Social and Cultural Studies

Hearkening back to her first book tour at the age of 26 (for the autobiographical novel Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel), and touching down upon a multitude of experiences she's had as a Canadian, a First Nations leader, a woman and mother and grandmother over the course of her life, Lee Maracle's My Conversations with Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer's own history and a re-imagining of the future of our nation.

In this latest addition to BookThug's Essays Series (edited by poet Julie Joosten), Maracle's writing works to engage readers in thinking about the threads that keep Canadians tied together as a nation--and also, at times, threaten to pull us apart--so that the sense of sovereignty and nationhood that she feels may be understood and even embraced by Canadians.

Author Michel Hellman meets with his editor Luc Bossé and casually promises to write a sequel to his best-selling book Mile End. But the Montréal neighborhood, with its trendy cafés and gluten-free bakeries, doesn't seem half as inspiring as it used to be. Part memoir and part documentary, Nunavik follows Hellman on a trek through Northern Quebec as he travels to Kuujjuaq, Puvirnituk, Kangiqsujuaq and Kangirsurk, meeting members of the First Nations, activists, hunters and drug dealers along the way. An honest and often funny account of this trip, Nunavik truly feels personal, with the author acknowledging (and challenging) his own prejudices. While the North has had a profound influence on our collective identity as Canadians, it remains an idea - myth rather than reality. Empirical rather than theoretical, Nunavik reflects on the way our relationship to the North has shaped our own cultural landscape.

Reviews
"An insightful, self-reflexive memoir of the author's journey to small Inuit communities in Nunavik, the northern part of the province of Quebec. Hellman shares his thoughts and perceptions of the North while never losing sight of his own racial privilege." - Jarrah, Goodreads.com

Educator Information
Graphic Novel | Non-Fiction

Additional Information
156 pages | 6.25" x 8.25" | Black and white images

Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground.

Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors reveal how survivors are unsettling colonial narratives about residential schools and how the churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the “new” residential school story. Part 1 details how residential schools have been understood and represented by various groups and individuals over time and how survivors’ testimonies at the commission are changing those representations. Part 2 examines whether the stories of abuse and trauma now circulating are overpowering less sensational stories, preventing other voices and memories from surfacing in local communities. Part 3 explores how the churches and former school staff have received this new testimony and what their response means for future relations with Aboriginal peoples across the country.

Power through Testimony shows that by bringing to light new stories about residential schools and by encouraging the denunciation of other historical wrongs, the TRC was more than a symbolic act. Ultimately, however, the contributors question the power of the TRC to unsettle dominant colonial narratives about residential schools and transform the relationship between Indigenous people and Canadian society.

As one of the first books published on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Power through Testimony will be of interest to students and scholars of Aboriginal studies, anthropology, and colonial studies and all Canadians interested in transitional justice and human rights.

Educator Information
Contributors: Janice Cindy Gaudet, Cheryl Gaver, Robyn Green, Jula Hughes, Lawrence Martin/Wapistan, Charles R. Menzies, Arie Molena, Ronald Niezen, Simone Poliandri, and Eric Taylor Woods

Additional Information
252 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

In 1966, twelve-year-old Chanie Wenjack froze to death on the railway tracks after running away from residential school. An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. None of those recommendations were applied.

More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Jordan Wabasse, a gentle boy and star hockey player, disappeared into the minus twenty degrees Celsius night. The body of celebrated artist Norval Morrisseau’s grandson, Kyle, was pulled from a river, as was Curran Strang’s. Robyn Harper died in her boarding-house hallway and Paul Panacheese inexplicably collapsed on his kitchen floor. Reggie Bushie’s death finally prompted an inquest, seven years after the discovery of Jethro Anderson, the first boy whose body was found in the water.

Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.

A portion of each sale of Seven Fallen Feathers will go to the Dennis Franklin Cromarty Memorial Fund, set up in 1994 to financially assist Nishnawbe Aski Nation students’ studies in Thunder Bay and at post-secondary institutions.

Awards
- 2018-2019 First Nation Communities Read
- 2018 RBC Taylor Prize

Reviews
“Talaga has written Canada’s J’Accuse, an open letter to the rest of us about the many ways we contribute — through act or inaction — to suicides and damaged existences in Canada’s Indigenous communities. Tanya Talaga’s account of teen lives and deaths in and near Thunder Bay is detailed, balanced and heart-rending. Talaga describes gaps in the system large enough for beloved children and adults to fall through, endemic indifference, casual racism and a persistent lack of resources. It is impossible to read this book and come away unchanged.” — RBC Taylor Prize Jury Citation

“In Seven Fallen Feathers, Tanya Talaga delves into the lives of seven Indigenous students who died while attending high school in Thunder Bay over the first eleven years of this century. With a narrative voice encompassing lyrical creation myth, razor-sharp reporting, and a searing critique of Canada’s ongoing colonial legacy, Talaga binds these tragedies — and the ambivalent response from police and government — into a compelling tapestry. This vivid, wrenching book shatters the air of abstraction that so often permeates news of the injustices Indigenous communities face every day. It is impossible to read Seven Fallen Feathers and not care about the lives lost, the families thrust into purgatory, while the rest of society looks away.” — Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury Citation

“[A]n urgent and unshakable portrait of the horrors faced by Indigenous teens going to school in Thunder Bay, Ontario, far from their homes and families. . . . Talaga’s incisive research and breathtaking storytelling could bring this community one step closer to the healing it deserves.” — Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

“Seven Fallen Feathers may prove to be the most important book published in Canada in 2017. Tanya Talaga offers well-researched, difficult truths that expose the systemic racism, poverty, and powerlessness that contribute to the ongoing issues facing Indigenous youth, their families, and their communities. It is a call to action that deeply honours the lives of the seven young people; our entire nation should feel their loss profoundly.” — Patti LaBoucane-Benson, author of The Outside Circle

“[W]here Seven Fallen Feathers truly shines is in Talaga’s intimate retellings of what families experience when a loved one goes missing, from filing a missing-persons report with police, to the long and brutal investigation process, to the final visit in the coroner’s office. It’s a heartbreaking portrait of an indifferent and often callous system . . . Seven Fallen Feathers is a must-read for all Canadians. It shows us where we came from, where we’re at, and what we need to do to make the country a better place for us all.” — The Walrus

Educator Information
The Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools list recommends this resource for Grade 12 English Language Arts and Social Studies.

Curriculum Connections: Indigenous Studies, History, Health

Additional Information
376 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 8-page colour insert and maps

Surviving Canada: Indigenous Peoples Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal is a collection of elegant, thoughtful, and powerful reflections about Indigenous Peoples' complicated, and often frustrating, relationship with Canada, and how--even 150 years after Confederation--the fight for recognition of their treaty and Aboriginal rights continues.

Through essays, art, and literature, Surviving Canada examines the struggle for Indigenous Peoples' to celebrate their cultures and exercise their right to control their own economic development, lands, water, and lives.

The Indian Act, Idle No More, and the legacy of residential schools are just a few of the topics covered by a wide range of elders, scholars, artists, and activists. Contributors include Mary Eberts, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Leroy Little Bear.

Reviews
"Published to coincide with celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, this insightful compendium of largely Indigenous voices challenges all Canadians to improve relations with and conditions for the continents First Nations Peoples. Poems, essays, interviews, song lyrics, and illustrations bring razor-sharp clarity to historic and contemporary issues, including the shameful history of residential schools, current reconciliation efforts, conflicts over resource development, and how best to confront legacies of racism and colonialism. The editors' aim to provide an accessible educational tool is well-served by coverage of diverse topics, including over-representation of Indigenous people in prison, land dispossession, and how social amnesia prevents progress. Equally impressive is the recovery of repressed histories, such as First Nation women's suffrage struggles, how the city of Winnipeg was built with stolen water, and the critical battle to preserve language rights. Contributors including the late actor Chief Dan George, singer-songwriter Buffy Saint-Marie, and a number of writers and activists, such as Erica Violet Lee and Helen Knott share feelings of anger and disappointment at past and ongoing injustices, as well as an incredible hope that insistent resilience that has marked Indigenous existence in Canada will help spark a new awakening for all Canadians." - Publishers Weekly

Additional Information
464 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squamish Nation, a community caught between its traditional values of respect—for the land, the family and the band—and the secular, capitalistic legislation imposed by European settlers. When she was six, the police carried her off to St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, as mandated by the 1920 Indian Act. There, she endured months of beatings, malnourishment and lice infestations before her family collected Mazie and her siblings and fled across the border.

After the war, the family return to their home on the Capilano Reserve and Mazie began working at a cannery where she packed salmon for eleven years. Mazie married Alvie Baker, and together they raised nine children, but the legacy of residential school for Mazie and her generation meant they were alienated from their culture and language. Eventually Mazie reconnected with her Squamish identity and she began to mourn the loss of the old style of government by councils of hereditary chiefs and to criticize the corruption in the band leadership created in 1989 by federal legislation.

Galvanized by the injustices she saw committed against and within her community—especially against indigenous women, who were denied status and property rights—she began a long career of advocacy. She fought for housing for families in need; she pushed for transparency in local government; she defended ancestral lands; she shone a bright light into the darkest political corners. Her family called her ch’sken: Golden Eagle.

This intimate biography of a community leader illuminates a difficult, unresolved chapter of Canadian history and paints a portrait of a resilient and principled woman who faced down her every political foe, unflinching, irreverent, and uncompromising.

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

What is family? Is it defined by blood and birth? Or can we invite whomever we want into that intimate embrace?

The Language of Family: Stories of Bonds and Belonging invites readers to pull up a guest chair at the family table.

Twenty contributors from across British Columbia -- museum curators, cultural luminaries, writers and thinkers young and old, from First Nations, LGBTQ, Japanese Canadian and Punjabi communities, among others -- share their vastly different perspectives on what family means in this superb collection of personal narratives, poems and essays.

This collection will provoke, tease, enlighten and infuriate. Isn't that what family does best?

Stories, poems and essays by Sadhu Binning, Martha Black, Don Bourdon, Kathryn Bridge, Tzu-I Chung, Shushma Datt, Mo Dhaliwal, Zoé Duhaime, barbara findlay, Lynn Greenhough, Judith I. Guichon, Lorne F. Hammond, Joy Kogawa, Patrick Lane, Jack Lohman, Luke Marston, Bev Sellars, Monique Gray Smith, Ann-Bernice Thomas and Larry Wong.

Educator Information
Some Indigenous content.

Additional Information
250 pages | 8.50" x 9.49"

Authenticity Note: This book contains contributions from Indigenous writers, which is why it has received the Authentic Indigenous Text label.  There are, however, many other contributors who are not Indigenous whose works are also included.

The Whaling People live along the west coast of Vancouver Island and Cape Flattery in Washington. They comprise more than 20 First Nations, including the Nuu-chah-nulth (formerly called Nootka), Ditidaht, Pacheedaht and Makah. These socially related people enjoyed a highly organized, tradition-based culture for centuries before Europeans arrived. As whaling societies, they had a unique relationship with the sea.

In The Whaling People, Eugene Arima and Alan Hoover give an intimate account of the traditional ways in which these coastal people looked at and understood the world they lived in. They present the activities, technologies, and rituals that the Whaling People used to make a living in their complex coastal environments, and their beliefs about the natural and supernatural forces that affected their lives. The book features 12 narratives collected from First Nations elders, each illustrated with original drawings by the celebrated Hesquiaht artist Tim Paul.

This informative and entertaining book celebrates the still-thriving cultures of the Whaling People, who survived the devastating effects of colonial power and influences. It includes a history of treaty-making in BC, leading up to the just-ratified Maa-nulth Treaty signed by five First Nations of the Whaling People.

Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Authenticity Note: Because of the artwork and narratives contributed to this work from First Nations elders and Hesquiaht artist Tim Paul, it has received the Authentic Text and Artwork labels. It's up to readers to determine if this work qualifies as authentic for their purposes.

Chronicles is a major work, a collection of current, pressing and inspirational stories of Indigenous communities from the Canadian subarctic to the heart of Dine Bii Kaya, Navajo Nation. Chronicles is a book literally risen from the ashes—beginning in 2008 after her home burned to the ground—and collectively is an accounting of Winona’s personal path of recovery, finding strength and resilience in the writing itself as well as in her work. Long awaited, Chronicles is a labour of love, a tribute to those who have passed on and those yet to arrive.

Reviews
“Winona LaDuke’s latest book reads like a prayer. These are holy words— inspirational stories taken straight from the heart of indigenous communities throughout the world…(Chronicles) is lyrical, instructional, and infused with wry humor when the weight of the message becomes unbearable…LaDuke provides a roadmap through tribal nations’ belief systems; offering a spiritual compass and invaluable insight into the relationship of prophesy to the realities of climate change, economic collapse, food scarcity and basic human rights.” — Huffington Post

Educator Information
Recommended for students in grades 9 - 12, as well as those at a college/university level, for courses in science, environmental science, and social justice.

Additional Information
310 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

High Arctic, 1920: Three Inuit men delivered justice to an abusive Newfoundland trader.

This is the story of fur trade rivalry and duplicity, isolation and abandonment, greed and madness, and a struggle for the affections of an Inuit woman during a time of major social change in the High Arctic.

A show trial was held in Pond Inlet in 1923 that marked an end to the Inuit traditional way of life and ushered in an era in which Inuit autonomy was supplanted by dependence on traders and police, and later missionaries.

Kenn Harper draws on a combination of Inuit oral history, archival research, and his own knowledge acquired through 50 years in the Arctic to create a compelling story of justice and injustice in the far north.

Reviews
"While the amount of background information sometimes threatens to overwhelm the actual trial, this material is so interesting — and Harper's writing so vibrant — that it does not impede the narrative, or preclude thought-provoking questions about Canada's long-standing and ongoing negative treatment of the Inuit."— Quill & Quire

Additional Information
400 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 70 photos | Bibliography | Index

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence.

Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action.

With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance.

Reviews
“This book makes an important – indeed, urgent – contribution to knowledge about violence against Indigenous women that ought to become required reading for politicians, activists, policy-makers, scholars, writers, and artists engaged in responding to this ongoing crisis.”
— Amber Dean, McMaster University, author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance

"Hargreaves ... examines how stories of individual tragedies have been memorialized in venues such as human rights reports, poems, films, and plays. She convincingly explains that statistics and research projects produced with the best intentions may serve to reinforce the very colonial power dynamics that prevent the emergence of transformative solutions in the struggle to end violence against Indigenous women. ... For those in the field of comparative narrative criticism, it’s a work sure to inspire much discussion, debate, and reflection."
— Publisher's Weekly

Educator Information
This book would be useful for Indigenous Studies, Women's Studies, Literary Criticism, and Canadian Literature courses, or courses where activism is a key theme.

Additional Information
296 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

For decades, the Inuit of northern Québec were among the most neglected people in Canada. It took The Battle of James Bay, 1971-1975, for the governments in Québec City and Ottawa to wake up to the disgrace.

In this concise, lively account, Zebedee Nungak relates the inside story of how the young Inuit and Cree "Davids" took action when Québec began construction on the giant James Bay hydro project. They fought in court and at the negotiation table for an accord that effectively became Canada's first land-claims agreement. Nungak's account is accompanied by his essays on Nunavik history. Together they provide a fascinating insight into a virtually unknown chapter of Canadian history.

Additional Information
112 pages | 5.00" x 7.50"

Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the framework of “aesthetic action,” the essays expand the frame of aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics.

This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing. These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of reconciliation as a form of resolution.

This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed, and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to move beyond what many have identified as the TRC’s political limitations.

Educator Information
This book would be useful for Art, Art & Politics, Social Science, and Indigenous Studies courses.

Additional Information
382 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 24 colour illustrations, 2 printed music items

Edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin

Indigenous traditions can be uplifting, positive, and liberating forces when they are connected to living systems of thought and practice. Problems arise when they are treated as timeless models of unchanging truth that require unwavering deference and unquestioning obedience. Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism celebrates the emancipatory potential of Indigenous traditions, considers their value as the basis for good laws and good lives, and critiques the failure of Canadian constitutional traditions to recognize their significance.

Demonstrating how Canada’s constitutional structures marginalize Indigenous peoples’ ability to exercise power in the real world, John Borrows uses Ojibwe law, stories, and principles to suggest alternative ways in which Indigenous peoples can work to enhance freedom. Among the stimulating issues he approaches are the democratic potential of civil disobedience, the hazards of applying originalism rather than living tree jurisprudence in the interpretation of Aboriginal and treaty rights, American legislative actions that could also animate Indigenous self-determination in Canada, and the opportunity for Indigenous governmental action to address violence against women.

Awards

• 2017 Donald Smiley Prize awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association joint winner

Reviews
"This remarkable work is at once challenging and accessible, philosophical and practical, and wide-ranging while firmly rooted in Anishinaabe tradition. Borrows takes a realistic, creative, and intellectually rigorous approach to some of the most difficult and pressing issues in Indigenous law, constitutional law, and political philosophy, as well as all readers who wish to better understand the relationship between indigenous peoples and Canada."— Katherine Starks, Saskatchewan Law Review

Additional Information
384 pages | 5.98" x 8.99"