Browse Books for Adults

This beautiful hard cover book by Verna J. Kirkness invites readers to go back in time and enjoy stories and photos of Ochekiwi Sipi (Fisher River) before 1950, as told by the Elders. This book was written and created for the 140th Anniversary of Ochekiwi Sipi in 2015.

“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.

In his most important book since The Sacred Balance and his most personal ever, revered activist and thinker David Suzuki draws on the experiences and wisdom he has gained over his long life and offers advice, stories, and inspiration to his six grandchildren.


In these inspiring letters to his grandchildren, David Suzuki speaks personally and passionately about their future. He also explains why sports, fishing, feminism, and failure are important; why it is dangerous to deny our biological nature; and why First Nations must lead a revolution. He even has something to say about fashion.


His letters are also chockfull of stories about his own childhood and anecdotes about his children and grandchildren when they were small, providing an intimate look at Suzuki's life as a father and grandfather. Most of all, as he ponders life's deepest questions and offers up a lifetime of wisdom, Suzuki inspires us all to live with courage, conviction, and passion.

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s.

Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse's training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Quebec, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources. Her memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, was published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic.

Educator & Series Information
Life Among the Qallunaat is the third book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or underappreciated texts by Indigenous writers. This reissue of Mini Aodla Freeman’s path-breaking work includes new material, an interview with the author, and an afterword by Keavy Martin and Julie Rak, with Norma Dunning.

Additional Information
304 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Literature not only represents Canada as “our home and native land” but has been used as evidence of the civilization needed to claim and rule that land. Indigenous people have long been represented as roaming “savages” without land title and without literature. Literary Land Claims: From Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat analyzes works produced between 1832 and the late 1970s by writers who resisted these dominant notions.

Margery Fee examines John Richardson’s novels about Pontiac’s War and the War of 1812 that document the breaking of British promises to Indigenous nations. She provides a close reading of Louis Riel’s addresses to the court at the end of his trial in 1885, showing that his vision for sharing the land derives from the Indigenous value of respect. Fee argues that both Grey Owl and E. Pauline Johnson’s visions are obscured by challenges to their authenticity. Finally, she shows how storyteller Harry Robinson uses a contemporary Okanagan framework to explain how white refusal to share the land meant that Coyote himself had to make a deal with the King of England.

Fee concludes that despite support in social media for Theresa Spence’s hunger strike, Idle No More, and the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the story about “savage Indians” and “civilized Canadians” and the latter group’s superior claim to “develop” the lands and resources of Canada still circulates widely. If the land is to be respected and shared as it should be, literary studies needs a new critical narrative, one that engages with the ideas of Indigenous writers and intellectuals.

Awards
Finalist for the 2015 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.

Reviews
Fee contributes to the decolonization of literary studies in Canada and readers will benefit from Fee's contextualization of Indigenous notions of land rights and language. ... scholars interested in issues related to decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty will find this work especially useful. — Lianne Leddy, H-Envirnoment, November -0001

Literary Land Claims is an extremely important contribution to conversations about literature in Canada. ... At a time when universities across Canada are endeavouring to heed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “Calls to Action,” Fee points readers toward a goal of consensus building, one that is predicated on muddying the binary and hierarchical logics through which we have tended to understand identity and, indeed, colonialism itself. She opens up an engaging and necessary conversation, offering a model for rich, ethical scholarly engagement with a literary landscape that is extends far beyond this book, and beyond the confines of “Canlit.” — Sarah Krotz, English Studies in Canada

... Literary Land Claims is timely reading. ... a rich and thoughtful book which will appeal to anyone writing or teaching in fields relating to settler-colonial, Canadian, and Indigenous studies. Historians in particular will find Fee’s chapters a valuable complement to the original texts she discusses. — Megan Harvey, BC Studies, November -0001

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

Additional Information
326 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 10 black and white illustrations

Memory Serves gathers together the oratories award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the Sto: lo in particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle shares her knowledge of Sto: lo history, memory, philosophy, law, spirituality, feminism and the colonial condition of her people.

Powerful and inspiring, Memory Serves is an extremely timely book, not only because it is the first collection of oratories by one of the most important Indigenous authors in Canada, but also because it offers all Canadians, in Maracle's own words, "another way to be, to think, to know," a way that holds the promise of a "journey toward a common consciousness."

Reviews
"Lee Maracle has provided a clear and eloquent voice of power that speaks of, speaks to and speaks with Indigenous peoples and indigenous women around the world. Her writing always provokes, awakens, stirs and enlightens our hearts and minds." - Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

"[a]t this fertile moment for change in the relationship between Canada's indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, Lee Maracle's new collection of oratories ... takes on even greater significance." - Brian Lynch, The Georgia Straight

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

Traditionally and through custom, nêhiyaw (Cree) laws are shared and passed down through the generations in the oral tradition, utilizing stories, songs, ceremonies, lands, waters, animals, land markings and other sacred rites. The loss of the languages, customs, and traditions of Indigenous peoples as a direct result of colonization has necessitated this departure from the oral tradition to record the physical laws of the nêhiyaw, for the spiritual laws can never be written down. As a result, this book is the first of its kind.

McAdam, a co-founder of the international movement Idle No More, shares nêhiyaw laws so that future generations, both nêhiyaw and non-Indigenous people, may understand and live by them to revitalize Indigenous nationhood. Nationhood is about land, language, and culture. Understanding and gaining an awareness of Indigenous laws will provide insight into the thoughts and worldview of Indigenous people before and during the numbered Treaty making process, and help create a harmonious society for all. Hopefully, then, the pain of the poverty, incarceration, suicide, death after death, without hope for the future, of nêhiyaw will become a distant memory.

This is the story of Nena.

Nena is the Cree word for "me" and this book is Irene Young's story of her search for "knowing nena."

Nena's story begins with her carefree childhood and adolescence in the community of Opaskwayak Cree Nation, and continues on through the intergenerational effects of residential school trauma. The book concludes with Nena's elder phase and profiles of her helpers, to whom she is passing on the traditional teachings of her people.

This Christmas season, things have gone awry for the kohkoms of Kiwetinohk. Clare Bear is engaged to be married, Zula Merasty is moving off-reserve and Sihkos Sinclare is in jail. It all comes to fruition at Clare's stagette. Nicimos is dedicated to the memory of Lacy Morin-Desjarlais.

Reviews
“Nicimos means sweetheart in Cree and that’s what this play is. A warm-hearted sweetheart with depth and charm and a great sense of humour. The final installment of the Rez Christmas series finds Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company director-writer Curtis Peeteetuce in outstanding form. His words are a gift to the actors and his generosity is reciprocated by incredibly satisfying performances. There’s more here than just a play, you realize. It’s an example of the power of theatre to unite, heal and humanize by appealing to First Nations audiences and the broader community.” – Saskatoon Star Phoenix

Educator Information
This book may be useful for courses in English language arts, creative writing, and performance arts for grades 11 to 12 students, as well as for students at a college/university level.

Caution: references to sexual and alcohol abuse and some Indigenous stereotypes.

Additional Information
72 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

As a window into the magic and medicine of the Northwest Territories, Richard Van Camp's fourth short story collection is hilarious and heartbreaking. A teenaged boy confesses to a vicious assault on a cross-dressing classmate; Lance tells the sensual story of becoming much closer to his wife's dear friend Juanita; while a reluctant giant catches up with gangsters Torchy and Sfen in a story with shades of supernatural and earthly menace.

Night Moves continues to explore the incredible lives of indigenous characters introduced in The Lesser Blessed, Angel Wing Splash Pattern, The Moon of Letting Go, and Godless but Loyal to Heaven. If this is your first time to Fort Simmer and Fort Smith, welcome. If it's another visit - come on in: we've left the lights on for you.

The Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada were here for thousands of years before the arrival of European peoples. Niniskamijinaqik / Ancestral Images: The Mi’kmaq in Art and Photography presents their unique culture and way of life through the remarkable and sometime complex lives of individuals, as depicted in artwork or photography.

The opening images in this collection were created by the Mi’kmaq themselves: portrayals of human beings carved into the rock formations of Nova Scotia. Then there are the earliest surviving European depictions of Mi’kmaq, decorations on the maps of Samuel de Champlain. Finally we see portraits of Mi’kmaw individuals, ancestors in whom we see their “humanity frozen in the stillness of a photograph,” as the writers of the book’s foreword describe.

Niniskamijinaqik / Ancestral Images includes 94 compelling pieces of art and photography, chosen from more than a thousand extant portraits in different media, that show the Mi’kmaw people. Each image is an entry point to deeply personal history, a small moment or single person transformed into vivid immediacy for the reader.

Additional Information
128 pages | 10.00" x 8.00" | b&w photographs

Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jonina Kirton's debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night - a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the weavings of a wagon-goddess who ventures into the double-world existence as a mixed-race woman. In her struggle for footing in this in-between space, she moves from the disco days oftrance dance to contemplations in her dream kitchen as a mother and wife.

With this collection, Kirton adds her voice to the call for the kind of fierce honesty referred to by Muriel Rukeyser when she asked, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Kirton tells her truth with gentleness and patience, splitting the world open one line at a time.

Mary Siisip Geniusz has spent more than thirty years working with, living with, and using the Anishinaabe teachings, recipes, and botanical information she shares in Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask. Geniusz gained much of the knowledge she writes about from her years as an oshkaabewis, a traditionally trained apprentice, and as friend to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe medicine woman from the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and a scholar, teacher, and practitioner in the field of native ethnobotany. Keewaydinoquay published little in her lifetime, yet Geniusz has carried on her legacy by making this body of knowledge accessible to a broader audience.

Geniusz teaches the ways she was taught—through stories. Sharing the traditional stories she learned at Keewaydinoquay’s side as well as stories from other American Indian traditions and her own experiences, Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history. Stories such as “Naanabozho and the Squeaky-Voice Plant” place the plants in cultural context and illustrate the belief in plants as cognizant beings. Covering a wide range of plants, from conifers to cattails to medicinal uses of yarrow, mullein, and dandelion, she explains how we can work with those beings to create food, simple medicines, and practical botanical tools.

Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask makes this botanical information useful to native and nonnative healers and educators and places it in the context of the Anishinaabe culture that developed the knowledge and practice.

Additional Information
344 pages | 7.00" x 10.00" | Paperback

Why don’t more Métis people go to traditional ceremonies? How does going to ceremonies impact Métis identity? In Rekindling the Sacred Fire, Chantal Fiola investigates the relationship between Red River Métis ancestry, Anishinaabe spirituality, and identity, bringing into focus the ongoing historical impacts of colonization upon Métis relationships with spirituality on the Canadian prairies. Using a methodology rooted in Anishinaabe knowledge and principles along with select Euro-Canadian research practices and tools, Fiola’s work is a model for indigenized research.

Fiola’s interviews of people with Métis ancestry, or an historic familial connection to the Red River Métis, who participate in Anishinaabe ceremonies, shares stories about family history, self-identification, and their relationships with Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian cultures and spiritualities. This study seeks to understand the historical suppression of Anishinaabe spirituality among the Métis and its more recent reconnection that breaks down the colonial divisions between their cultures.

Between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, at least sixty-five women, many of them members of Indigenous communities, were found murdered or reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In a work driven by the urgency of this ongoing crisis, which extends across the country, Amber Dean offers a timely, critical analysis of the public representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouver’s disappeared women to the attention of a wider public. Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women traces “what lives on” from the violent loss of so many women from the same neighbourhood.

Dean interrogates representations that aim to humanize the murdered or missing women, asking how these might inadvertently feed into the presumed dehumanization of sex work, Indigeneity, and living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Taking inspiration from Indigenous women’s research, activism, and art, she challenges readers to reckon with our collective implication in the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and to accept responsibility for addressing its countless injustices.