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Showing 181 - 200 of 328 items
By James Bartleman. 2016
2016 Speaker's Book Award — Shortlisted A look back over Bartleman’s seventy years, from his childhood of poverty to becoming…
the Queen’s representative in Ontario. James Bartleman, Ontario’s first Native lieutenant governor, looks back over seventy years to his childhood and youth to describe how learning to read at any early age led him to dream dreams, empowering him to serve his country as an ambassador. In time, Bartleman’s exciting and fulfilling career as a Canadian diplomat took him to a dozen countries around the world, from Bangladesh to Cuba, and from Australia to South Africa. After a vicious beating in a hotel room robbery in South Africa, however, he was forced to come to terms with a deepening depression. In the end, Bartleman found new meaning in life when he became the Queen’s representative in Ontario and mobilized the public to support his initiatives championing books and education for Native children. Seasons of Hope is the extraordinary story of an extraordinary man, and of his constant journey to hope.By Ronald Cross, Hélène Sévigny. 1994
The events at Oka in 1990 saw the Canadian Armed Forces confront some 40 armed Mohawk "Warriors" who were defending…
their community's resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. "Lasagna," one of the Mohawk leaders, was "unmasked" as Ronald Cross. This is his story - and the story of the ongoing struggles of Native nations in land disputes.By Lee Kalcheim. 2014
Soon after Emmy award winning comedy writer and playwright Lee Kalcheim's twin boys were born, he realized he wouldn't get…
much sleep for the next few years. So, while he was awake, he'd better remember what was happening. Lee records the poignant funny stories of this free wheeling family, their adventures living in L.A., Rome and New York, most importantly; the lessons he learned bringing them up. "We all just laughed our way through life, and I realized, writing comedy is hard....living it is exuberant!"Lee Kalcheim has written for both the theatre and television. An Emmy winning comedy writer (All In The Family), Cable Ace Award winner (The Paper Chase), Writers Guild Award (The Bridge of Adam Rush) and creator of the comedy series "Something Wilder" for NBC, which won no awards, but enabled Mr. Kalcheim to return to his first love; Playwriting. His plays include: "Breakfast With Les and Bess" at the Lambs Theatre, "Friends" at Manhattan Theatre Club", "Defiled" at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, with Peter Falk and Jason Alexander, and "Slouching Toward Hollywood" at the Penguin Rep in Stony Point, NY and "Seminar" most recently in Tokyo Japan."A beguiling valentine to fatherhood from one of the funniest minds in Hollywood and New York !"Daniel Klein, co author of the New York Times bestseller, "Plato And A Platypus Walk Into A Bar""Lee Kalcheim is one of my favorite Dads for three reasons: what he does; what he hears; and how he tells it."Jason Alexander, ActorBy George E. Stanley. 2001
Young Apache Goyahkla and his friend play games in their village that will prepare him for his role as a…
hunter and warrior-- and the place he will hold in history as Geronimo, fighter for the rights of his people.By Tom Wilson. 2017
"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. From Beautiful Scars: Even as a kid my existence as the son of Bunny and George Wilson seemed far-fetched to me. When I went over it in my head, none of it added up. The other kids on East 36th Street in Hamilton used to tell me stories of their mothers being pregnant and their newborn siblings coming home from the hospital. Nobody ever talked about Bunny's and my return from the hospital. In my mind my birth was like the nativity, only with gnarly dogs and dirty snow and a chipped picket fence and old blind people with short tempers and dim lights, ashtrays full of Export Plain cigarette butts and bottles of rum. Once, when I was about four, I asked Bunny, "How come I don't look anything like you and George? How come you are old and the other moms are young?" "There are secrets I know about you that I’ll take to my grave," she responded. And that pretty well finished that. Bunny built up a wall to protect her secrets, and as a result I built a wall to protect myself.By Martin Prechtel. 2012
Martín Prechtel's experiences growing up on a Pueblo Indian reservation, his years of apprenticing to a Guatemalan shaman, and his…
flight from Guatemala's brutal civil war to life in the U.S. inform this lyrical blend of memoir, cultural commentary, and spiritual call to arms. The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic is both an epic story and a cry to the heart of humanity based on the author's realization that human survival depends on keeping alive the seeds of our "original forgotten spiritual excellence." Prechtel relates our current state of ecological crisis to the rapid disappearance of biodiversity, indigenous cultures, and shared human values. He demonstrates how real human culture is exterminated when real (not genetically modified) seeds are lost. Like plants that become extinct once their required conditions are no longer met, authentic, unmonetized human cultures can no longer survive in the modern world. To "keep the seeds alive"--both literally and metaphorically--they must be planted, harvested, and replanted, just as human culture must become truly engaging and meaningful to the soul, as necessary as food is to the body. The viable seeds of spirituality and culture that lie dormant within us need to "sprout" into broad daylight to create real sets of cultures welcome on Earth.From the Hardcover edition.By Peter O'Neil. 0799
Gerry St. Germain's story begins in "Petit Canada" on the shores of the Assiniboine, growing up with his two younger…
sisters, his mother and his father-a shy Metis trapper and construction worker who sometimes struggled to put food on the table. St. Germain was initially troubled in school, scrapping with classmates and often skipping out to shoot pool, but an aunt and uncle funded his tuition to Catholic school, where a nun recognized his aptitude for math and encouraged him to pursue his dreams. He would go on to become an air force pilot, undercover policeman and West Coast chicken farmer. Business gave way to politics, and in 1988 he became one of a tiny number of Aboriginal Canadians named to a federal cabinet. That milestone was just one of many for a man who played a critical role in Canada's Conservative movement for a generation.From the Brian Mulroney era to the roller-coaster leadership of Kim Campbell, then to the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 and the subsequent rebuilding of the movement under Stephen Harper, St. Germain remained a trusted confidant of prime ministers and a crucial and often daring behind-the-scenes broker in bringing warring factions together. But he is most proud of his efforts during his later years in the Senate, when he was a quiet hero to Canada's Aboriginal community. He spearheaded major Senate reports on key issues like land claims and on-reserve education during the Harper era, when there were few friendly faces for First Nations leaders on Parliament Hill. That role reflected St. Germain's profound determination to help people who are still dealing today with the brutal legacy of residential schools and the paternalistic Indian Act. Memories of his humble beginnings, and the shame he once felt over his Metis heritage bubbled to the surface in his final address to Canada's Parliament in 2012, when he said in a voice quaking with emotion: "I am a Metis."By Bev Sellars. 2013
Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars…
spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school.These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. Perhaps the most symbolically potent strategy used to alienate residential school children was addressing them by assigned numbers only-not by the names with which they knew and understood themselves.In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family-from substance abuse to suicide attempts-and eloquently articulates her own path to healing. Number One comes at a time of recognition-by governments and society at large-that only through knowing the truth about these past injustices can we begin to redress them.Bev Sellars is chief of the Xatsu'll (Soda Creek) First Nation in Williams Lake, British Columbia. She holds a degree in history from the University of Victoria and a law degree from the University of British Columbia. She has served as an advisor to the British Columbia Treaty Commission.Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men--President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross--who led their respective nations…
at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story. One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson--war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South--whose first major initiative as president instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure: John Ross--a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat--who used the United States' own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson. Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers--cultivating farms, publishing a newspaper in their own language, and sending children to school--Ross championed the tribes' cause all the way to the Supreme Court. He gained allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. In a fight that seems at once distant and familiar, Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committed civil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. Their struggle contained ominous overtures of later events like the Civil War and set the pattern for modern-day politics. At stake in this struggle was the land of the Five Civilized Tribes. In shocking detail, Jacksonland reveals how Jackson, as a general, extracted immense wealth from his own armies' conquest of native lands. Later, as president, Jackson set in motion the seizure of tens of millions of acres--"Jacksonland"--in today's Deep South. Jacksonland is the work of renowned journalist Steve Inskeep, cohost of NPR's Morning Edition, who offers here a heart-stopping narrative masterpiece, a tragedy of American history that feels ripped from the headlines in its immediacy, drama, and relevance to our lives. Harrowing, inspiring, and deeply moving, Inskeep's Jacksonland is the story of America at a moment of transition, when the fate of states and nations was decided by the actions of two heroic yet tragically opposed men. CANDICE MILLARD, author of Destiny of the Republic and The River of Doubt"Inskeep tells this, one of the most tragic and transformative stories in American history, in swift, confident, colorful strokes. So well, and so intimately, does he know his subject that the reader comes away feeling as if Jackson and Ross's epic struggle for the future of their nations took place yesterday rather than nearly two hundred years ago." From the Hardcover edition.By R. Conrad Stein. 1983
Describes the bloody battle known as "Custer's last stand," in which an army of Sioux Indians led by Sitting Bull…
fought off an attack by the United States cavalry, leaving no survivors among the soldiers in Custer's command.This is the first thorough historical account of Chief Seattle and his times--the story of a half-century of tremendous flux,…
turmoil, and violence, during which a native American war leader became an advocate for peace and strove to create a successful hybrid racial community.When the British, Spanish, and then Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it may have appeared to them as an untamed wilderness. In fact, it was a fully settled and populated land. Chief Seattle was a powerful representative from this very ancient world. Historian David Buerge has been researching and writing this book about the world of Chief Seattle for the past 20 years. Buerge has threaded together disparate accounts of the time from the 1780s to the 1860s--including native oral histories, Hudson Bay Company records, pioneer diaries, French Catholic church records, and historic newspaper reporting. Chief Seattle had gained power and prominence on Puget Sound as a war leader, but the arrival of American settlers caused him to reconsider his actions. He came to embrace white settlement and, following traditional native practice, encouraged intermarriage between native people and the settlers, offering his own daughter and granddaughters as brides, in the hopes that both peoples would prosper. Included in this account are the treaty signings that would remove the natives from their historic lands, the roles of such figures as Governor Isaac Stevens, Chiefs Leschi and Patkanim, the Battle at Seattle that threatened the existence of the settlement, and the controversial Chief Seattle speech that haunts to this day the city that bears his name.By Russell Foureagles. 2014
Once Oneida healer Russell FourEagles (Atuneyute Keya) went to see his friend Bob, whom doctors had declared incurably paralyzed following…
a stroke. Within minutes of FourEagles' attention, Bob was kicking the covers off the bed. "You should write a book!" Bob later encouraged. And here it is. FourEagles' grandparents escaped the reservation-school education that obliterated Native American culture, preserving the healing abilities that can be traced in an unbroken lineage back two hundred grandmothers. In The Making of a Healer, he openly shares his knowledge in an effort to keep the old wisdom and practices from being forgotten. Recounting sacred Oneida myths and cosmology, he describes the healing powers of the Fire Ceremony, energy exchange, and humor; discusses natural remedies; and explains how he healed himself from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in the Vietnam War.By Ella E. Clark, Margot Edmonds. 1979
By Black Hawk, Donald Jackson. 1955
This important work is the autobiography of Black Hawk aka Black Sparrow Hawk aka Makataimeshekiakiak. Blackhawk was both a leader…
and warrior of the Sauk tribe of Native Americans in the United States. He served as a war chief for the Sauk indians and was known as Chief Black Hawk to the English. This is an important read for those interested in Native American history especially since it is written by this important figure in Native American history about his life and beliefs as well as an intimate firsthand account of the Black Hawk War.By Robert V. Hine, Don C. Talayesva, Leo W. Simmons, Prof. Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert. 1942
First published in 1942, Sun Chief is the autobiography of Hopi Chief Don C. Talayesva and offers a unique insider…
view on Hopi society. In a new Foreword, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert situates the book within contemporary Hopi studies, exploring how scholars have used the book since its publication more than seventy years ago.By Tanya Tagaq. 2018
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller PrizeFrom the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world…
with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.By Gayle Williamson, Clara Jean Hall. 2018
Clara Jean Mosley Hall has inhabited various cultural worlds in her life: Native American, African American, Deaf, and hearing. The…
hearing daughter of a Deaf Nanticoke Indian, who grew up in Dover, Delaware’s black community in the 1950s and 60s, Hall describes the intersections of these identities in Paris in America. By sharing her father’s experiences and relating her own struggles and successes, Hall honors her father’s legacy of hard work and perseverance and reveals the complexities of her own unique background. Hall was abandoned by her Deaf African-American mother at a young age and forged a close bond with her father, James Paris Mosley, who communicated with her in American Sign Language. Although his family was American Indian, they—like many other Nanticoke Indians of that region—had assimilated over time into Dover’s black community. Hall vividly recounts the social and cultural elements that shaped her, from Jim Crow to the forced integration of public schools, to JFK and Motown. As a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) in a time when no accessibility or interpreting services were available, she was her father’s sole means of communication with the hearing world, a heavy responsibility for a child. After her turbulent teenage years, and with the encouragement of her future husband, she attended college and discovered that her skills as a fluent ASL user were a valuable asset in the field of education. Hall went on to become a college professor, mentor, philanthropist, and advocate for Deaf students from diverse backgrounds. Her memoir is a celebration of her family, her faith, her journey, and her heritage.By Betty Arnett. 2017
Just out of college, Betty Jane adventures from Tennessee to Seward, Alaska, to become a housemother at Jesse Lee Home…
for children. She arrives fearful that someone will learn of her romantic adventures enroute and find them unbecoming of a young woman, who was sent by the Methodist church to care for eleven little boys. With no parenting skills, how will she wade through all of the children's disputes, temper tantrums, and tattling? Was her new reality that of referee, disciplinarian, counselor, nurse, as well as housemother? She soon learns these are the minimum instant mother qualifications. 22 and the Mother of 11 is an engaging, delightful, entertaining, and humorous Alaska memoir.In 1858, 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of Bordeaux wine, they…
stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there they set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. Around the eastern tip of New Guinea, however, the ship became engulfed in fog, struck reefs and ran aground. Scrambling aboard a longboat, the survivors undertook a perilous voyage, crossing almost 1000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of the Daintree region in far north Queensland, where, abandoned by his shipmates and left for dead, Narcisse was rescued by the local Aboriginal people. For seventeen years he lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their world - until in 1875 he was discovered by the crew of a pearling lugger and wrenched from his Aboriginal family. Taken back to his 'real' life in France, he became a lighthouse keeper, married and had another family, all the while dreaming of what he had left behind...Drawing from firsthand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France and other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and documenting the spread of European settlement in Queensland and the brutal frontier wars that followed, Robert Macklin weaves an unforgettable tale of a young man caught between two cultures in a time of transformation and upheaval.By John Norton Teyoninkarawen. 2019
A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812 presents the story of John Norton, or Teyoninhokarawen, an important war chief…
and political figure among the Grand River Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) in Upper Canada. Norton saw more action during the conflict than almost anyone else, being present at the fall of Detroit, the capture of Fort Niagara, the battles of Queenston Heights, Fort George, Stoney Creek, Chippawa, and Lundy’s Lane, the blockades of Fort George and Fort Erie, as well as a large number of skirmishes and front-line patrols. His memoir describes the fighting, the stresses suffered by indigenous peoples, and the complex relationships between the Haudenosaunee and both their British allies and other First Nations communities. Norton’s words, written in 1815 and 1816, provide nearly one-third of the book’s content, with the remainder consisting of Carl Benn’s introductions and annotations, which enable readers to understand Norton’s fascinating autobiography within its historical contexts. With the assistance of modern scholarship, A Mohawk Memoir presents an exceptional opportunity to explore the War of 1812 and native-newcomer issues through Teyoninhokarawen’s Mohawk perspectives from a period that produced few indigenous autobiographies, of which Norton’s is the most extensive, engaging, and reliable.