2023 Indigenous Voices Awards Finalists

Congratulations to all of the finalists of the 2023 Indigenous Voices Awards. It’s the sixth annual celebration of Indigenous writing talent, and we’re so proud to share the nominees from LPG publishers below.

All Books in this Collection

Showing all 9 results

  • Bedtime in Nunatsiavut

    Bedtime in Nunatsiavut

    $19.95

    A sweet, beautiful book for children depicting the transformative dreams envisioned by a young Inuk girl, with the help of her loving mother.

    In Bedtime in Nunatsiavut, a little girl named Nya yearns to fly, swim, and wander like the goose, salmon, bear, fox, and other animals that populate her world. Each night, her loving Ananak (mother) tucks her into bed and gives her a kunik (nose-to-nose rub) to help Nya dream and transform into the animals she longs to be like.

    In Nya’s dreams, she moves with the wonder and the freedom of the natural world, dancing beneath the dark Nunatsiavut skies, empowered and emboldened by her Ananak’s constant love. Written and illustrated by first-time author Raeann Brown, Bedtime in Nunatsiavut is a beautiful and joyful tribute to an Inuit childhood.

  • Buffalo Is the New Buffalo

    Buffalo Is the New Buffalo

    $23.95

    Powerful stories of “Metis futurism” that envision a world without violence, capitalism, or colonization.

    “Education is the new buffalo” is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, “Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?”

    Inspired by classic and contemporary speculative fiction, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo explores science fiction tropes through a Metis lens: a Two-Spirit rougarou (shapeshifter) in the nineteenth century tries to solve a murder in her community and joins the nehiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy) in order to successfully stop Canadian colonial expansion into the West. A Metis man is gored by a radioactive bison, gaining super strength, but losing the ability to be remembered by anyone not related to him by blood. Nanites babble to babies in Cree, virtual reality teaches transformation, foxes take human form and wreak havoc on hearts, buffalo roam free, and beings grapple with the thorny problem of healing from colonialism.

    Indigenous futurisms seek to discover the impact of colonization, remove its psychological baggage, and recover ancestral traditions. These eight short stories of “Metis futurism” explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Metis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.

  • God Isn’t Here Today

    God Isn’t Here Today

    $20.95

    WINNER OF THE 2023 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDS

    LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

    For fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen RussellGod Isn’t Here Today ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice.

    Driven by desperation into moments of transformation, Cunningham’s characters are presented with moments of choice—some for the better and some for the worse. A young man goes to God’s office downtown for advice; a woman discovers she is the last human on Earth; an ice cream vendor is driven insane by his truck’s song; an ageing stripper uses undergarments to enact her escape plan; an incubus tires of his professional grind; and a young woman inherits a power that has survived genocide, but comes with a burden of its own.

    Even as they flirt with the fantastic, Cunningham’s stories unfold with the innate elegance of a spring fern, reminding us of the inherent dualities in human nature—and that redemption can arise where we least expect it.

  • Shapeshifters

    Shapeshifters

    $19.95

    In Shapeshifters, Délani Valin explores the cost of finding the perfect mask. Through a lens of urban Métis experience and neurodivergence, Valin takes on a series of personas as an act of empathy as resistance. Some personas are capitalist mascots like the Starbucks siren, Barbie and the Michelin Man, who confide the hopes and frustrations that lay hidden behind their relentless public enthusiasm. Others include psychiatric diagnoses like hypochondria, autism and depression, and unlikely archetypes such as a woman who becomes a land mass by ending the quest to shrink herself. In more confessional poems, the pressure to find relief from otherness often leads to magical thinking: portals, flight, telepathy and incantations all become metaphors for survival. Shapeshifters maps ways in which an individual can attempt to fit into a world that is inhospitable to them, and makes a case to shift the shape of that world.

  • The Big Melt

    The Big Melt

    $19.95

    The Big Melt is a debut poetry collection rooted in nehiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie ndn utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change. Part memoir, part research project, this collection draws on Riddle’s experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. This book refuses a linear understanding of time in its focus on women in the author’s family, some who have passed and others who are yet to come. The Big Melt is about inheriting a Treaty relationship just as much as it is about breakups, demonstrating that governance is just as much about our interpersonal relationships as it is law and policy. How does one live one’s life in a way that honours inherited responsibilities, a deep love for humour and a commitment to always learning about the tension between a culture that deeply values collectivity and the autonomy of the individual? Perhaps we find these answers in the examination of ourselves, the lands we are from and the relationships we hold.

  • Together We Drum, Our Hearts Beat as One

    Together We Drum, Our Hearts Beat as One

    $19.95

    In this beautifully illustrated book, a determined young Anishnaabe girl in search of adventure goes on a transformative journey into a forest on her traditional territory. She is joined by a chorus of her ancestors in red dresses, who tell her they remember what it was like to be carefree and wild, too. Soon, though, the girl is challenged by a monster named Hate, who envelops her in a cloud of darkness. She climbs a mountain to evade the monster, and, with the help of her matriarchs and the power of Thunderbird, the monster is held at bay. Together the young girl and her ancestors beat their drums in song and support, giving the girl the confidence she needs to become a changemaker in the future, capable of fending off any monster in her way.

    Together We Drum, Our Hearts Beat as One is a moving and powerful book about Indigenous resistance and ancestral connection.

  • Trailer Park Shakes

    Trailer Park Shakes

    $22.95

    The poems in Trailer Park Shakes are direct and vernacular, rooted in community–a working-class Métis voice rarely heard from.

    These poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice–how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything–an entire cross-section of lived experience–written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words’ embrace. Dion-Glowa’s poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic.

    “Dion-Glowa’s voice crackles with frank, startling insight.”–Sachiko Murakami, author of Render

    “A collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed.”–John Brady McDonald, author of Kitotam

  • Whitemud Walking

    Whitemud Walking

    $23.95

    WINNER OF THE 2020/2021 ALCUIN SOCIETY BOOK DESIGN AWARD FOR POETRY

    WINNER OF THE ROBERT KROETSCH CITY OF EDMONTON BOOK PRIZE

    WINNER OF THE 2023 STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON AWARD FOR POETRY

    WINNER OF THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

    WINNER OF THE INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD FOR PUBLISHED POETRY IN ENGLISH

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS

    LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD

    An Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive

    Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in people’s lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.

    Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.

  • Women of the Fur Trade

    Women of the Fur Trade

    $18.95

    In eighteen hundred and something something, somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory, three very different women with a preference for twenty-first century slang sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love, and the hot nerd Louis Riel.

    Marie-Angelique, a Metis Taurus, is determined to woo Louis (a Metis Libra)—who will be arriving soon—by sending him boldly flirtatious letters. Eugenia, an Ojibwe Sagittarius, brings news of rebellion back to the fort after trading, but isn’t impressed by Louis’s true mediocre nature. And Cecilia, a pregnant British Virgo, is anxiously waiting on her husband’s return from an expedition, but can’t resist pining over the heartthrob Thomas Scott (Irish Capricorn), who is actually the one secretly responding to Marie-Angelique’s letters. This will all go smoothly, right?

    This lively historical satire of survival and cultural inheritance shifts perspectives from the male gaze onto women’s power in the past and present through the lens of the rapidly changing world of the Canadian fur trade.