Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call


Arthur Manuel - 2015
    Unsettling Canada chronicles the modern struggle for Indigenous rights covering fifty years of struggle over a wide range of historical, national, and recent international breakthroughs. Arthur Manuel has participated in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues since its inception in 2002. Since 2003, he has served as spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade (INET). Working through INET, Manuel succeeded in having the struggle for Aboriginal title and treaty rights injected into international financial institutions, setting important precedents for Aboriginal title and rights in Canada. Manuel is a spokesperson for the Defenders of the Land. Author of the book's Afterword, Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson has been elected chief of his Westbank First Nation six times and is one of the most successful First Nations business people in Canada. He was made a Grand Chief by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in recognition of a lifetime of political and economic leadership. Naomi Klein provides the Foreword. The volume has the occasional black and white photograph, references, and an index. This is an important contribution to the current literature about First Nations' perspectives on their roles in the political and sovereignty movements across Canada from the 1950s, the White Paper, the Red Paper, Constitution Express, Oka, RCAP, Delgamuukw, Sun Peaks, international lobbying, the Fourth World, and Idle No More. An important call to action for all Canadians from a respected First Nation leader and activist.

Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature


John L. PurdyJoseph Bruchac - 2000
    Its illustrative and popular material promote a deeper appreciation of different themes and approaches. Complete works that have become classics in the field, combined with ones from the modern era, make this collection rich in historical and theoretical context. Selections of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and drama, include works by Paula Gunn Allen, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Carter Revard, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Blaeser, Peter Blue Cloud, Louise Erdrich, Scott N. Momaday, Simon Ortiz, and many more. An effective introduction to Native American Literature for readers interested in this area of writing.Contents:Nonfiction. Postmodernism, Native American literature, and the real : the Silko-Erdrich Controversy by Susan Pérez CastilloThe American Indian fiction writers : cosmopolitanism, nationalism, the third world, and First Nation sovereignty by Elizabeth Cook-LynnIndian humor by Vine Deloria, Jr.The Ghost Dance War by Charles Eastman OhiyesaThe sacred hoop : a contemporary perspective by Paula Gunn AllenThe man made of word by N. Scott MomadayDecolonializing criticism : reading dialectics and dialogics in Native American literatures by David L. MooreTowards a national Indian literature : cultural authenticity in nationalism by Simon J. OrtizHistory, myth, and identity among Osages and other peoples by Carter RevardThe woman who loved a snake : orality in Mabel McKay's stories by Greg SarrisLanguage and literature from a Pueblo perspective by Leslie Marmon SilkoAn old-time Indian attack conducted in two parts : Part one, imitation "Indian" poemsbyPart two, Gary Snyder's Turtle IslandIntroduction : only the beginning by Brian Swann. Fiction. The approximate size of my favorite tumor ; This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona by Sherman AlexieSwimming upstream by Beth BrantA good chance ; The power of horses by Elizabeth Cook-LynnThe red convertible by Louise ErdrichUnfinished business by Eric GansworthAunt Parnetta's electric blisters by Diane GlancyDeer woman by Paula Gunn AllenSleeping in rain by Gordon HenryAunt Moon's young man by Linda HoganAs it was in the beginning by Pauline E. JohnsonBorders ; A seat in the garden by Thomas KingThe hawk is hungry by D'Arcy McNickleVeteran's dance by Jim NorthrupThe killing of a state cop by Simon J. OrtizBlessed sunshine by Louis OwensReport to the nation : repossessing Europe by Carter RevardHow I got to be queen by Greg SarrisThe man to send rain clouds ; Tony's story ; Yellow woman by Leslie Marmon SilkoThe disposal of Mary Joe's children by Mary TallMountainAll the colors of sunset by Luci TapahonsoThe warriors by Anna Lee WaltersThe soft-hearted Sioux by Zitkala-Sa. Poetry. The business of fancydancing ; Capital punishment ; Defending Walt Whitman ; The exaggeration of despair ; How to write the great American Indian novel ; Crazy Horse speaks by Sherman AlexieDear world ; Kopis'taya, a gathering of spirits ; Soundings by Paula Gunn AllenLiving history ; Rewriting your life ; Rituals : yours, and mine ; Where was I that day by Kimberly BlaeserBear : a totem dance as seen by Raven ; The old man's lazy ; Rattle ; To-ta Ti-om ; Turtle ; Yellowjacket ; Drum ; Reflections on milkweed by Peter Blue CloudAbove the line ; Blessing the waters ; Copal, red blood : Chiapas, 1998 by Joseph BruchacToday was a bad day like TB by ChrystosSalmon egg puller, $2.15 an hour by Nora DauenhaurCaptivity ; Indian boarding school : the runaways ; Jacklight ; Old man Potchikoo ; Dear John Wayne ; Turtle Mountain Reservation by Louise ErdrichShe had some horses ; Transformations ; I give you back ; Call it fear ; Eagle poem ; The woman hanging from the thirteenth floor window ; Grace ; The woman who fell from the sky by Joy HarjoBlessing ; Song for my name ; Bamboo ; Celebration : birth of a colt ; Drought ; The new apartment, Minneapolis ; The truth is ; Elk song ; Geraniums ; Heritage ; It must be ; Map ; Morning : the world in the lake by Linda HoganAkwesasne ; Legacy ; Sweetgrass ; The tell me I am lost ; Wild strawberry ; Wolf "aunt" by Maurice KennyWho am I by Joyce carlEtta MandrakeAngle of geese ; The bear ; At risk ; December 29, 1980 : Wounded Knee Creek ; The colors of night ; The eagle-feather fan by N. Scott MomadayBend in the river ; The creation, according to coyote ; Dry root in a wash ; My father's song ; A story of how a wall stands ; The boy and coyote by Simon J. OrtizAnd don't be deaf to the singing beyond ; Driving in Oklahoma ; In Kansas ; An eagle nation ; What the eagle fan says ; Wazhazhe grandmother by Carter RevardI expected my skin and my blood to ripen ; If I am too brown or too white for you ; Three thousand dollar death song by Wendy RoseIndian song : survival ; Untitled ; Untitled, from Ceremony ; Storytelling ; Story from Bear County ; Toe'osh : a Laguna coyote story ; When sun came to Riverwoman by Leslie Marmon SilkoGood grease ; The last wolf ; There is no word for goodbye ; Matmiya by Mary TallMountainBlue horses rush in ; In praise of Texas ; Light a candle ; Raisin eyes by Luci TapahonsoChristmas comes to Moccasin Flat ; Surviving ; Thanksgiving at Snake Butte ; Snow country weavers ; Riding the earthboy 40 by James WelchDream of rebirth ; For Heather, entering Kindergarten ; In the longhouse, Oneida Museum ; Black eagle child quarterly by Roberta Hill WhitemanThe first dimensions of skunk ; Winter of the salamander ; The language of weather ; Morning talking mother ; The significance of a water animal ; Nothing could take away the bear-king's image by Ray Young BearDrama. Harold of Orange : a screenplay by Gerald Vizenor

Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids


Cynthia Leitich SmithDavid Alexander Robertson - 2021
    and Canada dance, sell beadwork and books, and celebrate friendship and heritage. They are the heroes of their own stories.Featured contributors: Joseph Bruchac, Art Coulson, Christine Day, Eric Gansworth, Dawn Quigley, Carole Lindstrom, Rebecca Roanhorse, David A. Robertson, Andrea L. Rogers, Kim Rogers, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Monique Gray Smith, Traci Sorell, Tim Tingle, Erika T. Wurth, and Brian Young.

All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward


Tanya Talaga - 2018
    From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health — income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services — leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism, from the Occupation of Alcatraz led by the Indians of All Tribes, to the Northern Ontario Stirland Lake Quiet Riot, to the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which united Indigenous Nations from across Turtle Island in solidarity.Based on her Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series, All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.

Monkey Beach


Eden Robinson - 2000
    Growing up a tough, wild tomboy, swimming, fighting, and fishing in a remote village where the land slips into the green ocean on the edge of the world, Lisamarie has always been different. Visited by ghosts and shapeshifters, tormented by premonitions, she can't escape the sense that something terrible is waiting for her. She recounts her enchanted yet scarred life as she journeys in her speedboat up the frigid waters of the Douglas Channel. She is searching for her brother, dead by drowning, and in her own way running as fast as she can toward danger. Circling her brother's tragic death are the remarkable characters that make up her family: Lisamarie's parents, struggling to join their Haisla heritage with Western ways; Uncle Mick, a Native rights activist and devoted Elvis fan; and the headstrong Ma-ma-oo (Haisla for "grandmother"), a guardian of tradition. Haunting, funny, and vividly poignant, Monkey Beach gives full scope to Robinson's startling ability to make bedfellows of comedy and the dark underside of life. Informed as much by its lush living wilderness as by the humanity of its colorful characters, Monkey Beach is a profoundly moving story about childhood and the pain of growing older--a multilayered tale of family grief and redemption.

I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader


Zora Neale Hurston - 1979
    This unique anthology, with fourteen superb examples of her fiction, journalism, folklore, and autobiography, rightfully establishes her as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the next generation of black writers. The original commentary by Alice Walker and Mary Helen Washington, two African-American writers in the forefront of the Hurston revival, provide illuminating insights into Hurston—the writer, and the person—as well as into American social and cultural history.

In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation


Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail - 2016
    Without flinching, they look deeply and honestly at their own experiences and assumptions about race and racial divides in Canada in hopes that the rest of the country will do the same.Featuring a candid conversation between CBC radio host Shelagh Rogers and Chief Justice Sinclair, this book acts as a call for all Canadians to make reconciliation and decolonization a priority, and reminds us that once we know the history, we all have the responsibility—and ability—to make things better.

Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 1990
    New thought and new dialogue: a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of that word: a book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha."At one level or another, all the work in the collection seeks to find ways to understand and articulate our multiple identities and senses of place….Making Face/Making Soul is an exciting collection of dynamic, important writings that all women of color and white feminists will learn from, enjoy, and return to again and again and again."—Sojourner"...the pieces are stunning in what they risk and reveal..."—The San Francisco Chronicle

Roofwalker


Susan Power - 2002
    Many of the "histories" repeat subjects and themes found in the "stories," making Roofwalker a book that in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The first seven pieces in the book are "stories," fictional accounts primarily of girls and women. In the title story, a young girl believes in the power of the "roofwalker" spirit to make her dreams come true. In "Beaded Souls," a woman is cursed by the sin of her great-grandfather, an Indian policeman who arrested Sitting Bull. "First Fruits" follows a native girl’s first-year at Harvard. The nonfiction pieces include Power’s imaginary account of the meeting of her Phi Beta Kappa father and Sioux mother, a piece about the letters of an Irish ancestor and another in which Power and her mother visit the Field Museum in Chicago, where a native ancestor’s dress is on display.

Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East


Reza Aslan - 2010
    Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world’s finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama—many of them presented in English for the first time—features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.By shifting America’s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting, and informing" (Publishers Weekly).

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's


Tiffany Midge - 2019
    There are presumably more important concerns in Indian Country. More important than humor? Among the Diné/Navajo, a ceremony is held in honor of a baby’s first laugh. While the context is different, it nonetheless reminds us that laughter is precious, even sacred.Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, stand-alone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she does not like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege.   Midge goes on to ponder Standing Rock, feminism, and a tweeting president, all while exploring her own complex identity and the loss of her mother. Employing humor as an act of resistance, these slices of life and matchless takes on urban-Indigenous identity disrupt the colonial narrative and provide commentary on popular culture, media, feminism, and the complications of identity, race, and politics.

Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans


Mai Neng Moua - 2002
    Their numbers make them one of the largest recent immigrant groups in our nation. Today, significant Hmong populations can be found in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and Colorado, and St. Paul boasts the largest concentration of Hmong residents of any city in the world.In this groundbreaking anthology, first-and second-generation Hmong Americans--the first to write creatively in English--share their perspectives on being Hmong in America. In stories, poetry, essays, and drama, these writers address the common challenges of immigrants adapting to a new homeland: preserving ethnic identity and traditions, assimilating to and battling with the dominant culture, negotiating generational conflicts exacerbated by the clash of cultures, and developing new identities in multiracial America. Many pieces examine Hmong history and culture and the authors' experiences as Americans. Others comment on issues significant to the community: the role of women in a traditionally patriarchal culture, the effects of violence and abuse, the stories of Hmong military action in Laos during the Vietnam War. These writers don't pretend to provide a single story of the Hmong; instead, a multitude of voices emerge, some wrapped up in the past, others looking toward the future, where the notion of "Hmong American" continues to evolve.In her introduction, editor Mai Neng Moua describes her bewilderment when she realized that anthologies of Asian American literature rarely contained even one selection by a Hmong American. In 1994, she launched a Hmong literary journal, Paj Ntaub Voice, and in the first issue asked her readers "Where are the Hmong American voices?" Now this collection--containing selections from the journal as well as new submissions--offers a chorus of voices from a vibrant and creative community of Hmong American writers from across the United States.Contributors: BC, Bee Cha, True Hang, Sharon Her, May Lee, Kou Lor, Pacyinz Lyfoung, Mai Neng Moua, Vayong Moua, Noukou Thao, Bryan Thao Worra, Va-Megn Thoj, Ka Vang, M.S. Vang, Mayli Vang, Soul Choj Vang, Hawj Xiong, Kao Xiong with Dia cha, Pa Xiong, Naly Yang, Peter Yang, Kao Yongvang

Kiss of the Fur Queen


Tomson Highway - 1998
    Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are abused by priests.As young men, estranged from their own people and alienated from the culture imposed upon them, the Okimasis brothers fight to survive. Wherever they go, the Fur Queen--a wily, shape-shifting trickster--watches over them with a protective eye. For Jeremiah and Gabriel are destined to be artists. Through music and dance they soar.

Pieces of White Shell


Terry Tempest Williams - 1984
    Steeped in the lore of the Navajo reservation, where she worked as a teacher, the author came to see Navajo legend and ritual as touchstones for evaluating her own experience. She presents them here as a means for all people to locate their own history, traditions, and sense of how to live well.To know the oral tradition of Native American people is to feel the sensitivity and sensuality of language in its clearest motion and light, and this Williams has achieved in her appreciation of that tradition.--Simon OrtizPieces of White Shell is vibrant--full of risk, gentleness, wonder, and humility.--Barry LopezThis book is both informative and enormously evocative. Exposition and description are powerfully reinforced by recurrent passages in the mode of poetry and drama.--Brewster Ghiselin

Calling Down the Sky


Rosanna Deerchild - 2015
    Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture. The author portrays how the ongoing impact of the residential schools problem has been felt throughout generations and has contributed to social problems that continue to exist today.