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Non-Fiction
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 44 results
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L’sitkuk
$33.00L’sitkuk (pronounced elsetkook) is the original name for the Bear River Mi’kmaw community, which is part of the Mi’kmaw First Nation. Nestled close to the Bear River watershed, this tiny native community is regaining its culture, language and identity after hundreds of years of colonialism and assimilation. Living in the area for thousands of years, they were among the first people in Canada to have continuous contact with non-natives.
This book preserves the memory of the elders through oral histories and old photographs, and tells who these people are and how they survived, prospered and sustained one another. The stories of everyday life reflect native values and the strong ideal of interconnectedness in the community.
Darlene A. Ricker listened to the stories and learned about the traditions and culture of the closely knit Mi’kmaw community at Bear River. From her interviews with elders and young people, she has drawn this poignant oral history.
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leave some for the birds
$20.00From acclaimed filmmaker, artist and activist Marjorie Beaucage comes a poetic memoir that reflects on seven decades of living and seeking justice as a Two Spirit Michif woman. Poems, poetic observations and thoughtful meanderings comprise this inspirational journal-memoir-poetry collection from a woman who has dedicated her life and her talent to creating social change. Unfolding the wisdom gained from experience, leave some for the birds: movements for justice offers guidance for younger activists following the author’s trailblazing footsteps.
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Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing
$24.95Winner of the 2019–20 Huguenot Society of Canada Award
“Powerful … A deeply empathetic and inspiring work with insights of value to anyone struggling to overcome personal or communal trauma.” — Library Journal
“[A] beautifully written book about strategies for healing from intergenerational trauma … In crystal-clear prose, Methot has written a book that is both easy to follow and crucial to read.” — LitHub
Five hundred years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: substance use disorders and shockingly high rates of depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. With passionate logic and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others’ stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization.
But all is not lost. Methot also shows how we can come back from this with Indigenous ways of knowing lighting the way.
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Lighting the Eighth Fire
$21.95This remarkable collection of essays by leading Indigenous scholars focuses on the themes of freedom, liberation and Indigenous resurgence as they relate to the land. They analyze treaties, political culture, governance, environmental issues, economy, and radical social movements from an anti-colonial Indigenous perspective in a Canadian context. Editor Leanne Simpson (Nishnaabekwe) has solicited Indigenous writers that place Indigenous freedom as their highest political goal, while turning to the knowledge, traditions, and culture of specific Indigenous nations to achieve that goal. The authors offer frank and political analysis and commentary of the kind not normally found in mainstream books, journals, and magazines.
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Memory Serves
$24.95Winner of the Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Memory Serves gathers together the oratories award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the Sto: lo in particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle shares her knowledge of Sto: lo history, memory, philosophy, law, spirituality, feminism and the colonial condition of her people.
Powerful and inspiring, Memory Serves is an extremely timely book, not only because it is the first collection of oratories by one of the most important Indigenous authors in Canada, but also because it offers all Canadians, in Maracle’s own words, “another way to be, to think, to know,” a way that holds the promise of a “journey toward a common consciousness.”
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My Conversations With Canadians
$20.00Shortlisted 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.
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My Privilege, My Responsibility
$24.95Finalist, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction
Finalist, Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
In September 2015, Sheila North was declared the Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), the first woman elected to the position. Known as a “bridge builder”, North is a member of Bunibonibee Cree Nation. North’s work in advocacy journalism, communications, and economic development harnessed her passion for drawing focus to systemic racism faced by Indigenous women and girls. She is the creator of the widely used hashtag #MMIW. In her memoir, Sheila North shares the stories of the events that shaped her, and the violence that nearly stood in the way of her achieving her dreams. Through perseverance and resilience, she not only survived, she flourished. -
Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised somewhere else)
$20.00During the 60s Scoop, over 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their biological families, lands and culture and trafficked across provinces, borders and overseas to be raised in non-Indigenous households.
Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh delves into the personal and provocative narrative of Colleen Cardinal’s journey growing up in a non- Indigenous household as a 60s Scoop adoptee. Cardinal speaks frankly and intimately about instances of violence and abuse throughout her life, but this book is not a story of tragedy. It is a story of empowerment, reclamation and, ultimately, personal reconciliation. It is a form of Indigenous resistance through truth-telling, a story that informs the narrative on missing and murdered Indigenous women, colonial violence, racism and the Indigenous child welfare system.
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One Bead at a Time
$22.95One Bead at a Timeis the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit Métis writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder’s narrative is told verbatim, her melodious voice and keen sense of humour almost audible overtop of the text on the page. Early in her story, Little Thunder recounts a dream from her early adulthood, “I stared at these lily pads for the longest time and I decided that there was one part of the pond that had lots of lily pads and no frogs. I said, ‘I want to go there because there’s lots of lily pads but no frogs and I like creating community.’” And create community she does. Little Thunder established the first and today, the only all-women’s Sundance in the world, securing a land base in the Green Mountains of Vermont for future generations of Indigenous women’s ceremony. She was active in the A.I.M. movement and she continues to practice and promote political and spiritual awareness for Indigenous women around the world. A truly remarkable visionary.
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Overcome
$25.95Finalist, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction
Finalist, Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
With a foreword by Beatrice Mosionier.Abandonment, loss, endless transitions, self-reliance, continued persistence, and fierce beauty all coexist in this compelling collection of stories of ten women who journey from victims of the child welfare system to survivors, and beyond. These women face endless challenges, oppression, and trauma but discover their power through creativity, self-awareness, education, motherhood, and extreme empathy.
They decipher their personal stories looking back through the lens of their lived experience to contribute to changing the narratives of how people who grew up in in the child welfare system see themselves, and how society sees them. These stories create compassion and understanding, breaking down biases.
They also illustrate the direct and multi-faceted relationships between residential schools, the breakdown of Indigenous families, the perpetuated system racism of of the child welfare system and oppression through other societal systems. Many of these women are the voices of those who could have been murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls but have lived to tell their stories. Embracing their humanity, their courageous sharing teaches and informs us. These heartbreaking and inspiring stories will educate and create change.
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Performing Indigeneity
$25.00This volume of newly commissioned essays about Indigenous performance is the first in which all of the contributors are Indigenous artists or academics. Scholars were invited to write essays on some aspect of Indigenous performance and artists were asked to contribute statements on whatever they felt was important to them as theatre creators. As with any good assembly of like-minded members, themes and observations emerged, dovetailing and echoing each other, touching on theatre training, cultural identity, Indigenous theatre history, and claiming space, among others. A companion to the existing two-volume anthology Staging Coyote’s Dream, the authors gathered here—identifying as Cree, Mohawk, Creek, Ntlakapamux, Stó:lo, and many other nations—open a conversation, inviting more voices to join in illuminating the history of Indigenous performance in Canada and blazing a trail forward. Contributors include Tara Beagan, Jill Carter, David Geary, Carol Greyeyes, Michael Greyeyes, Falen Johnson, Michelle La Flamme, Jani Lauzon, Andréa Ledding, Daniel David Moses, Marrie Mumford, Starr Muranko, Yvette Nolan, Michelle Olson, Dylan Robinson, June Scudeler, Jason Woodman Simmonds, and Drew Hayden Taylor.
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Pictographs
$24.95In Pictographs, Ojibway artist James Simon Mishibinijima brings to life the legends passed down to him by generations of Elders. In this collection of drawings, each image tells a story, silently communicating lessons of harmony, interconnectedness and peace.
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Price Paid
$19.95Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival untangles truth from some of the myths about First Nations at the same time that it addresses misconceptions still widely believed today.
The second book by award-winning author Bev Sellars, Price Paid is based on a popular presentation Sellars created for treaty-makers, politicians, policymakers, and educators when she discovered they did not know the historic reasons they were at the table negotiating First Nations rights.
The book begins with glimpses of foods, medicines, and cultural practices North America’s indigenous peoples have contributed for worldwide benefit. It documents the dark period of regulation by racist laws during the twentieth century, and then discusses new emergence in the twenty-first century into a re-establishment of Indigenous land and resource rights. The result is a candidly told personal take on the history of a culture’s fight for their rights and survival. It is Canadian history told from a First Nations point of view.Awards and recognition for Bev Sellars’s They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School
− 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature
− 2014 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature (third prize)
− Shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (B.C. Book Prizes)
− More than 40 weeks on the B.C. bestsellers list -
Sacred Feminine
$24.00“To all the young girls in care and women in corrections, never give up hope. I was once where you are. Life gets better. Be blessed.”
— Jackie TraverseSacred Feminine is a colouring book by Anishinaabe artist Jackie Traverse.
The beautiful and intricate works of art within depict images of strength, resilience and empowerment. With each image, the artist explains the symbolism and meaning represented. The first of its kind, Sacred Feminine is intended to heal and educate readers and colourers of all ages.
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Sagkeeng Legends (Sagkeeng Aadizookaanag)
$14.95John C. Courchene was born in Sagkeeng First Nation in 1914, where he attended the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School. Courchene’s time in the residential school was short; his brothers, “Joejay” and Louis, took John out school so he could help them cut wood in the bush. While this helped John make a lifetime commitment to hard work, it also resulted in John being “illiterate” in the European sense of the word. In the ways of the forest and his native language, Anishanabemowin, however, John was far from illiterate. Sagkeeng Legends is a testament to John’s cultural literacy and a monument in the face of eroding Indigenous language and culture caused by centuries of colonization.
Originally recorded by John’s wife, Josephine Courchene, in the early 1980s and reprinted here in both English and Anishanabemowin by Craig Fontaine, the stories in Sagkeeng Legends represent two pebbles where a mountain of knowledge once stood. Nonetheless, this book is an important act of preserving and reintroducing Indigenous language and culture to a new generation.
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SakKijâjuk
$45.00Winner, 2018 Canadian Museums Association Award of Outstanding Achievement in Education
Shortlisted, 2018 Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association Best Atlantic Published Book Award
Nunatsiavut, the Inuit region of Canada that achieved self-government in 2005, produces art that is distinct within the world of Canadian and circumpolar Inuit art. The world’s most southerly population of Inuit, the coastal people of Nunatsiavut have always lived both above and below the tree line, and Inuit artists and craftspeople from Nunatsiavut have had access to a diverse range of Arctic and Subarctic flora and fauna, from which they have produced a stunningly diverse range of work.
Artists from the territory have traditionally used stone and woods for carving; fur, hide, and sealskin for wearable art; and saltwater seagrass for basketry, as well as wool, metal, cloth, beads, and paper. In recent decades, they have produced work in a variety of contemporary art media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, and ceramics, while also working with traditional materials in new and unexpected ways.
SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut is the first major publication on the art of the Labrador Inuit. Designed to accompany a major touring exhibition organized by The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery of St. John’s, the book features more than 80 reproductions of work by 45 different artists, profiles of the featured artists, and a major essay on the art of Nunatsiavut by Heather Igloliorte.
SakKijâjuk — “to be visible” in the Nunatsiavut dialect of Inuktitut — provides an opportunity for readers, collectors, art historians, and art aficionados from the South and the North to come into intimate contact with the distinctive, innovative, and always breathtaking work of the contemporary Inuit artists and craftspeople of Nunatsiavut.