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Indigenous Litspace Lists
Browse the books in the All Lit Up Indigenous Litspace by category.
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All Books in this Collection
Showing 121–140 of 151 results
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The Land We Are
$24.95The Land We Are is a stunning collection of writing and art that interrogates the current era of reconciliation in Canada. Using visual, poetic, and theoretical language, the contributors approach reconciliation as a problematic narrative about Indigenous-settler relations, but also as a site where conversations about a just future must occur. The result of a four-year collaboration between artists and scholars engaged in resurgence and decolonization, The Land We Are is a moving dialogue that blurs the boundaries between activism, research, and the arts.
Contributors: Jordan Abel, Leah Decter, Jonathan Dewar, David Garneau, Ayumi Goto, Allison Hargreaves, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Jaimie Isaac, David Jefferess, Layli Long Soldier, The New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society Collective, Sophie McCall, Peter Morin, Skeena Reece, Dylan Robinson, Sandra Semchuk, Adrian Stimson, Clement Yeh, and Keren Zaiontz.
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The Lover, the Lake
$21.95A spellbinding novel celebrating Indigenous sensuality; the first erotic novel written by an Indigenous woman in French.
When it was first published in Quebec, The Lover, The Lake was heralded as the first erotic novel written by an Indigenous woman in French. Today, as it is translated into English for the first time, author Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau would rather call it a celebration of sensuality, another first. At a time when Indigenous peoples were being dispossessed of their land and history as well as their relationship to the body, the love explored by Wabougouni and Gabriel is an act of defiance. Their intimate connection plays out on the shores of Lake Abitibi in an affair as turbulent and unfathomable as the lake itself.
“The aim here is to break free of the bonds of wounds the priests’ abuse has left on our bodies and souls, wounds linked to loss–of land, of intimate spaces, of identity both as an individual and community member, of sexual identity, of delight in the body, of innocence and the uncomplicated nature of lovemaking. My hope is that this novel will serve to unearth the seed of joy buried deep in our culture, still profoundly alive . . . The Lover, the Lake shows us that we are not just suffering and victims: we can also be pleasure.” — Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau, from the prologue
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The Marrow Thieves
$16.95Winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award (Young People’s Literature – Text)
Winner of the 2017 Kirkus Prize
Winner of the 2018 Sunburst Award
Winner of the 2018 Amy Mathers Teen Book Award
Winner of the 2018 Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Young Adult Literature
Just when you think you have nothing left to lose, they come for your dreams.
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden – but what they don’t know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves. -
The Pemmican Eaters
$18.95A picture of the Riel Resistance from one of Canada’s preeminent Métis poets
With a title derived from John A. Macdonald’s moniker for the Métis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont’s sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel.
Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont’s ancestors. In Dumont’s The Pemmican Eaters, a multiplicity of identities is a strengthening rather than a weakening or diluting force in culture.
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The Place of Scraps
$29.95George Ryga Award for Social Award: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Finalist)
BC Book Prize, Poetry: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner)The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save.
Drawing inspiration from Barbeau’s canonical book Totem Poles, Jordan Abel explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. His poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions.
Through the use of erasure techniques, Abel carves out new understandings of Barbeau’s writing – each layer reveals a fresh perspective, each word takes on a different connotation, each letter plays a different role, and each punctuation mark rises to the surface in an unexpected way. As Abel writes his way ever deeper into Barbeau’s words, he begins to understand that he is much more connected to Barbeau than he originally suspected.
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The Red Files
$18.95This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations.Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government’s complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which are divided into “black files” and “red files.” In vignettes as clear as glass beads, her poems offer affection to generations of children whose presence within the historic record is ghostlike, anonymous and ephemeral.The collection also explores the larger political context driving the mechanisms that tore apart families and cultures, including the Sixties Scoop. It depicts moments of resistance, both personal and political, as well as official attempts at reconciliation: “I can hold in the palm of my right hand / all that I have left: one story-gift from an uncle, / a father’s surname, treaty card, Cree accent echo, metal bits, grit– / and I will still have room to cock a fist.”The Red Files concludes with a fierce hopefulness, embracing the various types of love that can begin to heal the traumas inflicted by a legacy of violence.
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The Unnatural and Accidental Women
$17.95The Unnatural and Accidental Women is a surrealist dramatization of a thirty-year murder case involving many mysterious deaths in the “Skid Row” area of Vancouver. All the victims were found dead with a blood-alcohol reading far beyond safe levels, and all were last seen in the company of Gilbert Paul Jordan, who frequented the city’s bars preying on primarily middle-aged Native women. The coroner’s reports listed the cause of death of many of these women as “unnatural and accidental.”
Marie Clements reconstructs the lives of these women as shaped by lost connections—to loved ones, to the land, to a way of life—lives of at times desperate, at times tender yearning for ties of communication, belonging and shelter gone dead. These are precariously vulnerable lives, so easily drawn to their end by the heat and light of a flame, lives that thirst for an end of searching in forgetfulness.
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The Unplugging
$16.95In a post-apocalyptic world, Bern and Elena are exiled from their village. Their crime? The two women are no longer of child-bearing age.
Forced to rely upon traditional wisdom for their survival, Elena and Bern retreat from the remains of civilization to a freezing, desolate landscape where they attempt to continue their lives after the end of the world. When a charismatic stranger from the village arrives seeking their aid, the women must decide whether they will use their knowledge of the past to give the society that rejected them the chance at a future.
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The Windigo Chronicles
$16.95In this poetry book, David Groulx seamlessly weaves the spiritual with the ordinary and the present with the powerful voices of the past. He speaks for the spirit, determination, and courage of Aboriginal people, compelling readers to confront cruel reality with his sincere and inspiring vision. Author’s poetic power renders an honest and painful perception of Aboriginal life with strong voice against prejudice and injustice.
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They Called Me Number One
$19.95BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction, Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist)
Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner)Like thousands of Aboriginal children in 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.
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They Write Their Dream on the Rocks Forever
$29.95In They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever, ‘Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York explains the red-ochre inscriptions written on the rocks and cliffs of the lower Stein Valley in British Columbia. This is perhaps the first time that a Native elder has presented a detailed and comprehensive explanation of rock-art images from her people’s culture. As Annie York’s narratives unfold, we are taken back to the fresh wonder of childhood, as well as to a time in human society when people and animals lived together in one psychic dimension.
This book describes, among many other things, the solitary spiritual meditations of young people in the mountains, once considered essential education. Astrological predictions, herbal medicine, winter spirit dancing, hunting, shamanism, respect for nature, midwifery, birth and death, are some of the topics that emerge from Annie’s reading of the trail signs and other cultural symbols painted on the rocks. She firmly believed that this knowledge should be published so that the general public could understand why, as she put it, “The Old People reverenced those sacred places like that Stein.”
They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever opens a discussion of some of the issues in rock-art research that relate to “notating” and “writing” on the landscape, around the world and through the millennia. This landmark publication presents a well-reasoned hypothesis to explain the evolution of symbolic or iconic writing from sign language, trail signs and from the geometric and iconic imagery of the dreams and visions of shamans and neophyte hunters. This book suggests that the resultant images, written or painted on stone, constitute a Protoliteracy which has assisted both the conceptualization and communication of hunting peoples’ histories, philosophies, morals and ways life, and prepared the human mind for the economic, sociological and intellectual developments, including alphabetic written language.
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This is an Honour Song
$19.95This is an Honour Song is a collection of narratives, poetry, and essays exploring the broad impact of the 1990 resistance at Kanehsatà:ke, otherwise known as the “Oka Crisis.” The book is written by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, activists and traditional people, and is sung as an Honour Song celebrating the commitment, sacrifices and achievements of the Kanien’kehaka individuals and communities involved.
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This Is How We Got Here
$17.95Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, This is How We Got Here follows a close-knit family as they deal with an unexpected loss. A mother, father, aunt, and uncle must learn how to move forward after the trauma and re-learn how to interact with one another with forgiveness, humour, and love.
It’s been a year since Paul and Lucille’s son Craig died by suicide, and their once-solid family bonds are starting to break down. While the now-separated couple tries to honour their son, Lucille’s sister Liset and her husband Jim refuse to discuss their nephew. The ties that keep the four together as sisters, best friends, and spouses are strained by grief and guilt… until a visit from a fox changes everything.
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Those Who Know
$24.95The elders in Those Who Know have devoted their lives to preserving the wisdom and spirituality of their ancestors. Despite insult and oppression, they have maintained sometimes forbidden practices for the betterment of not just their people, but all humankind.First published in 1991, Dianne Meili’s book remains an essential portrait of men and women who have lived on the trapline, in the army, in a camp on the move, in jail, in residential schools, and on the reserve, all the while counselling, praying, fasting, healing, and helping to birth further generations.In this 20th anniversary edition of Those Who Know, Meili supplements her original text with new profiles and interviews that further the collective story of these elders as they guide us to a necessary future, one that values Mother Earth and the importance of community above all else.
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Thoughts And Other Human Tendencies
$16.95“Thoughts and Other Human Tendencies” is a poetry collection where stories of Aboriginal experiences are distilled into feelings and thoughts that are universal. Reneltta Arluk weaves the traditional and the contemporary together through the eyes of a young Aboriginal woman. She draws from the Aboriginal tradition of praising the land and the spirit, the realities of Aboriginal culture, and the concept of feminine individuality. Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. She celebrates the everyday acts, rituals, and stories that draw people together across the years and across the distances of cultural dispersion. Here are tales of love, betrayal, courage, defeat, acceptance, loss, grief, passion, delight, courting, coming of age, birth and death, youth and old age, hunting and surviving. The poems are united by the history of her ancestors and the ongoing struggle to define what it means to be a tribal member, an Aboriginal, and a woman in the twenty first century.
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Through Different Eyes
$19.95Everyone knows everyone’s business in the small fishing community of Kitsum. So when young Brenda Joe fears she might be pregnant, she also worries that rumours will spread quickly. Things look up when Brenda’s favourite aunt, Monica returns to Kitsum for Christmas, although she is preoccupied with her own relationship problems. It’s become clear to her that the white man she’s been living with in Vancouver sees her as his ?Indian Princess,? his own exotic arm candy, and she’s had enough. When she learns about Brenda?s secret relationship with a local man, Monica is appalled and goes to set him straight. But is there more to this attractive loner and his hard-partying relations than meets the eye? Come spring, amid their secrets and betrayals, each family member will be tempted down to the water to collect herring eggs from artfully placed hemlock branches. The question is, will they be able to face one another?
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Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
$16.95Three Young Native American sisters and their mother board a bus bound for Los Angeles, leaving home as part of a 1950s government mandate to relocate reserve Indians to urban centres. This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned to create a new play for the tenth anniversary of the Native Voices series at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles.
Clements dramatizes the emotional, psychological and social repercussions of this, and subsequent, bureaucratic incursions into the girls’ lives. Their arrival in California takes a tragic turn when their mother is suddenly killed and the girls are arbitrarily placed in different foster homes, never to see each other again.
We follow Janey, Miranda and Jessie as they lead very disparate adult lives: Janey, a troubled vagrant; Miranda, a burgeoning actress fighting typecasting in Hollywood; Jessie, an idealist physician who’s married to a medical colleague. As it was bureaucratic policy that had dismantled their secure family unit and sent each girl into the unknown, so too did a government paper ultimately bring them together, if only symbolically. Clements casts the sisters’ narrative against the backdrop of another historical injustice: the forced sterilization of thousands of Native women in the 1970s, a practice that was only abolished in 1981.
Clements’s play is a compelling, and poetic, investigation of the coldly bureaucratic machinations that have, throughout history, attempted to facilitate the disappearance of Native people. Though Tombs of the Vanishing Indian focuses on specific policies and locations, it speaks eloquently to broader themes of Aboriginal displacement. There are, indeed, echoes of Canadian policy aimed at the dissolution of First Nations families and culture: the potlatch ban, residential schools and the ban on Native language, whose profoundly damaging ramifications are our shared legacy.
Cast of 4 women and 3 men.
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Totem Poles and Railroads
$18.95Totem Poles and Railroads succinctly defines the 500-year-old relationship between Indigenous nations and the corporation of Canada. In this, her fifth poetry collection, Janet Rogers’ expands on that definition with a playful, culturally powerful and, at times, experimental voice. She pays honour to her poetic characters–real and imagined, historical and present day–from Sacajawea to Nina Simone. Placing poetry at the centre of our current post-residential school/present-day reconciliation reality, Rogers’ poems are expansive and intimate, challenging, thought-provoking and always personal.
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Tunirrusiangit
$45.00Two generations of Inuit artists challenging the parameters of tradition.
Kenojuak Ashevak shot to fame in 1970 when Canada Post printed The Enchanted Owl, a print of a black-and-red plumed nocturnal bird, on a postage stamp. She later became known as the magic-marker-wielding “grandmother of Inuit art,” famous for her fluid graphic storytelling and her stunning depictions of wildlife. She was a defining figure in Inuit art and one of the first Indigenous artists to be embraced as a contemporary Canadian artist.
Ashevak’s legacy inspired her nephew, Timootee (Tim) Pitsiulak, to take up drawing at the Kinngait Studios. In his relatively short career, he became a popular figure, known for drawing animal figures with a hunter’s precision and capturing the technological presence of the South in Nunavut.
Tunirrusiangit, “their gifts” or “what they gave” in Inuktitut, celebrates the achievements of two remarkable artists who challenged the parameters of tradition while consistently articulating a compelling vision of the Inuit world view. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, opening on 16 June and continuing until late August, Tunirrusiangit features more than 60 reproductions of paintings, drawings, and documentary photographs. Completing the book are essays by contemporary artists and curators Jocelyn Piirainen, Anna Hudson, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Koomuatuk Curley, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Taqralik Partridge that address both the past and future of Inuit identity.
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Two-Spirit Acts
$22.95In this collection of short but powerful two-spirit plays, characters dispel conventional notions of gender and sexuality while celebrating Indigenous understandings. With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.