Browse Books for Adults

Just Around the Corner is the story of Member of Parliament for Labrador, Yvonne Rumbolt-Jones, a woman from a northern community who broke free of her geographic and political isolation to embrace opportunity.

Just Around the Corner is the story of Member of Parliament for Labrador Yvonne Rumbolt-Jones, a woman from a northern community who broke free of geographic and political isolation to embrace opportunity. An intimate memoir from the longest-serving female politician in Newfoundland and Labrador, Just Around the Corner uncovers Rumbolt-Jones's strength as a survivor as well as her determination and courage through both her private life and her political life. She reveals her early years of dealing with child sexual abuse and experiences with family alcoholism, and her challenges as an adult confronting personal grief and loss, the sexism, public scrutiny, and challenges of party politics, as well as being diagnosed with cancer-twice. Through it all, the thread of Rumbolt-Jones's love for Labrador and its people, and her hope and joy in working for the future of both shines through. She writes with confidence and candour about overcoming adversity and marginality to be elected to both the provincial House of Assembly and the national Parliament, where she has been a strong leader and voice for women, Indigenous peoples, and Canada's North. Her story is that of a woman who refused to let the scars of the past define her, but rather used them to help her grow and understand that while we may not control what harms us, we can control how we move forward.

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304 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Paperback

The only book on award-winning Indigenous basket maker Jeremy Frey, accompanying his first major traveling exhibition.

Frey (Passamaquoddy) is one of the most respected Indigenous basket makers working today. Descended from a long line of basket makers, his work is known for its intricate design and exquisite artistry, which reflect both traditional techniques and his own creative vision.

This catalogue considers his work from a variety of perspectives. Secord, whom Frey credits for guiding his career as the founder of Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, contributes a detailed biographical essay. DeSimone situates Frey’s work in the broader field of contemporary art, with a specific focus on the new video work he is making for the exhibition. Hoska focuses on Frey’s art in the broader context of Native basket and fiber arts. And Mize considers the ways in which his expanding practice registers ecological knowledge, time, and the impact of climate change.

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160 pages | 8.85" x 11.91" | Hardcover  

Rooted in ten Indigenous values, this thoughtful, holistic book-written by Randy Woodley, a Cherokee descendant recognized by the Keetoowah Band, and Edith Woodley, an Eastern Shoshone tribal member-helps readers learn lifeways that lead to true wholeness, well-being, justice, and harmony.

The pursuit of happiness, as defined by settlers and enshrined in the American Dream, has brought us to the brink: emotionally, spiritually, socially, and as a species. We stand on a precipice, the future unknown. But Indigenous people carry forward the values that humans need to survive and thrive. In Journey to Eloheh, Randy and Edith Woodley help readers transform their worldviews and lifestyles by learning the ten values of the Harmony Way. These ten values, held in common across at least forty-five Indigenous tribes and nations, can lead us toward true well-being: harmony, respect, accountability, history, humor, authenticity, equality, friendship, generosity, and balance. By learning, converting to, and cultivating everyday practices of Eloheh--a Cherokee word meaning harmony and peace--we have a chance at building well-being and a sustainable culture.

In this riveting account of their own journeys toward deepening their indigeneity and embodying harmony, Edith, an activist-farmer, and Randy, a scholar, author, teacher, and wisdom-keeper, help readers learn the lifeways of the Harmony Way. The journey to Eloheh holds promise for all of us, Indigenous or not.

We know the Western worldview is at odds with a sustainable Earth, a just common life, and personal well-being. Together we can convert to another way of living--one that recognizes the Earth as sacred, sees all creation as related, and offers ancestral values as the way forward to a shared future.

Reviews
"Edith and Randy Woodley's passion and persistence to create spaces of community and care are inspiring. A blend of storytelling, theology, and guidance harvested directly through Indigenous wisdom, Journey to Eloheh reminds us to stay true to the path of kinship and belonging, and to never give up on justice and peacemaking in the world. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is searching for a way to be a better relative on this earth or to fight for a better reality for future generations. This book will help you get there." --Kaitlin B. Curtice, award-winning author of Native and Living Resistance

"Spiritual journey as autobiography: like a Navajo weaver, Journey to Eloheh skillfully connects Native American theology and personal experience into a way of life. If you are looking for your own path, Edith and Randy Woodley's story is a good place to begin." --Steven Charleston, author of Ladder to the Light, Spirit Wheel, and We Survived the End of the World

"There is so much we can all learn from the wisdom of Indigenous culture. In this book, Randy and Edith Woodley invite us to join them on a journey of learning a different way of living that leads to wholeness, abundance, and peace. They generously share their life experience and spiritual insights to show us a better path toward harmony with the whole of creation. I highly recommend it!" --Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil, author of Becoming Brave and Roadmap to Reconciliation 2.0

"A practical antidote to despair, hopelessness, and aimless consumption, this book offers a robust and healing path to well-being for all of us. The Woodleys are wise and trustworthy guides for restoration and embodied goodness within the community of creation." --Sarah Bessey, author of Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith

"Randy and Edith Woodley write with insight and wisdom from their years of experience. They have prophetic voices that draw attention to the needs of all of our relatives. Their voices rise out of difficult situations in which they have done more than survive; they are showing how to flourish in an ever-changing world." --Ray Aldred, director of the Indigenous Studies Program, Vancouver School of Theology

"For many years, I have considered Randy Woodley one of my teachers. His books, lectures, and personal conversations--together with his humble, yet bold, spirit as a teacher--have enriched and challenged me. His new book, co-written with his wise and eloquent wife, Edith, is a masterpiece, a book I would recommend to anyone and everyone. It beautifully combines the sharing of their life-story with the essence of their lifeway, articulated in ten powerful Indigenous values that are as deeply spiritual as they are deeply practical." --Brian McLaren, author, teacher, and activist

Educator Information
Keywords / Themes: Well-Being; the Harmony Way (Eloheh); Ten Eloheh Values; Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Values; Personal Growth.

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264 pages | 5.75" x 8.75" | Hardcover 

With gorgeous imagery, visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas brings to life the tumultuous history of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and the early colonization by the Europeans of the northern West Coast.

Yahgulanaas uses a blend of traditional and modern art, eschewing the traditional boxes of comic books for the flowing shapes of North Pacific iconography. The panels are filled with colourful and expressive watercolour paintings. The panels of each page, if removed and assembled into one whole image, form a large image reminiscent of a woven robe.

The story follows several historical figures, including Johan Adrian Jacobsen (JAJ), who comes to the Haida village of Masset to collect specimens for a German museum, through a time span that includes first contact, the devastation of the smallpox epidemic, and the mass resettlement of disenfranchised peoples, both Indigenous and European.

Reviews
“This book is a necessary tale told by the perfect voice at the right time. It also uses graphic imagery in a way I've not seen before, and it feels ground-breaking.” — Douglas Coupland

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132 pages | 8.00" x 10.00" | Hardcover

“We need to learn and grow together, and if we are able to do this, we will create harmony,” counsels Tom Sampson, an elder of Tsartlip First Nation in British Columbia.

Dynamic and diverse, Coast Salish culture is bound together by shared values and relations that generate a resilient worldview. Jesintel—"to learn and grow together"—characterizes the spirit of this book, which brings the cultural teachings of nineteen elders to new generations.

Featuring interviews that share powerful experiences and stories, Jesintel illuminates the importance of ethical reciprocal relationships and the interconnectedness of places, land, water, and the spirit within all things. Elders offer their perspectives on language revitalization, Coast Salish family values and naming practices, salmon, sovereignty, canoe racing, and storytelling. They also share traumatic memories, including of their boarding school experiences and the epidemics that ravished their communities. Jesintel highlights the importance of maintaining relations and traditions in the face of ongoing struggles. Collaboration is at the heart of this work and informs how the editors and community came together to honor the boundless relations of Coast Salish people and their territories.

Elders Interviewed:
Tom Sampson (Tsartlip First Nation)
Virginia Cross (Muckleshoot Tribe)
Ernestine Gensaw (Lummi Nation)
Steve and Gwen Point (Stó:lō Nation)
Gene and Wendy Harry (Malahat Nation)
Claude Wilbur (Swinomish Tribe)
Richard Solomon (Lummi Nation)
Elaine Grinell (Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe)
Arvid Charlie (Cowichan Nation)
Amy George (Tsleil-Waututh Nation)
Nancy Shippentower (Nisqually Tribe)
Nolan Charles (Musqueam Indian Band)
Andy de los Angeles (Snoqualmie Tribe)
Jewell James (Lummi Nation)
Kenny Moses Sr. Family (Tulalip Tribal Nation)
Ramona Morris (Lummi Nation)

Reviews
"A beautiful sharing of thriving Coast Salish communities. Indigenous elders, cultures, and languages have so much precious wisdom to share, and Jesintel celebrates these through storytelling and photos. It is a generous gift to anyone who wants to better understand the resilience of Indigenous communities."- Michelle M. Jacob (Yakama), author of The Auntie Way: Stories Celebrating Kindness, Fierceness, and Creativity

Educator Information
Nineteen elders from Coast Salish communities in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia offer a portrait of their perspectives on language, revitalization, and Coast Salish family values. Topics include naming practices, salmon, canoe journeys and storytelling.

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224 pages | 9.00" x 10.00" | 144 colour illustrations | 1 map | Paperback

A multi-generational story of loss, war, community, survival, perseverance, and renewal.

Joe Pete and her cousin Simon will find more than they anticipated buried beneath the snow as they search for her missing father. Their journey will unlock the ancestors and spirits embedded in the present who call back to a past marked by war and kinship, by conflict and wisdom that continue to contour their trajectory towards the future.

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300 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

Plan de cours de l'enseignant qui accompagne le livre Joue du tambour avec coeur. Quand sa mère lui donne un tambour fait à la main en cadeau, Ren apprend les enseignements du tambour qu’on lui transmet par le fait même. Il découvre que, grâce à ce tambour spécial, il peut créer des liens avec sa culture et reprendre confiance en sa voix pour partager avec joie les chansons traditionnelles de sa nation, la Nation Nuu-chah-nulth.

Educator Information
Find the student resource here: Joue du tambour avec coeur

This resource is available in English: Drum from the Heart Teacher Lesson Plan

Additional Information
14 pages | 8.50" x 11.00" | Paper Packet

An intriguing look at the accomplishments and contradictions of Joseph William McKay, best known as the founder of Nanaimo, BC, and one of the most successful Métis men to rise through the ranks of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the late nineteenth century.

When examining the history of British Columbia, one would be hard-pressed to find an Indigenous person who so successfully navigated the echelons of colonial power as did Joseph William McKay (1829–1900). McKay was Métis, born in Quebec, and began his career in Oregon during the dispute over the international boundary in 1845–46. After moving north, he met his mentor James Douglas and, at age twenty-three, was given the job of building the city of Nanaimo from the ground up and establishing its coal mines.

McKay made several exploratory trips with Douglas during the Gold Rush, and he surveyed the route for the Overland Telegraph, which ran throughout BC. He rose through the ranks of the Hudson’s Bay Company, eventually earning the appointment of Chief Factor, the company’s highest rank. This was at a time when few Indigenous employees of HBC were permitted to rise beyond the rank of postmaster.

After leaving the company in 1878, McKay began a second career in the Department of Indian Affairs. He was a federal Indian Agent and later the Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs for British Columbia. A product of his time who had found personal success working within the colonial system, McKay is a complicated figure when viewed through a twenty-first-century lens. He advocated on behalf of Indigenous Peoples when he tried to prevent the trespass of CPR crews and European settlers on their ancestral land. Between 1886 and 1888, he personally inoculated more than a thousand Indigenous people with the smallpox vaccine. Yet, he also participated in a system that did untold harm to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people. This fascinating new biography sheds light on an accomplished and complex man.

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224 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | B&W Photo Sections | Paperback 

A tour-de-force debut novel about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man and proud NDN glitter princess who must reckon with his past when he returns home to his reserve.

"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez"--and his former life--to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The seven days that follow are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's life is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.

Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of First Nations life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.

Awards

• 2021 Canada Reads winner

Reviews
"If we're lucky, we'll find one or two books in a lifetime that change the language of story, that manage to illuminate new curves in the flat vessels of old letters and words. This is one of those books. Jonny Appleseed gifts us with clarity in the shape of sharp, and medicine in the guise of soft -- and a sexy, powerful, broken, beautiful hero who has enough capacity in the dent of a clavicle to hold all the tears of his family. This book gives us back the land of curb and field, trailer and ledge, and the community -- in all its rusted and complicated glory. Most importantly, this book gifts us with the opportunity to hear the innovative and the ancient in the prose of a new literary goddess, Joshua Whitehead." ―Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow Thieves

"Joshua Whitehead redefines what queer Indigenous writing can be in his powerful debut novel. Jonny Appleseed transcends genres of writing to blend the sacred and the sexual into a vital expression of Indigenous desire and love. Reading it is a coming home to bodies, stories, and experiences of queer Indigenous life that has never been so richly and honestly shown before. This book is an honour song to every queer NDN body who has ever lived and it will transform the universe with its beauty and magic." ―Gwen Benaway, author of Passage

Educator Information
Caution: graphic/mature content such as sexual descriptions.

Additional Information
224 pages | 5.50" x 8.00"

From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural.

The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs series, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?

Awards

• NPR Book of the Year Award 
• Winner of the 2018 Whiting Award

Reviews
"Tommy Pico's books are contemporary epics. He writes poetry of rare brilliance, assured in form and forceful in its interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self."—Whiting Award Committee

"Tommy Pico's new collection, Junk, is nimble as jazz, intentionally unstable, a queer Beat novel in verse for the social media age." —Gregory Cowles, The New York Times Book Review

"Junk is a true American odyssey, complete with a reluctant hero who defies all odds to survive. Repulsed by the trashiness of empire, the violence of occupation, this book nonetheless searches in earnest for real tenderness, a romance that isn’t corny. . . . This is poetry of the highest order, on the level of a pop song, with the crystalline visions of a seer. I consumed it greedily, repeatedly, and am forever changed because of it." —Jenny Zhang, author of SOUR HEART

"Tommy Pico’s complex and lush third collection, Junk, explodes, rewinds, meditates, and explodes again. It binges and purges—on class, identity, sex, politics, snacks, comfort, and fear. . . . Pico is a master of inclusion, of elevating the mundane to the sublime, of examining absurdity and grave seriousness with equal measure. This is an ambitious long poem, and Pico is uniquely qualified to both drag and celebrate modern day consumption and indulgence with graceful humor and grit."—Morgan Parker, author of THERE ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAN BEYONCE

"Whiting Award-winner Tommy Pico follows his cult favorites Nature Poem and IRL with a gloriously wide-ranging monologue on love and friendship, queer and indigenous identity, Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. Pico builds his own 21st-century poetics, junk and all—and as he writes, 'It's important / to value the Junk, Junk has the best stories.'" —NPR

"Build[s] into an apocalyptic crescendo via Pico’s propulsive fervor . . . Pico demonstrates that a person’s many selves, traumas, anxieties, hookups, and breakups can become a marker of courage and survival."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Additional Information
80 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

The play-based learning and individualized strategies in this practical book build on the wide range of literacy skills present in the kindergarten classroom. This valuable resource explores simple ways to use traditional learning centres to provide children with real and authentic reasons to listen, speak, read, write, and view. Teachers will find a wealth of resources for creating meaningful learning experiences, including:

• answers to often-asked questions
• milestones to inform teaching instruction
• activities and games for both individuals and groups
• literacy extensions that involve children with quality literature, authentic artifacts, and recordings

This highly readable book will support teachers as they move beyond worksheets and nurture students on their journey to lifelong literacy.