highly original, carefully written, and theoretically grounded ethnography, Joseph Weiss describes how the people of Haida Gwaii engage in envisioning future-making, an aspirational and contested process that unsettles their own temporal displacement and potential erasure within settler colonialism … Shaping the Future points in a new direction and calls for a rethinking of ethnography as a method and the future of Indigenous nations within the state."-  Bruce Miller, author of Oral History on Trial: Recognizing Aboriginal Narratives in the Courts

Additional Information
244 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’s debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine’s Day in the dead of a winter storm.

Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year.

A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.

Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.

Additional Information
440 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | Paperback

When your culture is banned and your land and resources stolen, it takes a special individual not only to survive but to thrive. Grounded in the wisdom of his elders, Gisdewe Alfred Joseph wove respect, kindness and courage into his years of service to the Witsuwit’en people of northwest British Columbia. As artist, teacher, chief band councilor, house chief and a lead plaintiff in Delgamuukw-Gisdewe – one of the most important Aboriginal title cases in Canada – Alfred relied on the lessons he learned as a boy to deal with a pervasive colonial reality. In Song of the Earth, Ross Hoffman opens the feast hall doors, throwing light on what the Witsuwit’en have lost and what they have preserved since settlers came to their lands.

Written in collaboration with Alfred Joseph, Song of the Earth brings us inside the heart and mind of a man who grew up in the heart of Witsuwit’en culture and lived to see it transformed. But he was no passive observer; he initiated and participated in legal battles that have reshaped how Canada addresses its colonial past and struggles to find ways to reconcile with Indigenous nations. In the face of current Witsuwit’en attempts to block pipeline construction across their territories in northwestern BC, this book provides insight into the people standing up for the rights that Canadian courts have affirmed.

Additional Information
200 pages | 5.50" x 7.50"

Authenticity Note: Because this work is a collaboration between the author and Alfred Joseph, it has received the Authentic Indigenous Text label.

From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.

A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.

Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

Awards

• Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Awards for Published Prose in English.
• Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fiction

Reviews
“Tagaq’s surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic’s boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology.” –The New Yorker

“Though the protagonist’s coming-of-age story, generously and lovingly documented by Tagaq, is the anchor, Split Tooth is not a book that can be fully absorbed in one sitting. It’s possible to sink deeper and deeper into the narrative with each successive reading. Like a smirking teenager, Split Tooth blithely gives typical literary expectations the finger, daring us to see and experience narrative as chaotic, emotional, and deeply instinctive. And it succeeds.” –Quill and Quire

“Tanya’s book is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read. It’s deeply profound, emotional and personal, and furthers her artistic experimentation and genius into a new realm. I love her even more after reading it, and I’m once again awed by her talent.” –Jesse Wente, CBC Broadcaster

"[A] forceful coming-of-age tale.” –Toronto Life magazine

Additional Information

The final novel from Richard Wagamese, the bestselling and beloved author of Indian Horse and Medicine Walk, centres on an abused woman on the run who finds refuge on a farm owned by an Indigenous man with wounds of his own. A profoundly moving novel about the redemptive power of love, mercy, and compassion--and the land's ability to heal us.

Frank Starlight has long settled into a quiet life working his remote farm, but his contemplative existence comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of Emmy, who has committed a desperate act so she and her child can escape a harrowing life of violence. Starlight takes in Emmy and her daughter to help them get back on their feet, and this accidental family eventually grows into a real one. But Emmy's abusive ex isn't content to just let her go. He wants revenge and is determined to hunt her down. 

Starlight was unfinished at the time of Richard Wagamese's death, yet every page radiates with his masterful storytelling, intense humanism, and insights that are as hard-earned as they are beautiful. With astonishing scenes set in the rugged backcountry of the B.C. Interior, and characters whose scars cut deep even as their journey toward healing and forgiveness lifts us, Starlight is a last gift to readers from a writer who believed in the power of stories to save us.

Additional Information
256 pages | 5.19" x 8.00"

A teen's suspicious death, a shocking police cover-up and a mother's search for truth: this landmark investigation into justice and Canada's Indigenous people is re-issued and updated here for the first time in over a decade.

In 1990, on a brutally cold night, 17-year-old Neil Stonechild disappeared from downtown Saskatoon, last seen in police custody. His frozen body was found three days later in a field outside town. Though his mother pressed for answers, a cursory investigation pinned the blame on the teen himself, dead by alcohol and misadventure. Only in 2000, when two more men were found frozen to death, and a third survived his "starlight tour" at the hands of police, did the truth about Stonechild's fate begin to emerge. Soon one of the country's most prominent Indigenous lawyers was on the case, and an open secret was secret no more.

With exclusive co-operation from the Stonechild family, lawyer Donald Worme, and others, Starlight Tour is an engrossing portrait of rogue cops, racism, obstruction of justice and justice denied, not only to a boy and his family but to an entire nation.

Reviews
“For justice junkies like myself, this is a deeply engrossing account…. Should be compulsory reading for Canadian police recruits from sea to shining sea.” –William Deverell, The Globe and Mail

“The Stonechild story is ably captured by veteran CBC journalists Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud in a thoroughly researched, deftly written work…. A powerfully written, meticulously researched work with a cinematic feel, which should be on reading lists for students of Canadian history, journalism or law enforcement.” –Toronto Star

“The suspenseful and meticulous account of a very real and dark chapter in Canada’s modern history.” –TIME (Canada)

Additional Information
448 pages | 6.04" x 8.98"

“Taaqtumi” is an Inuktitut word that means “in the dark”—and these spine-tingling horror stories by Northern writers show just how dangerous darkness can be. A family clinging to survival out on the tundra after a vicious zombie virus. A door that beckons, waiting to unleash the terror behind it. A post-apocalyptic community in the far North where things aren’t quite what they seem. These chilling tales from award-winning authors Richard Van Camp, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Aviaq Johnston, and others will thrill and entertain even the most seasoned horror fan.

Educator & Series Information
Includes stories from northern Indigenous authors.

This book is part of the Taaqtumi series.

Additional Information
260 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | b&w illustrations

Acclaimed chef Shane M. Chartrand's debut cookbook explores the reawakening of Indigenous cuisine and what it means to cook, eat, and share food in our homes and communities.

tawâw [ta-wow; Cree]: “Welcome, there is room.”

Born to Cree parents and raised by a Métis father and Mi’kmaw-British mother, Shane M. Chartrand has spent the past fifteen years learning about his history, visiting with other First Nations peoples, gathering and sharing knowledge and stories, and creating dishes that combine his diverse interests and express his unique personality. The result is tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine, a gorgeous book that traces Chartrand’s culinary journey from his childhood in Central Alberta, where he learned to raise livestock, hunt, and fish on his family’s acreage, to his current position as executive chef at the acclaimed SC Restaurant in the River Cree Resort & Casino in Enoch, Alberta, on Treaty 6 Territory.

Containing over seventy-five recipes — including his award-winning dish “War Paint” — along with personal stories, interviews with Chartrand’s culinary influences and family members, and contemporary and archival photographs of his journey, tawâw is part cookbook, part exploration of ingredients and techniques, and part chef’s personal journal — a visionary book that will invite readers to leaf through its pages for ideas, education, recipes, and inspiration.

Additional Information 
304 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | full-colour photography throughout

Within Turtle Island Indigenous people know that its spiritual centre is the ultimate mover within everything we do and are surrounded by. The Clean Place: Honouring Indigenous Spiritual Roots of Turtle Island illuminates the strong connection Indigenous people have with the land and the importance of a paradigm shift worldwide toward sustainable ways of thinking and being. The voices and perspectives of the writers weave traditional teachings, spirituality, and messages of hope, change, and transformation.

Reviews
"Hankard’s compilation takes us on a journey throughout Turtle Island and beyond, across sacred oceans to the ancestral homelands of our relatives. This journey illuminates a connecting theme of Indigenous existence on, from and with the land as a sacred being. Upon a shared reading of a chapter with my son, it was clear he embodied the teachings within – he was doing his part in maintaining the Clean Place." - Cindy Peltier, PhD, Chair Indigenous Education Nipissing University

Educator Information
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgement
Gchi-Biimskogaabiwiding

Introduction
Michael Hankard

1. I Still Have the Place
Lorraine Rekmans

2. Unsettling the Clean Place: Beginnings of a Philosophical Reflection
Réal Fillion

3. Giving Thanks for the Light
Ross Hoffman

4. In Place and Time: Indigenous Women’s Re-Weaving and Resistances
Laura Hall

5. The Healing Journey: Spirituality, Cultural Connection and the Significance of Aboriginal Peoples Relationship to the Land
John E. Charlton & John G. Hansen

6. Honouring Papatuanuku: Honouring Mother Earth
Taima Moeke-Pickering

7. Stewards of the Sacred
Cynthia Landrum

8. A Buffalo’s Breath on a Cold Winter Morning
Michael Hankard

9. Wahi Pana: A Hawaiian Sense of Place and Relationship to the Land
Umi Perkins

10. The Land is One with Us, and We are One with the Land: A Personal Journal
Emily Faries

11. Caring for Past/Present/Future Through Anishinabe Photography on the Land
Celeste Pedri-Spade

12. Washed ‘Clean’ in Zimbabwe: The Dzivaguru Creation Story
Collis G. Machoko

13. Reflections on Urban Connections to Land and Ceremony: Uncovering the Virtues of Creativity, Cultural Resiliency, Flexibility and Tenacity
Barbara Waterfall

14. Biinidsa: Going Home to Clean Up
Kevin FitzMaurice

Epilogue: Clean Water in the ‘Clean Place’?
Maurice Switzer

About the Authors

Additional Information
251 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

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"

There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans.

Their story begins in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the Canadian North-West. Within twenty years the Métis proclaimed themselves a nation and won their first battle. Within forty years they were famous throughout North America for their military skills, their nomadic life and their buffalo hunts.

The Métis Nation didn’t just drift slowly into the Canadian consciousness in the early 1800s; it burst onto the scene fully formed. The Métis were flamboyant, defiant, loud and definitely not noble savages. They were nomads with a very different way of being in the world—always on the move, very much in the moment, passionate and fierce. They were romantics and visionaries with big dreams. They battled continuously—for recognition, for their lands and for their rights and freedoms. In 1870 and 1885, led by the iconic Louis Riel, they fought back when Canada took their lands. These acts of resistance became defining moments in Canadian history, with implications that reverberate to this day: Western alienation, Indigenous rights and the French/English divide.

After being defeated at the Battle of Batoche in 1885, the Métis lived in hiding for twenty years. But early in the twentieth century, they determined to hide no more and began a long, successful fight back into the Canadian consciousness. The Métis people are now recognized in Canada as a distinct Indigenous nation. Written by the great-grandniece of Louis Riel, this popular and engaging history of “forgotten people” tells the story up to the present era of national reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

Additional Information
576 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"