Music, Film and Performing Arts
Synopsis:
Turning a lens on the dark legacy of colonialism in horror film, from Scream to Halloween and beyond.
Horror films, more than any other genre, offer a chilling glimpse—like peering through a creaky attic door—into the brutality of settler colonial violence. While Indigenous peoples continue to struggle against colonization, white settler narratives consistently position them as a threat, depicting the Indigenous Other as an ever-present menace, lurking on the fringes of “civilized” society. Indigenous inclusion or exclusion in horror films tells a larger story about myths, fears, and anxieties that have endured for centuries.
Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes traces connections between Indigenous representations, gender, and sexuality within iconic horror classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th. The savage killer, the romantic and doomed Indian, the feral “mad woman”—no trope or archetype escapes the shadowy influence of settler colonialism. In the end, horror both disrupts and uncovers colonial violence—only to bury its victims once more.
Reviews
“This is the book I’ve waited my whole movie-geek life for.”— Jesse Wente
“Bloody Bodies, Bloody Landscapes is a must read for anyone consuming horror media. Laura Hall masterfully dissects the ways in which settler-colonialism is at the core of sexism, racism, sanism, and white supremacy, and how we see those systems of oppression at work in historical and contemporary horror.”— Jessica Johns
“Expertly foregrounding the most overlooked horror in this film genre—settler colonialism—Bloodies Bodies, Bloody Landscapes is deadly.”— Christine Sy
"Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes is brilliant scholarship that pinpoints the ugly truth about the treatment of Indigenous people in horror cinema. But Hall is doing much more than examining tropes of mysticism, savagery, and settler colonialism-as savior in horror; she is directing our attention to the recuperative power of certain portrayals, thereby reminding us that an anticolonial lens can produce whole and full human stories—even scary ones.”— Robin R. Means Coleman, author of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. They’re Here! Settler Colonialism and the Horror Film
Chapter 2. The Bloodsucking Brady Bunch: Gender, the Family and Settler Colonial Horrors
Chapter 3. We All go A Little Mad Sometimes!
Chapter 4. Cowboys in the Antarctic: Settler Colonialism and Nature in Horror
Chapter 5. Jason Voorhees Does a Land Acknowledgement: Indigeneity Lurking in the Woods
Conclusion
Sources
Additional Information
288 pages | 6.02" x 9.01" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Profoundly honest and moving, Kihiani is the uplifting story of an Inuk artist’s journey to healing and self-discovery
Born in Fort Churchill, Manitoba, but raised in Arviat, a predominantly Inuit community on the western edges of Hudson Bay, Susan and her six siblings grew up in a humble but loving home. But while living in Rankin Inlet, when she was eight years old, Susan’s life was disrupted by a life-changing event, a distinct separation that created a schism inside her for many years and from which she continues to heal.
At fifteen, she started writing poems that spilled out of her, and when Susan had the choice to leave her community, she grabbed it like a lifeline. Eventually, Susan was approached by a producer at CBC who was making a compilation album of Arctic artists and years later signed with a major label for her third album, This Child.
The disruption and milestones, the turmoil and joy, the devastation and healing—this is Susan Aglukark’s story of discovering her Inuk self.
Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
This meditation on the poetics of re-worlding follows the threads of Spiderwoman Theater’s Storyweaving practice back to its Guna and Rappahannock sources to illuminate its history, mechanics, and development for coming generations.
The Spiderwoman Theatre, the longest-running Indigenous theatre company in North America has heralded the revolutionary methodology of Storyweaving for generations of Indigenous artists. Storyweaving is a distinct methodology that governs the dramaturgical structure and performed transmission of the company’s plays on the contemporary stage. The practice of Storyweaving predates written history. It has been (and remains) specific to tribal storytellers across the continent.
The reclamation, then, of this aesthetic legacy by contemporary Indigenous storytellers is a crucial act of recovery. Jill Carter, an Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi theatre-worker and scholar, examines the process and development of Storyweaving. She studies how Storyweaving imagines and architects a functional framework that is being adopted and adapted by artists from myriad nations to create works (on the page and stage) that facilitate the healing, transformation, and survivance of their communities. Between the Layers pays respects to the teachers and visionaries that moulded this practice and encourages future generations to continue its legacy, while making a much-needed contribution to the study of Indigenous theatre and performance.
In its painstaking documentation of the Storyweaving artform, Between the Layers refuses the devaluation, erasure, and suppression of Indigenous culture, while contributing to the dissemination and celebration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
Educator Information
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Spiderwoman Theater: A Performance History
Introduction: Between the Layers
Chapter One:
Persistence of Violent Delights:
“It’s All the Same Bullshit Again”
Chapter Two:
“An Indian is an Idea a Man Has of Himself”
Chapter Three:
An Indian is More than Just an “Idea”:
By Their Acts Ye Shall Know Them
Chapter Four:
Towards a Poetics of Re-Worlding:
Becoming (and then Staging) the New Human Being
Chapter Five:
The Published Texts
Chapter Six:
The Three Sisters from There to Here:
Spiderwoman’s Issue and the Project of Re-worlding
Appendices
Works Cited
Additional Information
376 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 8 illustrations | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Reimagining Métis/settler relations through music
What makes music Métis, and who gets to decide? Complex dynamics of recognition, non-recognition, and erasure have played out over a history of Métis music-making, from the Red River Resistance all the way to the present day.
Monique Giroux argues that Métis music reflects broader social relationships, in particular the politics of recognition. Drawing on newspaper articles, archival documents, interviews with Métis and non-Métis musicians, and over a decade of research at cultural festivals, she charts a history of reframings: a changing but problematic relationship whereby settlers define the boundaries of acceptance to assert control over Métis identity and culture. Complicating this narrative, Giroux points to the many ways Métis have resisted settler recognition and erasure – both within mainstream old-time fiddling and at Métis-run events where people have continued to gather, tell stories, and draw on music to rebuild relationships in a time of resurgence.
Métis Music critically examines music as a shifting site of encounter, showing its readers what to listen for, how to learn by listening, and the importance of acting intentionally with the learning gained through listening.
Reviews
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Figures and Tables ix
Preface: Acknowledging Indigenous Presence, Tracing Ancestral Lines xi
1 Recognition, Resurgence, and Ethical Responsiveness 3
2 Fiddle Dance in the Fur Trade and across the Métis Homeland 34
3 Writing Métis Music in Manitoba Newspapers 60
4 Exchange, Multicultural Compartmentalization, and the New Old-Time Style 86
5 Métis Music at Manitoba’s Old-Time Fiddle Competitions 110
6 Cultural Festivals as Recognition and Resurgence 134
7 On Moving from Louis Riel to Li Keur 169
Postlude: Métis Music 203
Notes 209
References 231
Index 255
Additional Information
288 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 9 photos, 3 tables | Paperback
Synopsis:
Original People, Original Television is the behind-the-scenes account of a little known revolution in Canadian broadcasting—a journey begun in 1922 with Nanook of the North, wending its way across generations and the width and breadth of the traditional territories of the Inuit, First Nations and Métis; culminating in the 1999 launch of the world’s inaugural Indigenous led broadcast, the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network.
Additional Information
282 pages | 9.00" x 6.00" | b&w photos, index, bibliography | Special Edition | Paperback
Synopsis:
The Art of Making: Rediscovering the Blackfoot Legacy is a captivating entry into Jared Tailfeathers’ quest of cultural reclamation. Accompanied by his family and loyal dogs, Tailfeathers delves into his Indigenous heritage through hands-on, land-based exploration. The book traces the evolution of the Blackfoot Confederacy, examining its trade routes, resources, and interactions pre- and post-1800s. It provides intricate details of Blackfoot connections with nature, neighbouring First Nations Peoples, and their rich legacy in tool-making, spiritual knowledge seeking, and artistic expression. Tailfeathers’ research began in 2019, driven by a deep desire to reacquaint himself with his cultural and historical identity as a Blackfoot man navigating a post-colonial world. This book is a journey into the heart of Blackfoot culture, told by a man who walks the ancestral trails with his dogs.
Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Indigenous Spirit of Nature series.
Additional Information
208 pages | 7.25" x 9.25" | Colour Illustrations | Paperback
Synopsis:
Exploring how Indigenous media has flourished across Canada from the 1990s to the present
In the early 1990s, Indigenous media experienced a boom across Canada, resulting in a vast landscape of film, TV, and digital media. Coinciding with a resurgence of Indigenous political activism, Indigenous media highlighted issues around sovereignty and Indigenous rights to broader audiences in Canada. In Producing Sovereignty, Karrmen Crey considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in technology—that enabled this proliferation.
Exploring the wide field of media culture institutions, Crey pays particular attention to those that Indigenous media makers engaged during this cultural moment, including state film agencies, arts organizations, provincial broadcasters, and more. Producing Sovereignty ranges from the formation of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance in the early 1990s and its partnership with the Banff Centre for the Arts to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2016 production of Highway of Tears—an immersive 360-degree short film directed by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson—highlighting works by Indigenous creators along the way and situating Indigenous media within contexts that pay close attention to the role of media-producing institutions.
Importantly, Crey focuses on institutions with limited scholarly attention, shifting beyond the work of the National Film Board of Canada to explore lesser-known institutions such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies that create programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Through its refusal to treat Indigenous media simply as a set of cultural aesthetics, Producing Sovereignty offers a revealing media history of this cultural moment.
Reviews
"Producing Sovereignty is a must-read for those interested in the theoretical fundamentals of Indigenous media studies. By unearthing and revealing the subjugated histories and materiality of Indigenous artists and filmmakers, Karrmen Crey provides a crucial lens into the co-constitutive production of Indigenous aesthetics as an outcome of institutional contestations."—Brendan Hokowhitu, University of Queensland
"One of the most engaging and sophisticated books in the field, Producing Sovereignty uses highly immersive case studies to locate Indigenous media within wider social movements and cultural developments in North America. Karrmen Crey speaks to the decolonizing force of Indigenous media—not only as expressions of Indigenous cultural sovereignty but as destabilizing forces within contemporary settler societies."—Marian Bredin, coeditor of Canadian Television: Text and Context
Additional Information
224 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 25 black and white illustrations | Paperback
Synopsis:
Music historian Craig Harris explores more than five hundred years of Indigenous history, religion, and cultural evolution in Rise Up! Indigenous Music in North America. More than powwow drums and wooden flutes, Indigenous music intersects with rock, blues, jazz, folk music, reggae, hip-hop, classical music, and more. Combining deep research with personal stories by nearly four dozen award-winning Indigenous musicians, Harris offers an eye-opening look at the growth of Indigenous music.
Among a host of North America’s most vital Indigenous musicians, the biographical narratives include new and well-established figures such as Mildred Bailey, Louis W. Ballard, Cody Blackbird, Donna Coane (Spirit of Thunderheart), Theresa “Bear” Fox, Robbie Robertson, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joanne Shenandoah, DJ Shub (Dan General), Maria Tallchief, John Trudell, and Fawn Wood.
Reviews
Additional Information
344 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 40 Photos, Index | Paperback
Synopsis:
"I'm scared and scarred but I’ve survived"
Tom Wilson was raised in the rough-and-tumble world of Hamilton—Steeltown— in the company of World War II vets, factory workers, fall-guy wrestlers and the deeply guarded secrets kept by his parents, Bunny and George. For decades Tom carved out a life for himself in shadows. He built an international music career and became a father, he battled demons and addiction, and he waited, hoping for the lies to cease and the truth to emerge. It would. And when it did, it would sweep up the St. Lawrence River to the Mohawk reserves of Quebec, on to the heights of the Manhattan skyline.
With a rare gift for storytelling and an astonishing story to tell, Tom writes with unflinching honesty and extraordinary compassion about his search for the truth. It's a story about scars, about the ones that hurt us, and the ones that make us who we are.
Reviews
"Tom Wilson's memoir goes deeper than your average rock 'n' roll book." —Calgary Herald
Additional Information
240 pages | 5.20" x 8.02" | Paperback
Synopsis:
In 2019, a group of scholar-artists led by Jill Carter stood with their audience in a liminal space at the 'edge of the woods'—a space between now and then, a space between now and later. Together, they engaged in a survivance intervention: an Indigenous reclamation of territory, using Storyweaving practices rooted in personal connections to the land as a method of restor(y)ing treaty relationships.
Retreating to Re-Treat documents both their artistic offering and creation process, offered in the spirit of knowledge-sharing and enriching scholarship around collaborative practices. By revealing their unique and still-developing method for addressing a fraught and tangled (hi)story, the Collective Encounter invites readers to join them as we mediate those sites of profound experiences and renewal—sites in which the project of conciliation might truly begin.
Additional Information
144 pages | 5.37" x 8.38" | Paperback
Synopsis:
A monumental gathering of more than 60 contemporary artists, photographers, musicians, writers and more, showcasing diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms and mediums
This landmark volume is a gathering of Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice. It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.
Artists include: Neal Ambrose-Smith, Teresa Baker, Natalie Ball, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Rebecca Belmore, Andrea Carlson, Nani Chacon, Raven Chacon, Dana Claxton, Melissa Cody, Chris T. Cornelius, Lewis deSoto, Beau Dick, Demian DineYazhi’, Wally Dion, Divide and Dissolve, Korina Emmerich, Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, Yatika Starr Fields, Nicholas Galanin, Raven Halfmoon, Elisa Harkins, Luzene Hill, Anna Hoover, Sky Hopinka, Chaz John, Emily Johnson, Brian Jungen, Brad Kahlhamer, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Adam Khalil, Zack Kahlil, Kite, Layli Long Soldier, Erica Lord, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Tanya Lukin Linklater, James Luna, Dylan McLaughlin, Meryl McMaster, Caroline Monnet, Audie Murray, New Red Order, Jamie Okuma, Laura Ortman, Katherine "KP" Paul/Black Belt Eagle Scout, Postcommodity, Wendy Red Star, Eric-Paul Riege, Cara Romero, Sara Siestreem, Rose B. Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Anna Tsouhlarakis, Arielle Twist, Marie Watt, Dyani White Hawk and Zoon a.k.a. Daniel Glen Monkman.
Additional Information
448 pages | 9.75" x 12.25" | 387 Illustrations | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Shelley Niro is widely known for her ability to explore Traditional Stories, transgress boundaries, and embody the ethos of her matriarchal culture. A member of the Kanyen’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, she uses a wide variety of media, including photography, installation, film, and painting to bring greater visibility to Indigenous women and girls.
Pushing the limits of photography, Niro incorporates imagery from Traditional Stories to focus on contemporary subjects with wit, irony, and parody. Throughout her work — in her portraiture, sculptures, landscape paintings, photography, and film and video work — Niro challenges common preconceptions about gender, culture, and Indigenous Peoples.
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch brings together 215 reproductions from Niro’s expansive oeuvre, including work published here for the first time. Also included in this career retrospective are three major essays about Niro’s work by Melissa Bennett, Greg Hill, and David W. Penney, as well as texts from seven guest artists, scholars, and curators. Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch accompanies an international touring exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian with the collaboration of the National Gallery of Canada.
Additional Information
304 pages | 8.25" x 9.62"
Synopsis:
Indigenous and settler scholars and media artists discuss and analyze crucial questions of narrative sovereignty, cultural identity, cultural resistance, and decolonizing creative practices.
Humans are narrative creatures, and since the dawn of our existence we have shared stories. Storytelling is what connects us, what helps us give shape and understanding to the world and to each other. Who tells whose stories in which particular ways leads to questions of belonging, power, relationality, community and identity. This collection explores those issues with a focus on settler-Indigenous cultural politics in the country known as Canada, looking in particular at Indigenous representation in media arts. Chapters feature roundtable discussions, interviews, film analyses, resurgent media explorations, visual culture advocacy and place-based practices of creative expression.
Eclectic in scope and diverse in perspective, Indigenous Media Arts in Canada is unified by an ethic of conciliation, collaboration, and cultural resistance. Engaging deftly and thoughtfully with instances of cultural appropriation as well as the oppressive structures that seek to erode narrative sovereignty, this collection shines as a crucial gathering of thoughtful critique, cultural kinship, and creative counterpower.
Reviews
“Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton’s collection of conversations between, for, and about Indigenous media makers poses vital, critical, and generative questions about Indigenous film, film festivals and institutions, residential school histories, and decolonization without providing easy answers. These conversations are at times joyful expressions of the radical possibilities of media arts and at times painful provocations about settler colonial violence and its representational apparatuses. The chapters, written by the most brilliant and creative minds in contemporary Indigenous film, are paradigm-shifting love letters to the land, lived experience, collaboration, and futurity.” —Michelle Raheja, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of California, Riverside, author of Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing – Edited by Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Seeing, Knowing, Lifting – Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton
Part I – Decolonizing Media Arts Institutions
Part I Introduction – Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton
1. Our Own Up There: A Discussion at imagineNATIVE – Danis Goulet and Tasha Hubbard with Jesse Wente, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Shane Belcourt
2. Curating the North: Documentary Screening Ethics and Inuit Representation in Canada – Ezra Winton and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril
3. Sights of Homecoming: Locating Restorative Sites of Passage in Zacharias Kunuk’s Festival Performance of Angirattut – Claudia Sicondolfo
Part II – Protecting Culture
Part II Introduction – Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton
4. Addressing Colonial Trauma Through Mi’kmaw Film – Margaret Robinson and Bretten Hannam
5. Not Reconciled: The Complex Legacy of Films on Canadian "Indian" Residential Schools – Brenda Longfellow
6. The Resurgence of Indigenous Women in Contemporary Québec Cinema – Karine Bertrand
7. “Our Circle Is Always Open”: Indigenous Voices, Children’s Rights, and Spaces of Inclusion in the Films of Alanis Obomsawin – Joanna Hearne
Part III – Methods/Knowledges/Interventions
Part III Introduction Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton
8. Indigenous Documentary Methodologies: ChiPaChiMoWin: Telling Stories – Jules Arita Koostachin
9. Marking and Mapping Out Embodied Practices through Media Art – Julie Nagam and Carla Taunton
10. Curatorial Insiders/Outsiders: Speaking Outside and Collaboration as Strategic Intervention – Toby Katrine Lawrence
11. The Generative Hope of Indigenous Interactive Media: Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Futurism – Michelle Stewart
Part IV - Resurgent Media/Allies/Advocacy
Part IV Introduction – Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton + Sasha Crawford-Holland and Lindsay LeBlanc
12. “Making Things Our [Digital] Own”: Lessons on Time and Sovereignty from Indigenous Computational Art – Sasha Crawford-Holland and Lindsay LeBlanc
13. Careful Images: Unsettling Testimony in the Gladue Video Project – Eugenia Kisin and Lisa Jackson
Concluding Thoughts
Part 1: Beyond Words and Images – Ezra Winton and Dana Claxton Part 2: Setting the Record Straight – Lisa Jackson
About the Contributors
References
Index
Contributors
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril
Shane Belcourt
Karine Bertrand
Dana Claxton
Sasha Crawford-Holland
Danis Goulet
Bretten Hannam
Joanna Hearne
Tasha Hubbard
Lisa Jackson
Eugenia Kisin
Jules Arita Koostachin
Toby Katrine Lawrence
Lindsay LeBlanc
Brenda Longfellow
Julie Nagam
Margaret Robinson
Claudia Sicondolfo
Michelle Stewart
Carla Taunton
Jesse Wente
Ezra Winton
Additional Information
450 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
The Musician Healer resurrects a long-forgotten role for musicians and provides clear guidance for preparation and self-development as a musician healer in order to reactivate this role for the modern world. It begins with the author’s personal musical story that draws upon her Mi’kmaq/Abenaki First Nation and French roots, followed by a section on the history of musician healers from ancient Egypt and India. Runningdeer then explores the energetic aspects of music healing, especially the quality of personal energies that a musician channels through her music, and how to elevate and emanate those vibrations for positive healing outcomes.
“There are a few very particular aspects of healing for myself that I’ve enjoyed these past twenty plus years, while developing my work as Musician Healer. Yours will be different, perhaps, depending upon what your own inner challenges to growth have been. Our stories are different, after all ... I now know who I am, and why I’m here. I love and accept all my strengths, peculiarities and tender places. And feel great confidence in what I have to offer the world.” — Islene Runningdeer, 2022
Reviews
"Runningdeer writes like a spider spinning her web—circling and diving, drawing sticky connections and mind-expanding shapes. This book is an offering to a suffering world and to musicians who are yearning to transmit good through their gifts." — Mary Bonhag, Artistic Director, Scrag Mountain Music
"The beauty of the objective frequency in music to provide healing and love is excellently transmitted in this unique text. A heartfelt and genuine connection with ancient lifetimes and ancestors brings moments of perfection and clarity, as the sum total of everything acquired is realized in the present moment. Runningdeer brings lessons of giving and awareness in service to the light." — Julian Hobson Energy Healer and Editor of Embrace Your Divine Plan (2023)
Additional Information
208 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Qummut Qukiria! celebrates art and culture within and beyond traditional Inuit and Sámi homelands in the Circumpolar Arctic — from the continuance of longstanding practices such as storytelling and skin sewing to the development of innovative new art forms such as throatboxing (a hybrid of traditional Inuit throat singing and beatboxing). In this illuminating book, curators, scholars, artists, and activists from Inuit Nunangat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Sápmi, Canada, and Scandinavia address topics as diverse as Sámi rematriation and the revival of the ládjogahpir (a Sámi woman’s headgear), the experience of bringing Inuit stone carving to a workshop for inner-city youth, and the decolonizing potential of Traditional Knowledge and its role in contemporary design and beyond.
Qummut Qukiria! showcases the thriving art and culture of the Indigenous Circumpolar peoples in the present and demonstrates its importance for the revitalization of language, social wellbeing, and cultural identity.
Educator Information
Qummut Qukiria! means "up like a bullet" in Inuktitut and is used to convey excitement and enthusiasm. It also signifies the connection to the land and nature's offerings in the Circumpolar North.
Features over 200 images as well as essays from artists, educators, and scholars on contemporary Inuit and Sámi life and art, including filmmaking, sculpture, storytelling, and design.
Additional Information
368 pages | 9.25" x 6.75" | Hardcover
Synopsis:
Ndè Sii Wet'aà: Northern Indigenous Voices on Land, Life, & Art is a collection of essays, interviews, short stories and poetry written by emerging and established northern Indigenous writers and artists. Centred on land, cultural practice and northern life, this ground-breaking collection shares wealth of Dene (Gwichʼin, Sahtú, Dehcho, Tłı̨chǫ, Saysi, Kaska, Dënesuiné, W?ìl?ìdeh ) Inuit, Alutiiq, Inuvialuit, Métis, Nêhiyawak (Cree), Northern Tutchone, and Tanana Athabascan creative brilliance. Ndè Sii Wet'aà holds up the voices of women and Two Spirit and Queer writers to create a chorus of voices reflecting a deep love of Indigenous cultures, languages, homelands and the north. The book includes a series of pieces and interviews from established northern artists and musicians including Leela Gilday, Randy Baillargeon (lead singer for the W?ìl?ìdeh Drummers), Inuit sisters, song-writers and throat singers Tiffany Ayalik and Inuksuk Mackay of Piqsiq, Two Spirit Vuntut Gwitchin visual artist Jeneen Frei Njootli, Nunavik singer-songwriters Elisapie and Beatrice Deere and visual artist Camille Georgeson-Usher. Ndè Sii Wet'aà also includes writing from well-known northern writers Siku Allooloo, T'áncháy Redvers (Fireweed), Antione Mountain (From Bear Rock Mountain), Glen Coulthard (Red Skin, White Masks), Catherine Lafferty (Northern Wildflower, Land-Water-Sky) and Lianne Marie Leda Charlie, in amongst the best emerging writers in the north.
Additional Information
264 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Drawing attention to the ways in which creative practices are essential to the health, well-being, and healing of Indigenous peoples, The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being addresses the effects of artistic endeavour on the “good life”, or mino-pimatisiwin in Cree, which can be described as the balanced interconnection of physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being. In this interdisciplinary collection, Indigenous knowledges inform an approach to health as a wider set of relations that are central to well-being, wherein artistic expression furthers cultural continuity and resilience, community connection, and kinship to push back against forces of fracture and disruption imposed by colonialism.
The need for healing—not only individuals but health systems and practices—is clear, especially as the trauma of colonialism is continually revealed and perpetuated within health systems. The field of Indigenous health has recently begun to recognize the fundamental connection between creative expression and well-being. This book brings together scholarship by humanities scholars, social scientists, artists, and those holding experiential knowledge from across Turtle Island to add urgently needed perspectives to this conversation. Contributors embrace a diverse range of research methods, including community-engaged scholarship with Indigenous youth, artists, Elders, and language keepers.
The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being demonstrates the healing possibilities of Indigenous works of art, literature, film, and music from a diversity of Indigenous peoples and arts traditions. This book will resonate with health practitioners, community members, and any who recognize the power of art as a window, an entryway to access a healthy and good life.
Reviews
“There is a genuinely beautiful life-force at work in this text: it’s artful and creative, readable and forceful. The objectives and scholarship throughout The Arts of Indigenous Health and Wellbeing are clear, grounded, rigorous and likely to make important contributions to knowledge and conversations about Indigenous health and the humanities in times and space of contemporary coloniality.” — Sarah de Leeuw
"The unique content of The Arts of Indigenous Health and Wellbeing may be useful for communities to heal, and to preserve cultural and traditional knowledge that can be passed down in the written form. The content can spark dialogue and learning by being discussed and used by families, generations, health providers/healers and a wide array of learners.”— Margot Latimer
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Ch 1: What This Pouch Holds
Ch 2: Baskets, Birchbark Scrolls, and Maps of Land: Indigenous Making Practices as Oral Historiography
Ch 3: For Kaydence and her Cousins: Health and Happiness in Cultural Legacies and Contemporary Contexts
Ch 4: Stories and Staying Power: Art-Making as (Re)Source of Cultural Resilience and Well-Being for Panniqtumiut
Ch 5: Healthy Connections: Facilitators’ Perceptions of Programming Linking Arts and Wellness with Indigenous Youth
Ch 6: Narrating Relations: Genetic Ancestry Testing and Alternarratives of Queer Kinship
Ch 7: The Doubleness of Sound in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools
Ch 8 Kissed by Lightning: Mediating Haudenosaunee Traditional Teachings through Film
Ch 9: Minobimaadiziwinke (Creating a Good Life): Native Bodies Healing
Ch 10: Body Counts: War, Pesticides and Queer Spirituality in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints
Ch 11: “The Song of the Starved Soul”
Ch 12 Sakihiwawin: Land’s Overflow into the space-tial “Otherwise”
Additional Information
240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
Errol Ranville has been running all his life: from chronic poverty and racism in rural Manitoba; a discriminatory music business; alcohol and drug addiction; and the responsibilities that come with being regarded as a role model. Though Errol has faced seemingly insurmountable barriers as an Indigenous performer in a predominately white music business, his band C-Weed & the Weeds released several #1 songs and went on to score JUNO nominations in 1985 and 1986. He was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Indigenous Music Awards in 2011. In his memoir Run as One, Errol embraces the role of trailblazer for the countless musicians that follow his path.
Reviews
"This is the story of how C-Weed became a legendary name in Indigenous music. Run As One traces the perseverance, heartbreak and inspiration that led Errol Ranville from extreme hardship to singing the soundtrack of so many of our lives." - Wab Kinew, author of The Reason You Walk
Additional Information
160 pages | 6.18" x 8.91"
Synopsis:
Indigenous Celebrity speaks to the possibilities, challenges, and consequences of popular forms of recognition, critically recasting the lens through which we understand Indigenous people’s entanglements with celebrity. It presents a wide range of essays that explore the theoretical, material, social, cultural, and political impacts of celebrity on and for Indigenous people. It questions and critiques the whitestream concept of celebrity and the very juxtaposition of “Indigenous” and “celebrity” and casts a critical lens on celebrity culture’s impact on Indigenous people.
Indigenous people who willingly engage with celebrity culture, or are drawn up into it, enter into a complex terrain of social relations informed by layered dimensions of colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, and classism. Yet this reductive framing of celebrity does not account for the ways that Indigenous people’s own worldviews inform Indigenous engagement with celebrity culture––or rather, popular social and cultural forms of recognition.
Indigenous Celebrity reorients conversations on Indigenous celebrity towards understanding how Indigenous people draw from nation-specific processes of respect and recognition while at the same time navigating external assumptions and expectations. This collection examines the relationship of Indigenous people to the concept of celebrity in past, present, and ongoing contexts, identifying commonalities, tensions, and possibilities.
Reviews
“Indigenous Celebrity is an indispensable, paradigm-shifting study of celebrity that centres Indigenous meaning-making, epistemologies, kinship, and world views, even as it remains attuned to the historical and continuing effects of settler-colonial and other colonizing celebrity systems and dynamics upon Indigenous celebrity. From its analyses of Indigenous celebrity activism, to Indigenous sport celebrity, to celebritized “last” speakers of Indigenous languages, to Indigenous celebrity in Australia and India, and beyond, this thoughtful collection builds a compelling broad-based analysis that is attentive to the crucial specificities of place and community. The burgeoning field of celebrity studies dearly needs this book.” — Lorraine York
“Indigenous Celebrity is the first book to look at celebrity through an Indigenous lens. It addresses a significant gap in the literature – for Indigenous/Native/Aboriginal studies, for celebrity and fame studies, and as a comparative resource for social and cultural studies.” — Julie Pelletier
Educator Information
Other contributors: Daryl Adair, Kim Anderson, Renée E. Mzinegiizhigoo-kwe Bédard, Aadita Chaudhury, Jenny L. Davis, Karen Fox, Christina Giacona, Jonathan G. Hill, Brendan Hokowhitu, Kahente Horn-Miller, David Lakisa, Sheryl Lightfoot, Virginia McLaurin, w. C. sy, Tracy Taylor, Katerina Teaiwa.
Topics: Film & Media Studies, Indigenous Studies, Popular Culture, Social Science
Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | index, bibliography
Synopsis:
Despite a recent increase in the productivity and popularity of Indigenous playwrights in Canada, most critical and academic attention has been devoted to the work of male dramatists, leaving female writers on the margins. In Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada, Sarah MacKenzie addresses this critical gap by focusing on plays by Indigenous women written and produced in the socio-cultural milieux of twentieth and twenty-first century Canada.
Closely analyzing dramatic texts by Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan, MacKenzie explores representations of gendered colonialist violence in order to determine the varying ways in which these representations are employed subversively and informatively by Indigenous women. These plays provide an avenue for individual and potential cultural healing by deconstructing some of the harmful ideological work performed by colonial misrepresentations of Indigeneity and demonstrate the strength and persistence of Indigenous women, offering a space in which decolonial futurisms can be envisioned.
In this unique work, MacKenzie suggests that colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence against Indigenous women. Most significantly, however, she argues that resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic writing and production work in direct opposition to such representational and manifest violence.
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Violence Against Indigenous Women and Dramatic Subversion
Reclaiming Our Grandmothers in Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots and Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea
Community and Resistance in Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Now Look What You Made Me Do
Media, Gendered Violence, and Dramatic Resistance in Yvette Nolan’s Annie Mae’s Movement and Blade
Indigenous Women’s Theatre: A Transnational Mechanism of Decolonization
References
Index
Additional Information
200 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback
Synopsis:
An examination of historical performances in an iconic Vancouver park demonstrating how it remains an Indigenous place despite colonial efforts.
Performance embodies knowledge transfer, cultural expression, and intercultural influence. It is a method through which Indigenous people express their relations to land and continuously establish their persistent political authority. But performance is also key to the misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial societies.
Against the Current and Into the Light challenges dominant historical narratives of the land now known as Stanley Park, exploring performances in this space from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selena Couture engages with knowledge held in an endangered Indigenous language's place names, methods of orientation in space and time, and conceptions of leadership and respectful visiting. She then critically engages with narratives of Vancouver history created by the city's first archivist, J.S. Matthews, through his interest in Lord Stanley's visit to the park in 1889. Matthews organized several public commemorative performances on this land from the 1940s to 1960, resulting in the iconic yet misleading statue of Lord Stanley situated at the park's entrance. Couture places Matthews's efforts at commemoration alongside continuous political interventions by Indigenous people and organizations such as the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, while also responding to contemporary performances by Indigenous women in Vancouver that present alternative views of history.
Using the metaphor of eddies of influence - motions that shape and are shaped by obstacles in their temporal and spatial environments - Against the Current and Into the Light reveals how histories of places have been created, and how they might be understood differently in light of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization.
Reviews
"Against the Current and Into the Light is an innovative, deeply researched, and thoroughly engrossing account of the acts of knowledge transfer embedded in both Indigenous and white settler cultural performances related to Stanley Park. Couture engages with several Indigenous scholars' own interventions into the politics of intercultural knowledge production and approaches the material she is writing about with humility, responsibility, and care." Peter Dickinson, Simon Fraser University
Additional Information
272 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 26 b&w photos, 1 map
Synopsis:
“The Gabriel Dumont Institute Press is pleased to be able to preserve and share Jeanne Pelletier’s work and life story through Let Me See Your Fancy Steps—Story of a Métis Dance Caller. The Story of Jeanne Pelletier as told to Sylvie Sara Roy and Wilfred Burton. Jeanne’s achievement as the first female Métis dance caller is, of course, about Métis dance, but it is also about the determination of a young Métis girl who achieves her dream to become a dance caller during a time when this was only done by men.”
This resource includes dance calls for 16 dances and is accompanied by the instructional DVD All My Relations which features dance company V’ni Dansi which is led by renowned dancer and artistic director, Yvonne Chartrand.
Reviews
"The recounting of Jeanne’s work is supplemented throughout the book by testimonials of her former dance students and community members, all of whom praise the dance caller for the substantial impact that she’s had both on their personal lives, as well as the academic and social climates of the Métis community in Saskatchewan. As a Métis myself, I feel lost at times, as if my culture is fuzzy or foreign to me. Reading the life experiences, knowledge, and not to mention the wealth of Métis Jig steps found in this book gave me an overwhelming sense of peace to see research of this caliber and this level of care being invested in my culture. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Métis culture and the significance that the jig has to the culture. Anyone who has seen the Métis Jig performed live knows that it is a beautiful and awe-inspiring dance, but after reading Jeanne’s explanations of the cultural significance of the dances, I will now appreciate the dance that much more as a story and celebration of my culture. It is also worth mentioning that entire dance sequences are written out to follow with Jeanne’s notes, and the book includes an instructional DVD." - Ben Charles for SaskBook Reviews
Educator Information
Recommended by Gabriel Dumont Institute for Secondary/Post Secondary/Adult.
Includes a DVD.
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2019-2020 resource list as being useful for grades 5-12 with regard to these subjects: English Language Arts, Physical Education, Social Studies, Teacher Resource.
Synopsis:
Following the Final Report on Truth and Reconciliation, Performing Turtle Island investigates theatre as a tool for community engagement, education, and resistance.
Comprised of multidisciplinary and diverse perspectives, Performing Turtle Island considers theatre as a tool for community engagement, education, and resistance, and examines how communities in turn influence the construction of Indigenous identities through theatre.
Contributors:
Megan Davies (York University)
Spy Dénommé-Welch (Brock University)
Floyd Favel (Poundmaker First Nation)
Carol Greyeyes (University of Saskatchewan)
Michael Greyeyes (Muskeg Lake First Nation)
Kahente Horn-Miller (Carleton University)
Dione Joseph (Onehunga, New Zealand)
Catherine Magowan (Hamilton, ON)
Daniel David Moses (Queen's University)
Yvette Nolan (University of Saskatchewan)
Armand Ruffo (Sagamok Ojibway and Chapleau Cree Fox Lake First Nations, Queen's University)
Annie Smith (Grand Prairie Regional College)
Reviews
“Brilliantly introduces pedagogies that jump scale; a bundling project for future ancestors revealing knowledges for flight into kinstillatory relationships. ” —Karyn Recollet, co-author of In This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Hip Hop
“An important resource for those who want to introduce or incorporate Indigenous artistic perspectives in their course or work. ” —Heather Davis-Fisch, author of Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance
“A very significant and welcome contribution to the growing body of work on Indigenous theatre and performance in the land now called Canada. ” —Ric Knowles, author of Performing the Intercultural City
Educator Information
Understanding Indigenous cultures as critical sources of knowledge and meaning, each essay addresses issues that remind us that the way to reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous peoples is neither straightforward nor easily achieved. Comprised of multidisciplinary and diverse perspectives, Performing Turtle Island considers performance as both a means to self-empowerment and self-determination, and a way of placing Indigenous performance in dialogue with other nations, both on the lands of Turtle Island and on the world stage.
Additional Information
256 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 5 photos, 1 table
Synopsis:
We Interrupt This Program tells the story of how Indigenous people are using media tactics in the realms of art, film, television, and journalism to rewrite Canada’s national narratives from Indigenous perspectives.
Miranda Brady and John Kelly showcase the diversity of these interventions by offering personal accounts and reflections on key moments – witnessing survivor testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attending the opening night of the ImagineNative Film + Media Festival, and discussing representations of Indigenous people with artists such as Kent Monkman and Dana Claxton and with CBC journalist Duncan McCue. These scene-setting moments bring to life their argument that media tactics, as articulations of Indigenous sovereignty, have the power not only to effect change from within Canadian institutions and through established mediums but also to spark new forms of political and cultural expression in Indigenous communities and among Indigenous youth.
Theoretically sophisticated and eminently readable, We Interrupt This Program reveals how seemingly unrelated acts by Indigenous activists across Canada are decolonizing our cultural institutions from within, one intervention at a time.
This book will appeal to wide spectrum of readers – from students and scholars in communications and media studies to those with a general interest in Canadian art, culture, history, journalism, anthropology, and Indigenous studies.
Reviews
"...the book chronicles the breadth of media interventions employed by Aboriginal media creators, foregrounding Indigenous worldviews, agency and resilience while challenging colonial myths. It is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand Indigenous cultural expression in Canada in the digital age." — Brad Clark, Journalism and Broadcast Media Studies at Mount Royal University, Canadin Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2018
"[We Interrupt this Program] provides an analytical perspective to help readers reflect on what types of new interruptions may be brewing – or to plan the interventions themselves." — Greg Macdougall, Briarpatch Magazine, June 2018
Educator Information
Table of Contents
Introduction: Indigenous Media Tactics
1 Media Practices and Subversions: Survivor Testimonials in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
2 IsumaTV’s “Testimony by Isuma”: Online Expressions of Inuit Culture and Assimilation
3 Redfacing, Remediation, and Other Indigenous ArtTactics: Challenging Cultural Institutions
4 imagineNATIVE as Industry Intervention: Supporting and Growing Indigenous Media Makers
5 Reporting News in Indigenous Communities: A Conversation with Journalist Duncan McCue on Respect and Relationality
Conclusion: Media Tactics Old and New
Notes; Works Cited; Index
Additional Information
220 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 14 B&W Photos
Synopsis:
Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music, a study of subarctic Cree hunting songs, is the first detailed ethnomusicology of the northern Cree of Quebec and Manitoba. The result of more than two decades spent in the North learning from the Cree, Lynn Whidden’s account discusses the tradition of the hunting songs, their meanings and origins, and their importance to the hunt. She also examines women’s songs, and traces the impact of social change—including the introduction of hymns, Gospel tunes, and country music—on the song traditions of these communities.
The book also explores the introduction of powwow song into the subarctic and the Crees struggle to maintain their Aboriginal heritage—to find a kind of song that, like the hunting songs, can serve as a spiritual guide and force.
Including profiles of the hunters and their songs and accompanied (online) by original audio tracks of more than fifty Cree hunting songs, Essential Song makes an important contribution to ethnomusicology, social history, and Aboriginal studies.
Awards
- ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, Bronze Pize, Music Category
Educator Information
Audio files available on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-276681310/sets/essential-song-three-decades.
Additional Information
192 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"
Synopsis:
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)
Synopsis:
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
Synopsis:
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"
Synopsis:
This manual teaches techniques of playing the flute for both the absolute beginner as well as the seasoned player. Using the CD that accompanies this manual, readers will be able to learn the basic skills needed to play.
The author describes the history of the modern Native American Flute and includes the traditional legend of how it became an integral part of the courting ritual. Also included are instructions for maintaining your flute, numerous graphs and illustrations of scales to practice, advice on how to choose the best flute for you, songwriting tips, practice songs, and blank composition sheets. The instructional CD features samples of Jeff Ball's bestselling recordings. Beautiful color photos of both flute players and flutes accompany the text.
Synopsis:
First Nations, Inuit, and Métis music in Canada is dynamic and diverse, reflecting continuities with earlier traditions and innovative approaches to creating new musical sounds. Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada narrates a story of resistance and renewal, struggle and success, as indigenous musicians in Canada negotiate who they are and who they want to be. Comprised of essays, interviews, and personal reflections by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal musicians and scholars alike, the collection highlights themes of innovation, teaching and transmission, and cultural interaction. Individual chapters discuss musical genres ranging from popular styles including country and pop to nation-specific and intertribal practices such as powwows, as well as hybrid performances that incorporate music with theatre and dance. As a whole, this collection demonstrates how music is a powerful tool for articulating the social challenges faced by Aboriginal communities and an effective way to affirm indigenous strength and pride. Juxtaposing scholarly study with artistic practice, Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada celebrates and critically engages Canada's vibrant Aboriginal music scene. Contributors include Véronique Audet (Université de Montreal), Columpa C. Bobb (Tsleil Waututh and Nlaka'pamux, Manitoba Theatre for Young People), Sadie Buck (Haudenosaunee), Annette Chrétien (Métis), Marie Clements (Métis/Dene), Walter Denny Jr. (Mi'kmaw), Gabriel Desrosiers (Ojibwa, University of Minnesota, Morris), Beverley Diamond (Memorial University), Jimmy Dick (Cree), Byron Dueck (Royal Northern College of Music), Klisala Harrison (University of Helsinki), Donna Lariviere (Algonquin), Charity Marsh (University of Regina), Sophie Merasty (Dene and Cree), Garry Oker (Dane-zaa), Marcia Ostashewski (Cape Breton University), Mary Piercey (Memorial University), Amber Ridington (Memorial University), Dylan Robinson (Stó:lo, University of Toronto), Christopher Scales (Michigan State University), Gilles Sioui (Wendat), Gordon E. Smith (Queen's University), Beverly Souliere (Algonquin), Janice Esther Tulk (Memorial University), Florent Vollant (Innu) and Russell Wallace (Lil'wat).
Additional Information
520 pages | 6.14" x 9.25"
Authenticity Note: While the editors of this book are not Indigenous, the majority of contributors are Indigenous; therefore, this book has received the Authentic Indigenous Text label.
Synopsis:
Indigenous media challenges the power of the state, erodes communication monopolies, and illuminates government threats to indigenous cultural, social, economic, and political sovereignty. Its effectiveness in these areas, however, is hampered by government control of broadcast frequencies, licensing, and legal limitations over content and ownership.
Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada explores key questions surrounding the power and suppression of indigenous narrative and representation in contemporary indigenous media. Focusing primarily on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, the authors also examine indigenous language broadcasting in radio, television, and film; Aboriginal journalism practices; audience creation within and beyond indigenous communities; the roles of program scheduling and content acquisition policies in the decolonization process; the roles of digital video technologies and co-production agreements in indigenous film making; and the emergence of Aboriginal cyber-communities.
Additional Information
200 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"




































