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22 and the Mother of 11
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.A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
By Alicia Elliott. 2020
A bold and profound work by Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a personal…
and critical meditation on trauma, legacy, oppression and racism in North America. In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of 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, 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.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.Paris in America: A Deaf Nanticoke Shoemaker and His Daughter
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.Let's move on: Paul Okalik speaks out
By Paul Okalik, Louis McComber. 2018
Paul Okalik was raised in a community that has survived starvation, epidemics, eradication of their spiritual heritage, relocation, schooling in…
a foreign language and confrontation with the Canadian justice system. He made the decision to improve the living conditions of his fellow Inuit. After ten years in Ottawa universities, he was called to the Northwest Territories Bar and then was elected the first Premier of Nunavut, the new Canadian territory, all in the year 1999. The new government was challenged on all fronts. Education and training was crucial if Inuit wanted to play a determining role in decision-making. While Paul Okalik was premier, Nunavut developed a civil service decentralized over ten distant communities, built much-needed infrastructures and provided more affordable housing. 2018.Heart berries: a memoir
By Sherman Alexie, Terese Marie Mailhot, Joan Naviyuk Kane. 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.The first book-length biography of Richard Oakes, a Red Power activist of the 1960s who was a leader in the…
Alcatraz takeover and the Red Power Indigenous rights movement A revealing portrait of Richard Oakes, the brilliant, charismatic Native American leader who was instrumental in the takeovers of Alcatraz, Fort Lawton, and Pit River and whose assassination in 1972 galvanized the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, DC. The life of this pivotal Akwesasne Mohawk activist is explored in an important new biography based on extensive archival research and key interviews with activists and family members. Historian Kent Blansett offers a transformative and new perspective on the Red Power movement of the turbulent 1960s and the dynamic figure who helped to organize and champion it, telling the full story of Oakes’s life, his fight for Native American self-determination, and his tragic, untimely death. This invaluable history chronicles the mid-twentieth century rise of Intertribalism, Indian Cities, and a national political awakening that continues to shape Indigenous politics and activism to this day. TESTSplit Tooth
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.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.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.Indian Americans of Massachusetts (American Heritage)
By Meenal Atul Pandya. 2018
Indians are the most recent immigrants in Massachusetts Though a tiny minority their contributions are numerous and far-reaching…
Swami Vivekananda arrived in Boston in 1893 and left a lasting legacy of Hindu philosophy Sushil Tuli opened a unique community bank Leader Bank as the first and only minority-owned bank in the state of Massachusetts The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT created with the grant of 20 million by Desh and Jaishree Deshpande empowers MIT s researchers to make a difference in the world by developing innovative technologies Author Meenal Atul Pandya details the influence of Indians on Massachusetts historyLa force de marcher (Chronique)
By Wab Kinew, Caroline Lavoie. 2017
Ce qui nous pousse à avancer est l'extraordinaire récit de la vie de Tebasonakwut Kinew (ou Peter Kelly, comme l'avaient…
appelé les religieux au pensionnat indien). Père de l'auteur, ce chef Anishinaabe (Ojibwé) originaire du Nord de l'Ontario a vécu à Winnipeg. Le livre, d'un style limpide et réaliste, se lit comme un roman. Les aventures et mésaventures de Tebasonakwut Kinew, parfois tragiques, parfois drôles, sont l'occasion de raconter la vie de tout un peuple à travers les épreuves du temps, de la discrimination des années 1930 à la lutte pour le droit de vote et les droits civiques des années 1960. 2017. Titre uniforme: Reason you walk.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…
British Columbia. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bipolar II, Terese 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 the reader 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, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people and to her place in the world. A New York Times BestsellerDr Stanley Vollant: mon chemin innu : récit biographique
By Mathieu-Robert Sauvé. 2013
Né d'un père disparu et d'une mère alcoolique, Stanley Vollant est sauvé de l'orphelinat par son grand-père innu, pêcheur de…
saumons et trappeur de Pessamit, sur la Côte-Nord. Élève brillant doté d'une mémoire prodigieuse, il doit surmonter sa peur du sang et sa phobie des cadavres pour devenir, en 1994, le premier chirurgien d'origine autochtone de l'histoire du Québec. Tout au long de son parcours, il se fera remarquer par ses succès scolaires... et ses prouesses athlétiques. Coureur de fond, joueur de football, marathonien, il prendra part à plusieurs compétitions jusqu'à ses études supérieures. Mais à la suite d'une série d'échecs personnels, dont deux divorces, il sombre dans une dépression qui le mènera au bord du suicide. C'est le visage de ses enfants, apparaissant sur l'écran de son téléphone portable, qui le retiendra au moment de poser le geste ultime. Aujourd'hui considéré comme un modèle de réussite pour les autochtones et pour les Québécois dans leur ensemble, il a entrepris en 2010 une grande marche pour sensibiliser l'opinion publique à la cause des Premières Nations et à l'importance de l'exercice physique. Conférencier recherché, lauréat de plusieurs prix, il mène de front plusieurs batailles, dont celle consistant à former plus de médecins issus de minorités culturelles. Le tracé est fait, suivez le chemin conclut le médecin à l'endroit de ses compatriotes. 2013.Buckskin and Broadcloth: A Celebration of E. Pauline Johnson — Tekahionwake, 1861-1913
By Sheila M.F. Johnston. 1997
This is the first generously illustrated biography of the Mohawk poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake. The author has created an exciting…
volume of anecdotes, letters and poetry, and illustrated it with period photographs and new illustrations by the Six Nations artist, Raymond R. Skye. While the story of Pauline Johnson has been told before, it has never been given the intimacy that this book provides. Tracing her ancestry, moving on to explore her extraordinary stage career, and finally shedding light on Pauline Johnson’s last years in Vancouver, Sheila M.F. Johnston has breathed new life into the compelling story of one of Canada’s brightest literary and stage stars. This book contains over forty poems that are not part of Pauline Johnson’s classic collection of poems, Flint and Feather. The "uncollected" poems have been culled from archives, libraries and out-of-print books. They shed light on the development of the poet, and enlighten and enrich her life story. Buckskin & Broadcloth is truly a celebration of the life of a Canadian hero – one whose legacy to Canadian literature and Canadian theatre is unparalleled.Life Among the Qallunaat (First Voices, First Texts #3)
By Julie Rak, Mini Aodla Freeman, Keavy Martin, Norma Dunning. 2015
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. Life Among the Qallunaat is the third book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or under appreciated 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.Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home
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.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.A Metaphoric Mind: Selected Writings of Joseph Couture
By Virginia Mcgowan, Ruth Couture. 2013
Dr. Joseph Couture (1930–2007), known affectionately as "Dr. Joe," stood at the centre of some of the greatest political, social,…
and intellectual struggles of Aboriginal peoples in contemporary Canada. A profound thinker and writer, as well as a gifted orator, he easily walked two paths, as a respected Elder and traditional healer and as an educational psychologist, one of the first Aboriginal people in Canada to receive a PhD. His work challenged and transformed long-held views of Canada's Indigenous peoples, and his vision and leadership gave direction to many of the current fields of Aboriginal scholarship. His influence extended into numerous areas—education, addictions and mental health treatment, community development, restorative justice, and federal correctional programming for Aboriginal peoples. With a foreword by Lewis Cardinal, A Metaphoric Mind brings together for the first time key works selected from among Dr. Joe's writings, published and unpublished. Spanning nearly thirty years, the essays invite us to share in his transformative legacy through a series of encounters, with Aboriginal spirituality and ancestral ways of knowing, with Elders and their teachings, with education and its role in politicization, self-determination, and social change, and with the restorative process and the meaning of Native healing.Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch
By Richard Daly, Rena Point Bolton. 2013
Xwelíqwiya is the life story of Rena Point Bolton, a Stó:lō matriarch, artist, and craftswoman. Proceeding by way of conversational…
vignettes, the beginning chapters recount Point Bolton's early years on the banks of the Fraser River during the Depression. While at the time the Stó:lō, or Xwélmexw, as they call themselves today, kept secret their ways of life to avoid persecution by the Canadian government, Point Bolton’s mother and grandmother schooled her in the skills needed for living from what the land provides, as well as in the craftwork and songs of her people, passing on a duty to keep these practices alive. Point Bolton was taken to a residential school for the next several years and would go on to marry and raise ten children, but her childhood training ultimately set the stage for her roles as a teacher and activist. Recognizing the urgent need to forge a sense of cultural continuity among the younger members of her community, Point Bolton visited many communities and worked with federal, provincial, and First Nations politicians to help break the intercultural silence by reviving knowledge of and interest in Aboriginal art. She did so with the deft and heartfelt use of both her voice and her hands. Over the course of many years, Daly collaborated with Point Bolton to pen her story. At once a memoir, an oral history, and an “insider” ethnography directed and presented by the subject herself, the result attests both to Daly’s relationship with the family and to Point Bolton’s desire to inspire others to use traditional knowledge and experience to build their own distinctive, successful, and creative lives.