Indigenous History Month
Enjoy books by strictly Indigenous authors!
All of June we recognize, and celebrate the Indigenous community, while mourning alongside them for the atrocities they have experienced . Here in Grande Prairie specifically we reside on Treaty 8 territory, which is the home of the Cree, Beaver, Dene, and Metis. For more info visit:
https://www.alberta.ca/national-indigenous-history-month.aspx
Embers : one Ojibway's meditations
Wagamese, Richard, author
2016
In this carefully curated selection of everyday reflections, Richard Wagamese finds lessons in both the mundane and sublime as he muses on the universe, drawing inspiration from working in the bush--sawing and cutting and stacking wood for winter as well as the smudge ceremony to bring him closer to the Creator. Embers is perhaps Richard Wagamese's most personal volume to date. Honest, evocative and articulate, he explores the various manifestations of grief, joy, recovery, beauty, gratitude, physicality and spirituality--concepts many find hard to express. But for Wagamese, spirituality is multifaceted.
kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân = The way I remember
Solomon Ratt, author.
2023
"A residential school survivor finds his way back to his language and culture through his family's traditional stories. When reflecting on forces that have shaped his life, Solomon Ratt says his education was interrupted by his schooling. Torn from his family at the age of six, Ratt was placed into the residential school system-a harsh, institutional world, operated in a language he could not yet understand, far from the love and comfort of home and family. In kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember, Ratt reflects on these memories and the life-long challenges he endured through his telling of âcimisowin-autobiographical stories-and also traditional tales. Written over the course of several decades, Ratt describes his life before, during, and after residential school. In many ways, these stories reflect the experience of thousands of other Indigenous children across Canada, but Ratt's stories also stand apart in a significant way: he managed to retain his mother language of Cree by returning home to his parents each summer despite the destruction wrought by colonialism. Ratt then shifts from the âcimisowina (personal, autobiographical stories) to âcathôhkîwina, (sacred stories) the more formal and commonly recognized style of traditional Cree literature, to illustrate how, in a world uninterrupted by colonialism and its agenda of genocide, these traditional stories would have formed the winter curriculum of a Cree child's education. Presented in Cree Th-dialect Standard Roman Orthography, syllabics, and English, Ratt's reminiscences of residential school escapades almost always end with a close call and a smile. Even when his memories are dark, Ratt's particularly Cree sense of humour shines, making kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân /The Way I Remember an important and unique memoir that emphasizes and celebrates Solomon Ratt's perseverance and life after residential school."-- Provided by publisher.
A minor chorus : a novel
Belcourt, Billy-Ray, author
2022
An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness. What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.
Split tooth
Tagaq, 1975- author
2019
Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.
This house is not a home
Lafferty, Catherine, 1982- author
2022
"After a hunting trip one fall, a family in the far reaches of so-called Canada's north return to nothing but an empty space where their home once stood. Finding themselves suddenly homeless, they have no choice but to assimilate into settler-colonial society in a mining town that has encroached on their freedom. An intergenerational coming-of-age novel, This House Is Not a Home follows K©ø?·, a Dene man who grew up entirely on the land before being taken to residential school. When he finally returns home, he struggles to connect with his family: his younger brother whom he has never met, his mother because he has lost his language, and an absent father whose disappearance he is too afraid to question. The third book from acclaimed Dene, Cree and Metis writer Kat¿?i?·© , This House Is Not a Home is a fictional story based on true events. Visceral and embodied, heartbreaking and spirited, this book presents a clear trajectory of how settlers dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their land - and how Indigenous communities, with dignity and resilience, continue to live and honour their culture, values, inherent knowledge systems, and Indigenous rights towards re-establishing sovereignty. Fierce and unflinching, this story is a call for land back." -- Provided by publisher.
Truth telling : seven conversations about Indigenous life in Canada.
Good, Michelle, author
2023
This is a collection of essays about the contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada. From resistance and reconciliation to the resurgence and reclamation of Indigenous power, Michelle Good explores the issues through a series of personal essays. Michelle Good delves into the human cost of colonialism, showing how it continues to underpin social institutions in Canada and prevents meaningful and substantive reconciliation.
Unbroken : my fight for survival, hope, and justice for Indigenous women and girls
Sterritt, Angela.
2023
Unbroken is an extraordinary work of memoir and investigative journalism focusing on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, written by an award-winning Gitxsan journalist who survived life on the streets against all odds.
UNeducation. Volume 1, A residential school graphic novel : PG version
EagleSpeaker, Jason author, illustrator
2014
What the eagle sees : indigenous stories of rebellion and renewal
Yellowhorn, Eldon, 1956- author
2019
Indigenous people across Turtle Island have been faced with disease, war, broken promises, and forced assimilation. Despite crushing losses and insurmountable challenges, they formed new nations from the remnants of old ones, they adopted new ideas and built on them, they fought back, they kept their cultures alive, and they survived. Key events in Indigenous history with accounts of the people, places, and events that have mattered from the 12th century to present day are told from a vastly under-represented perspective--an Indigenous viewpoint.