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Reads for Truth and Reconciliation
September 30 is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada: a day to mourn the Indigenous children lost to and abused in Canada’s residential school system, and a resounding call to know and action the 94 Calls to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s report. These books, from personal memoirs to essays to novels to poetry collections, are a place to get started.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 85 results
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1939
$18.95In 1939, a group of students at a fictional residential school in Ontario are faced with the daunting task of putting on a play by William Shakespeare for the King and Queen of England on their first Royal Tour of Canada. But as news spreads and audience expectations abound, the students, resilient and resourceful, find their own way into the text, determined to challenge the notion that there’s only one way to do Shakespeare. Born of both family legacy and the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the development of 1939 was guided by Indigenous Elders, survivors, and ceremony.
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A Really Good Brown Girl
$20.00Deluxe redesign of the Gerald Lampert Award-winning classic.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Métis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles. It is an indispensable contribution to Canadian literature.
I am looking at a school picture, grade five, I am smiling easily … I look poised, settled, like I belong. I won an award that year for most improved student. I learned to follow really well. –from “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl”
“No other book so exonerates us, elevates us and at the same time indicts Canada in language so eloquent it almost hurts to hear it.” –Lee Maracle, from the Introduction
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Bad Indians Book Club
$26.00In this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to inhabit?
Patty Krawec doesn’t want to be a “Good Indian.” When a friend asked what books could help them understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec gave them a list. This list then exploded into a book club, then into a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then, ultimately, into this book.
Drawing on conversations with readers and authors, Bad Indians Book Club delves into writing about history, science, and gender, and into memoirs and fiction, all by “Bad Indians” and those like them, whose refusal of the dominant narrative of the wemitigoozhiwag (European settlers) opens up new possibilities for identity and existence.
Introducing each chapter with flash fiction about a shapeshifting Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where stories of and by marginalized writers help us imagine a thousand worlds waiting to be born.
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Beaver Hills Forever
$21.95An irreverent and playful novella of Metis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life
Conor Kerr’s 2024 novel Prairie Edge was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, Beaver Hills Forever, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Metis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada’s colonial education system and resource extraction industries.
A beguiling and genre-bending work, Beaver Hills Forever offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.
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Bent Back Tongue
$20.00Bent Back Tongue is a raw examination of love, identity, politics, masculinity, and vulnerability. Through sharp honesty and revealing satire, Gottfriedson delves into Canadian colonialism and the religious political paradigms shaping experiences of a Secwépemc First Nations man. This is a book that tears through deceptions that both Canada and the church impose on their citizens. Gottfriedson tackles the darkest layers of a shared colonial history; at the same time, the poems in Bent Back Tongue are a celebration of love, land, family, and the self.
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Bilijk
$50.00The head of tide of the Wəlastəkw, known as Ekwpahak in Wəlastəkwey, has long been a gathering place for the Wəlastəkokewiyik and was reserved for them by colonial authorities in the mid-18th century. However, when 11,000 Loyalists invaded unceded Wəlastəkwey territory after the American Revolution, and the influential Judge Isaac Allen purchased Ekwpahak in a highly questionable dealing, the Wəlastəkokewiyik were deprived of their land, with some forced to settle a few miles upriver at Kingsclear.
In this long-awaited volume, Andrea Bear Nicholas assembles Oral Traditions, archival documents, paintings, maps, and photographs to document the history of the Kingsclear First Nation community, from its establishment in the late-18th century to the disastrous mid-20th century attempt to centralize the Wəlastəkwey Nation at Kingsclear. These documents demonstrate the destructive impact of colonialism upon the Wəlastəkokewiyik, from their dispossession by Loyalists and the establishment of the Sussex Vale Indian School in the late 18th century, to the increasing restrictions on traditional life that both impoverished and oppressed them.
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Blood
$21.95Blood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship.
Conceived in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones, Tyler Pennock’s Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker’s relationship to the living–never forgetting non-human kin.
This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw.
“A music as sensitive as it is revelatory.”–Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst
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Burning in This Midnight Dream
$20.00A deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada.
Many of the poems in Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures.
Halfe’s poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture.
Originally published in 2016 by Coteau Books, Burning in This Midnight Dream won the Indigenous Peoples’ Publishing Award, the Rasmussen, Ramussen & Charowsky Indigenous Peoples’ Writing Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award, the League of Canadian Poets’ Raymond Souster Award, and the High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writers. It was also the 2017 WILLA Literacy Award Finalist in Poetry. This new edition includes a new Afterword by Halfe.
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Carrying It Forward
$20.00John Brady McDonald has lived in Kistahpinanihk, an area that includes Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, for nearly all his life. A member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and a descendent of Metis leader Jim Brady, John Brady has worked to move carefully between these two nations – to learn their stories, honour their traditions and reclaim their languages, all of which were nearly lost to him. In this wide-ranging collection the author looks at everything from the city of Prince Albert to his experience of residential school, to northern firefighting, to his time in the United Kingdom, where he “discovered” and “claimed” the island for the First People of the Americas. These are essays filled with history, much careful observation and some hard-learned lessons about racism, about recovery, about the ongoing tragedies facing Indigenous peoples. With honesty, a poet’s turn of phrase and a bit of sly humour, John Brady pulls us deep into the life he has lived in Kistahpinanihk and asks us to consider what life could be like in a New North Territory.
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CoyWolf
$18.95Isidor, a half-coyote, half-wolf coywolf, has always struggled to find his place as a half-breed. After the untimely death of his mother, he leaves his community to roam across prairies, forests, and mountains, sharing stories in his search for kinship and belonging. But as Sharp-Tooths are increasingly policed, tagged, or killed to make way for insatiable human expansion, Isidor and his pack are forced to make impossible decisions. Do they retreat to better their chances of survival, or risk everything by joining a resistance of rogue animals to protect what’s left of their homeland?
In this gripping drama, Colin Wolf weaves a powerful allegory through the lives of animals, paralleling the displacement of Métis people and the enduring struggle for Indigenous land rights on Turtle Island. CoyWolf is a hopepunk thriller and a roadmap for young revolutionaries navigating the realities of resistance, doing your best, and learning the wisdom of those who have walked the path before.
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Devil in the Woods
$20.00A collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians.
D.A. Lockhart’s stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture).
The letter poems comprise a large portion of this collection and are each addressed to specific key public figures–from Sarah Polley to Pierre Berton, k.d. lang to Robertson Davies, Don Cherry to Emily Carr. The second portion of the pieces are prayer poems, which tenderly illustrate hybrid notions of faith that have developed in contemporary Indigenous societies in response to modern and historical realities of life in Canada. Together, these poems act as a lyric whole to push back against the dominant view of Canadian political and pop-culture history and offer a view of a decolonized nation.
Because free double-doubles…
tease us like bureaucratic promises
of medical coverage and housing
not given to black mold and torn-
off siding. Oh Lord, let us sing anew,
in this pre-dawn light, a chorus
that shall not repeat Please Play Again. (from “Roll Up the Rim Prayer”) -
Finding Otipemisiwak
$24.95Winner, Evelyn Richardson Nonfiction Award (Nova Scotia Book Awards)
A Sixties Scoop survivor’s journey back to her Nation and the truth of who she is
Otipemisiwak is a Plains Cree word describing the Metis, meaning “the people who own themselves.”
Andrea Currie was born into a Metis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians – all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the Sixties Scoop was in full swing. Together with her younger adopted brother, also Metis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.
Finding Otipemisiwak weaves lyrical prose, poetry, and essays into an incisive commentary on the vulnerability of Indigenous children in a white supremacist child welfare system, the devastation of cultural loss, and the rocky road some people must walk to get to the truth of who they are. Her triumph over the state’s attempts to erase her as an Indigenous person is tempered by the often painful complexities of re-entering her cultural community while bearing the mark of the white world in which she was raised. In Finding Otipemisiwak, one woman’s stories about surviving, then thriving as a fully present member of her Nation and the human family are a portal. Readers who walk through will better understand the impact of the Sixties Scoop in the country now called Canada.
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From Bear Rock Mountain
$25.00Winner of the NorthWords Book Award
“An evocative story that winds back and forth from past to present, from the broad historical interaction of Indigenous peoples and Europeans to his own personal details.” —Maclean’sIn this poetic, poignant memoir, Dene artist and social activist Antoine Mountain paints an unforgettable picture of his journey from residential school to art school—and his path to healing.
In 1949, Antoine Mountain was born on the land near Radelie Koe, Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. At the tender age of seven, he was stolen away from his home and sent to a residential school—run by the Roman Catholic Church in collusion with the Government of Canada—three hundred kilometres away. Over the next twelve years, the three residential schools Mountain was forced to attend systematically worked to erase his language and culture, the very roots of his identity.
While reconnecting to that which had been taken from him, he had a disturbing and painful revelation of the bitter depths of colonialism and its legacy of cultural genocide. Canada has its own holocaust, Mountain argues. As a celebrated artist and social activist today, Mountain shares this moving, personal story of healing and the reclamation of his Dene identity.
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Ghost Lake
$19.95In Ojibwe cosmology there are thirteen moons, and in these pages are thirteen offerings from Ghost Lake, an interrelated cast of characters and their brushes with the mysterious. Issa lives in fear of having her secret discovered, Aanzheyaawin haunts the roads seeking vengeance, Zaude searches for clues to her brother’s death, Fanon struggles against an unexpected winter storm, Eadie and Mushkeg share a magical night, Tyner faces brutal violence, and Tyler, Clay, and Dare must make amends to the spirits before it’s too late. Here the precolonial past is not so distant, and nothing is ever truly lost or destroyed because the land remembers. Ghost Lake is a companion volume to Adler’s Indigenous horror novel, Wrist (2016, Kegedonce Press). It was the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award in Published English Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award in Book Design.
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Girl running
$24.95This stellar debut collection by Métis poet Diana Hope Tegenkamp takes us through many worlds and wonders. In Girl running, we find solace and outrage, grief and tenderness, bewilderment and beauty, all “entangled in hope and dreaming.” The poet’s love of the natural world is both earthy and adamantine, and her passion for literature and art is just as rich a source for her questioning eye.
On the edge of Saskatoon, a woman opens a car door and flees. A child runs away from residential school after a beating. A Métis man’s ghost gallops on a ghost horse across the prairies. Henry James’ 19th-century heroine, Isabel Archer, runs across a wintery yard. Lana Tisdel drives away from Falls City, Nebraska, after the murder of her transgender boyfriend.
After many losses—of a mother known and loved, of a Métis father unknown and imagined—the ‘girl’ of this collection is running towards and away from mortality. In these poems, disappearances, perpetual flights, river walks, shadowy descents and miraculous returns connect daily living and mortality, current social realities and ancient histories, the surface and the subterranean depths of our complicated lives. Lovers of contemporary Canadian poetry will find that this textured collection rewards reading and rereading.
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Growing My Way Home
Sad, shocking, and truthful, Growing My Way Home chronicles one woman’s struggle through events all too common among a People who have been separated from their culture and their language. From abuse to early involvement in the criminal justice system, from her experiences as a thirteen-year-old drug dealer, a fifteen-year-old parent, and finally an award-winning writer, artist, and filmmaker, Jenn Ashton has survived it all. A work of autofiction based on her teenage journals and fifty years of lived experience, Growing My Way Home documents a long journey to acceptance and understanding.