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Indigenous Litspace Lists
Browse the books in the All Lit Up Indigenous Litspace by category.
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Showing 141–156 of 156 results
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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.
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Walking in Balance
$18.00We have, according to our beliefs, five essential parts: body, soul, spirit, heart, and mind, which all have to be satisfied equally. When you are in balance you are walking on the right road, following the right path of life – Basil Johnston. Eight traditional Anishinaabe stories are told in both Anishinaabe and English languages for adults.
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Weasel Tail
$32.95The generation to which Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged spanned more than the length of their lifetimes. That generation fought heroically in world wars and at the same time raised children under a paternalistic federal regime that denied both a culture and a heritage. The Crowshoes regained their heritage and shared it with the larger community, gaining respect from all the people with whom they were in contact and becoming articulate representatives and the holders of stories, legends, and customs. The interviews in Weasel Tail track not just their personal stories but the stories of a people who insisted on being recognized and a culture born out of the land of southern Alberta. Paralleling the interviews, Mike Ross has included historical photographs and documentation of a world and people who are a rich part of Alberta’s history.
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What Became My Grieving Ceremony
$17.95Cara-Lyn Morgan joins those young Canadian poets who are driven by family experience to communicate with their pasts in order to inform their futures. Morgan’s complex cultural history that was generated from her M?tis mother and her Afro-Caribbean father necessitates an exploration of their struggles as distinctive cultures. It also insists on understanding the connectivity of her ancestral, cultural roots and the disparate values that shaped her.
“What Became My Grieving Ceremony draws us into a sprawling family, and we rub shoulders with Fr. Ed; Patrick, the daemonic uncle; Margrette Monkman; Leotha and with the author herself as she conducts her personal and familial archeology, locating the self in its web of relations. Morgan is also on a linguistic search for a lost Michif, that unique Western Canadian tongue, born of the union of two races. Following her, I was led to the wakes, the barns and various kitchens of her people, where I found myself both a stranger yet also home.” – Tim Lilburn
“Elegant and empathic, this fine book plumbs not only grief, but takes us through its rites: the anticipation of loss and its initial sting; the shouldering of a despair so vivid it hurts to succumb to memory’s unheralded quietude. Drawing from her M?tis and Trinidadian heritage, Morgan counterpoints the unassuaged suffering of her people with her family’s, experiencing them as only one alert person can. Open yourself to these poems, become their host, and live their affirmative message as your own.” -John Barton -
Where the Blood Mixes
$16.95Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some, like Floyd, the legacy of that trauma has been passed down through families for generations. But what is the greater story, what lies untold beneath Floyd’s alcoholism, under the pain and isolation of the play’s main character?
Loring’s title was inspired by the mistranslation of the N’lakap’mux (Thompson) place name Kumsheen. For years, it was believed to mean “the place where the rivers meet”—the confluence of the muddy Fraser and the brilliant blue Thompson Rivers. A more accurate translation is: “the place inside the heart where the blood mixes.” But Kumsheen also refers to a story: Coyote was disemboweled there, along a great cliff in an epic battle with a giant shape-shifting being that could transform the world with its powers—to this day his intestines can still be seen strewn along the granite walls. In his rage the transformer tore Coyote apart and scattered his body across the nation, his heart landing in the place where the rivers meet.
Can a person survive their past; can a people survive their history? Irreverently funny and brutally honest, Where the Blood Mixes is a story about loss and redemption. Caught in a shadowy pool of alcoholic pain and guilt, Floyd is a man who has lost everyone he holds most dear. Now after more than two decades, his daughter Christine returns home to confront her father. Set during the salmon run, Where the Blood Mixes takes us to the bottom of the river, to the heart of a People.
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Whiskey Bullets
$14.95Eloquent, poignant and witty, Garry Gottfriedson’s new collection of poetry, Whiskey Bullets, approaches an old genre with a new flare that will challenge your expectations of cowboy poetry. This edgy collection explores themes of duality that exist in the parallel worlds of cowboys and Indians.
Often satirical, Whiskey Bullets is a testament to adaptability, turning tragedy into humour and pain into passion. It speaks to the unique experience of growing up aboriginal, on the Tk’emlupsReserve (Secwepemc) near Kamloops, with strong First Nation values and traditions, while at the same time immersed in the cowboy and ranching culture of the interior of BC. Gottfriedson skillfully balances his indigenous vision and contemporary concerns, creating a blend of imagery that stimulates the mind’s eye like never before.
Shattering the cowboy’s code of ethics, Gottfriedson unveils hidden truths, unspoken and often ignored, bringing to the fore inescapable issues of gender, sexuality,race and politics, infused with aboriginal attitude. Form and content are carefully conceived to celebrate the distinctive aboriginal individuality, the “shape-shifting” attitudes that are required when one lives simultaneously in two cultures – Secwepemc and white – and their two languages. Candid and challenging, Whiskey Bullets is thought-provoking and engaging.
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White Girls in Moccasins
$15.95Miskozi is searching for something…
There’s something missing.
And she’s not sure what it is.
She goes on a search for herself and her culture, accompanied by her inner white girl, Waabishkizi, and guided by Ziibi, a manifestation of an ancestral river, both provoking her to try and find the answers.
She begins the journey back before she was even born, right at the seeds of colonization when her ancestors were forced to hide their culture anywhere they could.
Burying their language.
Their teachings.
Their bundles.
Their moccasins.
White Girls in Moccasins is a hilarious and poignant reclamation story that world-hops between dreams, memories, and a surreal game show. Miskozi recounts her life and is forced to grapple with her own truth, while existing in a society steeped in white supremacy.
A love letter to brown kids born in the 80s, surviving in the 90s and all those continuing to deeply reclaim.
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Winter Child
$21.95A visceral, luminous novel about a Métis woman tracing the life and death of her son.
One late September day, amid the year’s first snowfall, the winter child is born. He does not breathe. His mother watches helplessly until “at last the baby uttered a first tentative croak like a frog unsure of spring’s arrival.”
Then again, and again, and again, the winter child narrowly avoids death’s reach. But his mother knows: “he would be her wound, she would have to battle to keep him with her, to defend him against the worst of all enemies.”
Originally published in French and told through alternating and overlapping memories, Winter Child is a powerful meditation on grief and life. With a poet and storyteller’s language, Virgina Pésémapéo Bordeleau traces a mother’s journey from devastation to strength, descending to the darkest inner depths, and finally finding the generosity of life and love.
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Witness, I Am
$18.95Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada’s most recognized poets. The first part of the book, “Dangerous Sound,” contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. “Muskrat Woman,” the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, “Ghost Dance,” raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield’s poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From “Killer,” Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: “I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you.”
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Wrestling with Colonialism on Steroids
$15.95For decades, the Inuit of northern Québec were among the most neglected people in Canada. It took The Battle of James Bay, 1971-1975, for the governments in Québec City and Ottawa to wake up to the disgrace.
In this concise, lively account, Zebedee Nungak relates the inside story of how the young Inuit and Cree “Davids” took action when Québec began construction on the giant James Bay hydro project. They fought in court and at the negotiation table for an accord that effectively became Canada’s first land-claims agreement. Nungak’s account is accompanied by his essays on Nunavik history. Together they provide a fascinating insight into a virtually unknown chapter of Canadian history.
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Wrist
$19.95In 1872, dinosaur hunters become embroiled in a battle over the discovery of fossils in Northern Ontario as their excavation crews are driven mad by a bizarre and terrifying illness. Over a hundred years later, Church and his family show signs of the same monstrous affliction. As he begins to unravel his family’s dark history, Church must race to protect the secrets buried deep in bones and blood. A fascinating story embracing Anishinaabe legend, culture, and language, Wrist is set in the fictional town of Sterling and Ghost Lake Reserve, and is Nathan Adler’s debut novel. It is the companion volume to Ghost Lake, which won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award in Published English Fiction.
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Yukonstyle
$16.95Garin was two years old when his mother disappeared from a rundown East Vancouver neighbourhood. Now that the Robert Pickton trials are gaining national attention, Garin wonders if his mother, a First Nations woman, could be one of the unidentified victims. His ailing father isn’t forthcoming with answers, and Garin’s suspicions are at an all-time high. In the midst of all this, his roommate Yuko has taken in Kate, a young pregnant hitchhiker who unintentionally wreaks havoc on their friendship. But when Garin’s father is hospitalized, nothing else matters but finally determining the truth about his mother. In this deftly written play, the characters grapple with the harsh Yukon winter within a world of racism, addiction, and loneliness.