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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 49–64 of 85 results
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Roth
$29.99Unless there is snow on the ground, never speak their name aloud.
The more they eat the hungrier they become, and they are starving.
They were meant to stay undisturbed, their dismembered limbs scattered, frozen under the permafrost, but as is always the way, the greed of industry has unburied them once more. Now, the most feared, the Wheetago, have returned, using their powers to call back the Na acho, cannibalistic giants once banished by Dene deities.
The revered hero known as the Child Finder who is fighting to cling to his humanity after a Wheetago attack, a mother, her young son, and a desperate band of convicts, form an uneasy alliance to survive the Wheetago horrors now awakened.
ROTH, from award-winning, bestselling Tlicho Dene author Richard Van Camp, and visionary illustrator Christopher Shy is the first graphic novel in the Wheetago War series.
““This spectacular, boundary-pushing book will change the way you look at graphic novels.
Rooted in ancient and powerful narratives, this captivating saga will have you holding your breath until it releases you from its grip at the end, only to want more.”
– Waubgeshig Rice, author Moon of the Turning Leaves
Nominated for Best Graphic Novel Aurora Awards 2025
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Save Your Prayers – Send Money
Save Your Prayers – Send Money boldly takes on the wellness industry, considering disability politics through the lived experience of a seventy-year-old Métis woman and recovering New Ager. Weaving intergenerational trauma and its impact on health through the author’s experience of living with chronic pain and illness, these poems explore where healing might lie and how a peace might be found whether we heal or not. The weft supporting all of this is the importance of belonging, of blood memory and cellular memory reaching back to our earliest Ancestors.
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Seventhblade
$24.95After the murder of T’Rayles’s adopted son, the infamous warrior and daughter of the Indigenous Ibinnas returns to the colonized city of Seventhblade ready to tear the streets asunder in search of her son’s killer. T’Rayles must lean into the dangerous power of her inherited sword and ally herself with questionable forces, including the Broken Fangs, an alliance her mother founded, now fallen into greed and corruption, and the immortal Elraiche, a powerful and manipulative deity exiled from a faraway land. Navigating the power shifts in a colonized city on the edge and contending with a deadly new power emerging from within, T’Rayles risks everything to find the answers, and the justice, she so desperately desires.
Loaded with complex characters and intricately staged action, and set in a fragmented, fascinating world of dangerous magics and cryptic gods, Seventhblade is a masterful new fantasy adventure from a bright emerging Indigenous voice.
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She Falls Again
$23.95CBC BOOKS ‘CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN 2024’
CBC BOOKS ‘BOOKS TO READ IN HONOUR OF THE NATIONAL DAY FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION’
The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!
This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.
This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It’s a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.
Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems – angry, funny, sad – demand a new world for Indigenous women.
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Silence to Strength
$18.00From the 1960s through the 1980s the Canadian Children’s Aid Society engaged in a large-scale program of removing First Nations children from their families and communities and adopting them out to non-Indigenous families. This systemic abduction of untold thousands of children came to be known as the Sixties Scoop. The lasting disruption from the loss of family and culture is only now starting to be spoken of publicly, as are stories of strength and survivance.
In Silence to Strength: Writings and Reflections on the 60s Scoop, editor Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith gathers together contributions from twenty Sixties Scoop survivors from across the territories of Canada. This anthology includes poems, stories and personal essays from contributors such as Alice McKay, D.B. McLeod, David Montgomery, Doreen Parenteau, Tylor Pennock, Terry Swan, Lisa Wilder, and many more. Courageous writings and reflections that prove there is strength in telling a story, and power in ending the silence of the past. -
Skin
$23.95Conceived in the same world as Pennock’s first two books of poetry, Bones and Blood, Skin is the final book in a trilogy that centres a two-spirit Indigenous person’s experiences.
Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. When a Two-Spirit Indigenous person returns home, they begin to understand the world through their relationships to others. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak.
Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what—and who—is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. For readers of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jeanette Armstrong, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin—porous, protective, remembering—for those still finding their way home.
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South Side of a Kinless River
$23.95CBC Best Poetry Book 2024
A nuanced, relational, and community-minded new book from one of Canada’s preeminent poets.
South Side of a Kinless River wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. Métis identity, land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women of the nascent settler communities figure into these poems. They add up to a Métis woman’s prairie history, one that helps us feel the violence in how those contributions and wisdoms have been suppressed and denied.
“Each poem is an anthem, every page showcasing the talent and necessity of this incredible poetic voice. Dumont brings the Métis tone, cadence and intricate stitch-work into all she creates.”
– Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow Thieves and Empire of the Wild“The voice of this Métis woman is as loving, tender and humane, as it is powerful, satirical and political…”
– Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion -
Space Girl
As the first person born on the Moon, Lyra lives a charmed life as a beloved social media influencer. On her twenty-first birthday, two disasters strike: the birth of a rival “baby influencer” and the discovery of an enormous asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth (and all of Lyra’s social media followers). Forced to escape the lunar surface, she unexpectedly finds herself on Earth – a strange new world where she must decide what matters more: her personal dreams of social media fame or the safety of humanity as a whole. Space Girl explores colonialism, digital culture, and the ways we wield power in every space we enter – whether that’s cyberspace, outer space, or the fragile spaces we call home.
Cast of 2 women and 1 man
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Spruce to Cedar
$23.95Gently disarming poems that explore healing despite the limitations of living in a colonial society.
Set in the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Vancouver, Lasänmą’s debut poetry collection takes the reader from her childhood into adulthood by sharing both warm and harrowing memories as they shaped her. The poems follow a young woman discovering the healing of being alone and of finding identity through culture as well as in isolation. Using English, Southern Tutchone, and Dene, the fragile but courageous speaker yearns for the comforts of childhood, yet at the same time looks squarely both at the difficulties of the past and the possibilities of the future. Unashamed, she bares it all.
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St. Michael’s Residential School
$21.95One of the few accounts by care-givers in an Indian Residential School describing the
horrific conditions.
Nancy Dyson and Dan Rubenstein In 1970, the authors, Nancy Dyson and Dan Rubenstein, were hired as childcare workers at the Alert Bay Student Residence (formerly St. Michael’s Indian Residential School) on northern Vancouver Island. Shocked when Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families, punished for speaking their native language, fed substandard food and severely disciplined for minor offences, Dan and Nancy questioned the way the school was run with its underlying missionary philosophy. When a delegation from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs visited St. Michael’s, the couple presented a long list of concerns, which were ignored. The next day they were dismissed by the administrator of the school. Some years later, in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports were released. The raw grief and anger of residential school survivors were palpable and the authors’ troubling memories of St. Michael’s resurfaced. Dan called Reconciliation Canada, and Chief Dr. Robert Joseph encouraged the couple to share their story with today’s Canadians. St. Michael’s Residential School: Lament and Legacy is a moving narrative – one of the few told by caregivers who experienced on a daily basis the degradation of Indigenous children. Their account will help to ensure that what went on in the Residential Schools is neither forgotten nor denied. -
Standoff
$21.95Faced with a constant stream of news reports of standoffs and confrontations, Canada’s “reconciliation project” has obviously gone off the rails. In this series of concise and thoughtful essays, lawyer and historian Bruce McIvor explains why reconciliation with Indigenous peoples is failing and what needs to be done to fix it.
Widely known as a passionate advocate for Indigenous rights, McIvor reports from the front lines of legal and political disputes that have gripped the nation. From Wet’suwet’en opposition to a pipeline in northern British Columbia, to Mi’kmaw exercising their fishing rights in Nova Scotia, McIvor has been actively involved in advising First Nation clients, fielding industry and non-Indigenous opposition to true reconciliation, and explaining to government officials why their policies are failing.
McIvor’s essays are honest and heartfelt. In clear, plain language he explains the historical and social forces that underpin the development of Indigenous law, criticizes the current legal shortcomings and charts a practical, principled way forward.
By weaving in personal stories of growing up Métis on the fringes of the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba and representing First Nations in court and negotiations, McIvor brings to life the human side of the law and politics surrounding Indigenous peoples’ ongoing struggle for fairness and justice. His writing covers many of the most important issues that have become part of a national dialogue, including systemic racism, treaty rights, violence against Indigenous people, Métis identity, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and the duty to consult.
McIvor’s message is consistent and powerful: if Canadians are brave enough to confront the reality of the country’s colonialist past and present and insist that politicians replace empty promises with concrete, meaningful change, there is a realistic path forward based on respect, recognition and the implementation of Indigenous rights.
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Starwalker
$18.95Starwalker is an empowering and deeply moving musical that follows the journey of Star, an Indigi-Queer Two-Spirit drag queen whose life is transformed upon discovering the House of Borealis, a vibrant and revolutionary drag house in East Vancouver. Star’s journey highlights the intersection of Two-Spirit identity and queer culture, blending Indigenous heritage with drag artistry to create an unforgettable, inspiring persona that challenges societal norms and celebrates cultural roots. At its core, Starwalker is a story of self-discovery, resilience, and community, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and love. As Star navigates their path of self-discovery, they realize that what they’ve been searching for is more than just a stage — it’s a home and a community where they can be fully themselves. The love story interwoven throughout highlights the beauty of embracing both romantic love and the chosen family that forms within Queer communities. Through soaring music, a heartfelt journey, and fierce drag performances, Starwalker invites audiences to embrace the beauty of living authentically and fearlessly in a world that often tries to silence those who dare to stand out.
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Stolen Sisters
$19.95Stolen Sisters is a first-of-its-kind play that gives voice to the lives and legacies of three Beothuk women and girls whose names have survived in historical record.
These are stories that have been mis-told, misrepresented, and mythologized by colonial interference. By shifting the lens of history to reflect Indigenous perspective and experience, the women brought to life in Stolen Sisters set the record straight, telling their own stories with both humour and unflinching honestly. Based on the oral and written Indigenous histories of colonization locally and worldwide, the voices of Stolen Sisters shine a light on the global experience of Indigenous women and girls and, in particular, Newfoundland’s part in that legacy.
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Stoneface
$28.00Stephen Kakfwi was born in a bush camp on the edge of the Arctic Circle in 1950. In a family torn apart by tuberculosis, alcohol and the traumas endured by generations in residential school, he emerged as a respected Dene elder and eventually the Premier of the Northwest Territories.
Stephen belongs to a cohort of young northerners who survived the childhood abuses of residential school only to find themselves as teenagers in another residential school where one Oblate father saw them as the next generation of leaders, and gave them the skills they would need to succeed. Kakfwi, schooled on civil rights and 1960s protest songs, dedicated himself to supporting chiefs in their claim to land that had been taken away from them and in their determination to seize control of the colonial political system.
Kakfwi’s life has been a series of diverse endeavours, blending traditional Dene practices with the daily demands of political office—hunting moose one day and negotiating with European diamond merchants the next. Throughout his career, Kakfwi understood that he held the power to make change—sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he did not. But he also embraced the power of story-telling, and has helped change the story of the North.
Kakfwi combines his remarkable memory for detail with his compelling raconteur’s skill in taking us through the incredible story of his life and one of the most transformative times in Canadian history. In his candid description of the loneliness of leadership and his embrace of Dene spirituality, Kakfwi’s Stoneface transforms politics into philosophy and an intensely personal guide to reconciliation.
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The Bears and the Magic Masks
$15.95Award-winning storyteller and poet Joseph Dandurand captures the delightful relationship between bears and the Kwantlen people in his fourth book for children ages 6–8.
For a long time, the Kwantlen and the bears have lived side by side. When the master carver falls into the river, the bears rescue him. In thanks, the master carver gives the bears animal masks. But the bears don’t know that these masks are magical.
The Bears and the Magic Masks is the fourth in the Kwantlen Stories Then and Now series by award-winning author Joseph Dandurand, following The Girl Who Loved the Birds, A Magical Sturgeon and The Sasquatch, the Fire and the Cedar Baskets.
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The Dialogues
$22.00In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Manitoulin Island to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world.