Forgiveness


Mark Sakamoto - 2014
    On the other side of the country, Mitsue Sakamoto and her family felt their pleasant life in Vancouver starting to fade away after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.Ralph found himself one of the many Canadians captured by the Japanese in December 1941. He would live out his war in a prison camp, enduring beatings, starvation, electric feet and a journey on a hell ship to Japan, watching his friends and countrymen die all around him. Mitsue and her family were ordered out of their home and were packed off to a work farm in rural Alberta, leaving many of their possessions behind. By the end of the war, Ralph was broken but had survived. The Sakamotos lost everything when the community centre housing their possessions was burned to the ground, and the $25 compensation from the government meant they had no choice but to start again.Forgiveness intertwines the compelling stories of Ralph MacLean and the Sakamotos as the war rips their lives and their humanity out of their grasp. But somehow, despite facing such enormous transgressions against them, the two families learned to forgive. Without the depth of their forgiveness, this book's author, Mark Sakamoto, would never have existed.

Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism


June Eric-UdorieAfua Hirsch - 2018
    A groundbreaking book that elevates underrepresented voices, Can We All Be Feminists? offers the tools and perspective we need to create a 21st century feminism that is truly for all.Including essays by: Soofiya Andry, Gabrielle Bellot, Caitlin Cruz, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Brit Bennett, Evette Dionne, Aisha Gani, Afua Hirsch, Juliet Jacques, Wei Ming Kam, Mariya Karimjee, Eishar Kaur, Emer O’Toole, Frances Ryan, Zoé Samudzi, Charlotte Shane, and Selina Thompson

Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past


Jessica J. Lee - 2020
    Lee embarks on a journey to discover her family's forgotten history and to connect with the island they once called home Taiwan is an island of extremes: towering mountains, lush forests, and barren escarpment. Between shifting tectonic plates and a history rife with tension, the geographical and political landscape is forever evolving. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather's life, Jessica J. Lee seeks to piece together the fragments of her family's history as they moved from China to Taiwan, and then on to Canada. But as she navigates the tumultuous terrain of Taiwan, Lee finds herself having to traverse fissures in language, memory, and history, as she searches for the pieces of her family left behind.Interlacing a personal narrative with Taiwan's history and terrain, Two Trees Make a Forest is an intimate examination of the human relationship with geography and nature, and offers an exploration of one woman's search for history and belonging amidst an ever-shifting landscape.

Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City


Mary Jane Logan McCallum - 2018
    He was left untreated and unattended to for thirty-four hours in the Emercency Room, where he ultimately died from an easily treatable infection. McCallum and Perry show that Sinclair’s tragically avoidable death reflects a particular structure of indifference born of and maintained by colonialism.

Call Us What We Carry


Amanda Gorman - 2021
    Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Imaginary Borders


Xiuhtezcatl Martinez - 2020
    Space to think. Space to connect. Space to be yourself. And this is your invitation to join us. In this personal, moving essay, environmental activist and hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez uses his art and his activism to show that climate change is a human issue that can't be ignored.Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Earth Guardians Youth Director and hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez shows us how his music feeds his environmental activism and vice versa. Martinez visualizes a future that allows us to direct our anger, fear, and passion toward creating change. Because, at the end of the day, we all have a part to play.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design


Charles Montgomery - 2012
    Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

Calling My Spirit Back


Elaine Alec - 2020
    When our people heal, our families heal, our communities heal and our land will heal. You cannot have one without the other.These stories are teachings, prophecy and protocols shared throughout the years by elders, language speakers, medicine people and helpers. They have been the foundation to individual healing and learning self-love. They teach us how to make good decisions for ourselves and for all other aspects in our lives.When our people were young, they were sent on the land to gather as much experience and knowledge as they could, and when they returned, they would contribute what they learned.I am Syilx and Secwepemc and although many of my teachings come from this place, they also intertwine with indigenous knowledge shared through ceremony from many other nations.People from all backgrounds have embraced concepts from other parts of the world that promote self-love, healing and well-being through practices of discipline and meditation.Very little has been shared about indigenous systems and how it promotes self-love and approach to healing.

Stolen Words


Melanie Florence - 2017
    He tells her that his words were stolen from him when he was taken to live at a residential school as a boy. The little girl then sets out to help her grandpa find his language again.

The Spawning Grounds


Gail Anderson-Dargatz - 2016
    A bold new story that bridges Native and white cultures across a bend in a river where the salmon run.On one side of the river is a ranch once owned by Eugene Robertson, who came in the gold rush around 1860, and stayed on as a homesteader. On the other side is a Shuswap community that has its own tangled history with the river--and the whites. At the heart of the novel are Hannah and Brandon Robertson, teenagers who have been raised by their grandfather after they lost their mother. As the novel opens, the river is dying, its flow reduced to a trickle, and Hannah is carrying salmon past the choke point to the spawning grounds while her childhood best friend, Alex, leads a Native protest against the development further threatening the river. When drowning nearly claims the lives of both Hannah's grandfather and her little brother, their world is thrown into chaos. Hannah, Alex, and most especially Brandon come to doubt their own reality as they are pulled deep into Brandon's numinous visions, which summon the myths of Shuswap culture and tragic family stories of the past. The novel hovers beautifully in the fluid boundary between past and present, between the ordinary world and the world of the spirit, all disordered by the human and environmental crises that have knit the white and Native worlds together in love, and hate, and tragedy for 150 years. Can Hannah and her brother, and Alex, find a way forward that will neither destroy the river nor themselves?

The Beadworkers


Beth Piatote - 2019
    An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s, as her family is gradually drawn to the front lines of the conflict. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college, one French and the other Lakota, each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce/Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas.

Australia Day


Stan Grant - 2019
    On January 26, no Australian can really look away.'Since publishing his critically acclaimed, Walkley Award-winning, bestselling memoir Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends.In this book, Australia Day, his long-awaited follow up to Talking to My Country, Stan talks about our country, about who we are as a nation, about the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and what it means to be Australian. A sad, wise, beautiful, reflective and troubled book, Australia Day asks the questions that have to be asked, that no else seems to be asking. Who are we? What is our country? How do we move forward from here?

Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada


Adria Vasil - 2007
    You’ll get the dirt on what not to buy and why, and the dish on great gifts, clothes, home supplies and more. Based on the popular and authoritative "Ecoholic" column that appears weekly in NOW, Ecoholic is a cheeky and eye-opening guide to all of life’s greenest predicaments.The Best Green ProductsFor the home: cleaning and laundry supplies, furniture, linensFor renovations: flooring, paint, insulation, carpets, cabinetryFor the kitchen: cookware, appliancesFor your body: cool clothes, jewellery, shoes, beauty careFor baby: toys, cribs, organic food, diapersFor the garden: fertilizer, pest control, patio furnitureFor the office: supplies, equipment, energy savingsFor your pet: natural food, flea control, litter solutionsFor the fun of it: sporting goods, camping equipment, holidaysThe Most Current InformationAvoiding toxins in the homeBuying pesticide-free foodSustainable seafood, meat and veggie choicesReducing energy and water useGreening your love lifeEco-tourismKeeping your home and garden pest-free without harmful chemicalsGreen gift-giving and ethical investingChoosing an environmentally friendly careerThe big issues facing Canada and how to get involvedThe Most Helpful ServicesElectronics and computer recyclersAlternative energy suppliersGreen general storesLocal organic food deliveryIncentives and rebates for greening your homeLocal and national environmental groupsHousehold hazardous waste disposalAlso includes a city-by-city guide:Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda


Roméo Dallaire - 2003
    Digging deep into shattering memories, Dallaire has written a powerful story of betrayal, naïveté, racism & international politics. His message is simple, undeniable: Never again. When Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire was called to serve as force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in '93, he thought he was heading off on a straightforward peacekeeping mission. Thirteen months later he flew home from Africa, broken, disillusioned & suicidal, having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days. In Shake Hands with the Devil, he takes readers with him on a return voyage into hell, vividly recreating the events the international community turned its back on. This book is an unsparing eyewitness account of the failure by humanity to stop the genocide, despite timely warnings. Woven thru the story of this disastrous mission is his own journey from confident Cold Warrior, to devastated UN commander, to retired general engaged in a painful struggle to find a measure of peace, hope & reconciliation. This book is a personal account of his conversion from a man certain of his worth & secure in his assumptions to one conscious of his own weaknesses & failures & critical of the institutions he'd relied on. It might not sit easily with standard ideas of military leadership, but understanding what happened to him & his mission to Rwanda is crucial to understanding the moral minefields peacekeepers are forced to negotiate when we ask them to step into dirty wars.

Lakeland


Allan Casey - 2009
    Through his sharply drawn characters, lively storytelling, and intimate evocation of wild beauty, he celebrates the rich culture and unsung splendor of Canada's lakeland. Decrying reckless development in a paradise often taken for granted, Casey tempers evangelical outrage with deep compassion. Often humorous, always thought-provoking, Lakeland should find a place in every lakeside cottage, in the corner of every tent.Nominated for the Saskatchewan Book Award and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, Lakeland was the recipient of the prestigious Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 2010.Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.