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Showing 41 - 60 of 328 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.A boy called Slow: the true story of Sitting Bull
By Joseph Bruchac. 1994
In the 1830s, parents in the Lakota Sioux tribe gave their children childhood names like Runny Nose and Hungry Mouth.…
Later when the child had grown and proven himself, he earned a new name. Returns Again named his boy Slow because he never did anything quickly. Slow hated his name and tried hard to earn a better one. At fourteen, Slow had a chance to show his bravery. Grades K-3. 1998, c1994.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.These tales of bravery, courage, and decisive action in times of terrible conflict are the stories of heroes. Although the…
lives of the Native chiefs and famous Métis were often tinged with sadness and loss, they were also an inspiration. Jam-packed with adventures and battles, these tales ultimately tell of the negotiations, broken promises, and harsh realities of the changing face of the West. 2003.Heart berries: a memoir
By Terese Marie Mailhot. 2018
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in…
the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father--an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist--who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts us to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, re-establishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world. Bestseller. 2018.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.