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Showing 41 - 60 of 125 items
Big Bear (Extraordinary Canadians)
By Rudy Wiebe. 2008
Big Bear was a Plains Cree chief in Saskatchewan at a time when aboriginals were confronted with the disappearance of…
the buffalo and waves of European settlers that seemed destined to destroy the Indian way of life. In 1876 he refused to sign Treaty No. 6, until 1882, when his people were starving. Big Bear advocated negotiation over violence, but when the federal government refused to negotiate with aboriginal leaders, some of his followers killed 9 people at Frog Lake in 1885. Big Bear himself was arrested and imprisoned. 2008.As long as the rivers flow
By Oskiniko Larry Loyie, Connie Brissenden. 2005
It is Larry Loyie's last summer before entering residential school, a time of learning and adventure. He cares for an…
abandoned baby owl, watches his grandmother make winter moccasins, helps the family prepare for a hunting and gathering trip. But soon, a truck comes to forcibly take Lawrence and his siblings away to their new school, which would try to erase their traditional language and culture. Grades 3-6. 2002.Back on the rez: finding the way home
By Brian Maracle. 1996
Forty years after moving away to the city, Mohawk writer Brian Maracle returned to the Six Nations Grand River Territory…
where he grew up. He writes about his first year "back on the rez," and the challenges of adapting to a way of life he had not known for decades. He tells of the search for his cultural and spiritual roots, and of the problems in a deeply divided community. c1996.Ada Blackjack: a true story of survival in the Atlantic
By Jennifer Niven. 2003
Ada Blackjack was an unskilled 23-year-old Inuit woman from Nome, Alaska, who signed on as a seamstress for a top-secret…
expedition to the far North, to colonize desolate Wrangel Island. When the expedition went wrong, Ada was left on her own but managed to return home, only to be tricked, exploited and hounded by journalists and others. A true story of a woman who survived a terrible time in the wild only to face a different ordeal in civilization. 2003.A two-spirit journey: the autobiography of a lesbian Ojibwa-Cree elder (Critical studies in Native history ; #18)
By Ma-Nee Chacaby, Mary Louisa Plummer. 2016
As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills…
from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people. 2016.A stranger at home: a true story
By Christy Jordan-Fenton, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton. 2011
10-year-old Margaret Pokiak can hardly contain her excitement - it's been two years since her parents delivered her to the…
school run by the dark-cloaked nuns and brothers. But Margaret soon realizes that she's an outsider in the Arctic - she's forgotten the language and stories of her people, and she can't even stomach the food her mother prepares. As she struggles to reclaim her way of life, she discovers how important it is to remain true to the ways of her people - and to herself. Sequel to "Fatty legs". Grades 4-7. 2011.The reason you walk: a memoir
By Wab Kinew. 2015
When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a…
year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who’d raised him. “The Reason You Walk” spans that 2012 year, chronicling painful moments in the past and celebrating renewed hopes and dreams for the future. As Kinew revisits his own childhood in Winnipeg and on a reserve in Northern Ontario, he learns more about his father's traumatic childhood at residential school. Bestseller. Winner of the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. 2015.Walking in the woods: a Métis journey
By Herb Belcourt. 2006
Belcourt traces his ancestry directly to a French-Canadian voyageur and his Cree-Métis wife who lived in Ruperts Land after 1800.…
The eldest of ten children, Belcourt grew up in a small log home near Lac Ste. Anne during the Depression. When Belcourt left home at 15 to become a labourer in coal mines and sawmills, his father told him to save his money so he could work for himself, and over the next three decades, Belcourt began a number of small Alberta businesses that prospered and eventually enabled him to make significant contributions to the Métis community. 2006.Up Ghost River: a chief's journey through the turbulent waters of Native history
By Edmund Metatawabin, Alexandra Shimo. 2014
A powerful, raw memoir about the abuse former First Nations chief Edmund Metatawabin endured in residential school in the 1960s.…
Even as Metatawabin built the trappings of a successful life, he was tormented by horrific memories. In seeking healing, Metatawabin travelled to southern Alberta. There he learned from elders, participated in native cultural training workshops that emphasize the holistic approach to personhood, and finally faced his alcoholism and PTSD. Now his mission is to help the next generation of residential school survivors. Bestseller. Winner of the 2015 Speaker's Book Award. c2014.Too afraid to cry: Memoir Of A Stolen Childhood
By Ali Cobby Eckermann. 2012
A memoir that, in bare blunt prose and piercingly lyrical verse, gives witness to the human cost of policies that…
created the Stolen Generations of Indigenous people in Australia. It is a narrative of good and evil, terror and happiness, despair and courage. 2012.The shoe boy
By Duncan McCue. 2016
A memoir of McCue's five months in a hunting cabin with a James Bay Cree family. McCue is Anishinaabe, a…
member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario. He renders a beautiful sketch of the landscape and culture of the Cree, a nation still recovering from the massive James Bay hydroelectric project of the ‘70s. Frank, funny and evocative, he entwines the challenges of identity for First Nations youth, the sexual frustration and hopeful confusion of the teenage years, and the realities of living in an enduring state of culture shock. 2016.The scalpel and the silver bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine And Traditional Healing
By Lori Arviso Alvord, Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt. 1999
Raised on the reservation near Gallup, New Mexico, half-Navajo Alvord graduated from Dartmouth and then went to Stanford for her…
medical degree. She describes her career as the first Navajo woman surgeon and her belief that integrating tribal ways into traditional western medicine improves healing. 1999.First-hand accounts of Indigenous people's encounters with colonialism are rare, but a daily diary that extends over fifty years is…
unparalleled. Based on a transcription of Arthur Wellington Clah's diaries, this book offers an account of a Tsimshian man who moved in both colonial and Aboriginal worlds. From his birth in 1831 to his death in 1916, Clah witnessed profound change: the arrival of traders, missionaries, and miners, and the establishment of industrial fisheries, wage labour, and reserves. 2011.The life and death of Anna Mae Aquash
By Johanna Brand. 1993
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 1976. It took two autopsies and demands from family and friends to uncover that…
Canadian Indian activist Anna Mae Aquash had been killed by a bullet, fired execution-style into the back of her head. Was she murdered by the FBI, or by colleagues in the American Indian Movement? Some descriptions of violence. c1993.Indian school days
By Basil Johnston. 1988
In 1939, when Basil Johnston was 10 years old, an Indian agent took Basil and his sister to boarding schools…
run by Jesuit priests near Sudbury, Ontario. He writes of hunger, loneliness, abuse and culture shock as he describes the government's policy to assimilate Indians out of a life of "poverty, dirt and ignorance" into the "Canadian way of life".Mamaskatch: a Cree coming of age
By Darrel McLeod. 2018
Growing up in the tiny village of Smith, Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod was surrounded by his Cree family's history. In…
shifting and unpredictable stories, his mother, Bertha, shared narratives of their culture, their family and the cruelty that she and her sisters endured in residential school. Darrel was comforted by her presence and that of his many siblings and cousins, the smells of moose stew and wild peppermint tea, and his deep love of the landscape. Bertha taught him to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that would return to watch over and guide him at key junctures of his life. However, in a spiral of events, Darrel's mother turned wild and unstable, and their home life became chaotic. Sweet and innocent by nature, Darrel struggled to maintain his grades and pursue an interest in music while changing homes many times, witnessing violence, caring for his younger siblings and suffering abuse at the hands of his surrogate father. Meanwhile, his older brother's gender transition provoked Darrel to deeply question his own sexual identity. Winner of the 2018 Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction. 2018.Northern wildflower
By Catherine Lafferty. 2018
With startling honesty and a distinct, occasionally humorous, voice, Lafferty tells her story of being a Dene woman growing up…
in a small northern Canadian mining town and her struggles with discrimination, poverty, addiction, love and loss. Focusing on the importance of family ties, education, spiritualism, cultural identity, health and happiness, the relentless pursuit of success and the courage to speak the truth, Lafferty's words bring cultural awareness and relativity to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike, giving insight into the real issues many Indigenous women face. 2018.A mind spread out on the ground
By Alicia Elliott. 2019
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about Native people in North America while drawing on intimate…
details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight and understanding to the ongoing legacy of colonialism. What are the links between depression, colonialism and loss of language--both figurative and literal? How does white privilege operate in different contexts? How do we navigate the painful contours of mental illness in loved ones without turning them into their sickness? How does colonialism operate on the level of literary criticism? A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is Alicia Elliott's attempt to answer these questions and more. In the process, she engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, sexuality, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing and representation. Elliott makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political--from overcoming a years-long history with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft dinner to how systematic oppression is linked to depression in Native communities. With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott extends far beyond her own experiences to provide a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future. Bestseller. Winner of the 2020 Evergreen Award. 2019.Go show the world: a celebration of Indigenous heroes /
By Wab Kinew. 2018
Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun: Portraits of Everyday Life in Eight Indigenous Communities
By Paul Seesequasis. 2019
A revelatory portrait of eight Indigenous communities from across North America, shown through never-before-published archival photographs--a gorgeous extension of Paul…
Seesequasis's popular social media project.In 2015, writer and journalist Paul Seesequasis found himself grappling with the devastating findings of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on the residential school system. He sought understanding and inspiration in the stories of his mother, herself a residential school survivor. Gradually, Paul realized that another, mostly untold history existed alongside the official one: that of how Indigenous peoples and communities had held together during even the most difficult times. He embarked on a social media project to collect archival photos capturing everyday life in First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities from the 1920s through the 1970s. As he scoured archives and libraries, Paul uncovered a trove of candid images and began to post these on social media, where they sparked an extraordinary reaction. Friends and relatives of the individuals in the photographs commented online, and through this dialogue, rich histories came to light for the first time.Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun collects some of the most arresting images and stories from Paul's project. While many of the photographs live in public archives, most have never been shown to the people in the communities they represent. As such, Blanket Toss is not only an invaluable historical record, it is a meaningful act of reclamation, showing the ongoing resilience of Indigenous communities, past, present--and future.