Great Reads by Indigenous Women

Books by Indigenous women.

All Books in this Collection

Showing all 5 results

  • A Gentle Habit

    A Gentle Habit

    By: Cherie Dimaline
    $24.00

    The inspiration for the collection comes from American Poet Charles Bukowski who wrote “In between the punctuating agonies, life is such a gentle habit.” Following this theme of extraordinary ordinariness, A Gentle Habit is a collection of six new short stories focusing on the addictions of a diverse group of characters attempting normalcy in an unnatural world.

  • Annie Pootoogook

    Annie Pootoogook

    By: Nancy Campbell
    $45.00

    When Annie Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award in 2006, she cracked the glass ceiling for Inuit art, securing its place in contemporary Canadian art discourse and establishing herself as an artist of international importance. Her achievement sparked critical discussion around contemporary art as well as the absence, and growing presence, of Inuit art: an important conversation that continues to this day.

    The life and death of Annie Pootoogook is a story of national significance. The complex narratives weaving through her short life speak to possibility and heartbreak, truth and reconciliation, the richness of community, and the depths of tragedy. These complexities are recorded in her arresting pencil crayon compositions. Her frank, sometimes challenging, sometimes amusing images of everyday life, acutely observed and marked by a linear control as taut as a wire, declare her as a major contributor to the landscape of contemporary Inuit art.

    Annie Pootoogook: Cutting Ice accompanied an exhibition organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the gallery of record for works on paper from Annie Pootoogook’s Inuit community of Kinngait (Cape Dorset). Under the direction of Nancy Campbell, this publication and the exhibition serve to commemorate the life and work of a remarkable artist after her tragically early death.

  • Indianland

    Indianland

    By: Lesley Belleau
    $18.95

    Indianland is a rich and varied poetry collection. The poems are written from a female and Indigenous point of view and incorporate Anishinaabemowin throughout. Time is cyclical, moving from present day back to first contact and forward again. Themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing are explored, images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs reoccur, and touchstone issues in Indigenous politics are addressed = (Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, Oka). Anishinaabemowin throughout. Time is cyclical, moving from present day back to first contact and forward again. Themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing are explored, images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs reoccur, and touchstone issues in Indigenous politics are addressed (Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, Oka).

  • My Conversations With Canadians

    My Conversations With Canadians

    By: Lee Maracle
    $20.00

    Shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award
    Shortlisted for the First Nation Communities READ 2018-2019 Award

    On her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn’t possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since. As time has passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice and reconciliation, to name a few, are the heart of My Conversations with Canadians.

    In essays that are both conversational and direct, Maracle seeks not to provide any answers to these questions she has lived with for so long. Rather, she thinks through each one using a multitude of experiences she has had as a First Nations leader, a woman, a mother, and grandmother over the course of her life. Lee Maracle’s My Conversations with Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer’s own history and a reimagining of the future of our nation.

  • My Life in a Kwagu’l Big House

    My Life in a Kwagu’l Big House

    By: Diane Jacobson
    $18.95

    Honey Jacobson considered herself lucky to live in the last semi-traditional big house of the Kwagu’? people: a four-storey house filled with a loving extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts and the patriarch and matriarch of the household, Grandpa Moses and Granny Axu. While new smaller houses were spreading throughout her community, Honey really knew only her relatives inside that Big House.

    In the 1960s, Western culture captured the fancy of Honey’s community and family, and its spell inevitably changed a Kwagu’? family. This is Honey’s story.