In addition, beginning at the age of five, Sellars was isolated for two years at Coqualeetza Indian Tuberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours' drive from home. The trauma of these experiences has reverberated throughout her life.The first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph's Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be White and Roman Catholic.Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph's Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph's Mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hubert O'Connor, which took place during Sellars's student days, between 1962 and 1967, when O'Connor was the school principal. After the school's closure, those who had been forced to attend came from surrounding reserves and smashed windows, tore doors and cabinets from the wall, and broke anything that could be broken. Overnight their anger turned a site of shameful memory into a pile of rubble.In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution's lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

    A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.Weaving together the voices that shaped her, Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, the teachings of a changing earth, and the poets who paved her way. She explores her grief at the loss of her mother and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. Moving fluidly among prose, song, and poetry, Poet Warrior is a luminous journey of becoming that sings with all the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.

    Adapted by the poet John Neihardt from a series of interviews, it is one of the most widely read and admired works of American Indian literature. Cryptic and deeply personal, it has been read as a spiritual guide, a philosophical manifesto, and a text to be deconstructed--while the historical Black Elk has faded from view.In this sweeping book, Joe Jackson provides the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West. Born in an era of rising violence, Black Elk killed his first man at Little Big Horn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior and instead choose the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that haunted and inspired him, even after he converted to Catholicism in his later years.In Black Elk, Jackson has crafted a true American epic, restoring to Black Elk the richness of his times and gorgeously portraying a life of heroism and tragedy, adaptation and endurance, in an era of permanent crisis on the Great Plains.

    This collection of sixteen essays is at once philosophic, practical, and visionary. It is an effort to open discussion about the unique experience of Native Americans and offers a concise reference for administrators, educators, students and community leaders involved with Indian Education.

    The movement was inspired by Shannen Koostachin, a young Cree woman whom George Stroumboulopoulos named as one of “five teenage girls who kicked ass in history.”All Shannen wanted was a decent education. She found an ally in Charlie Angus, who had no idea she was going to change his life and inspire others to change the country.Based on extensive documentation assembled from Freedom of Information requests, Angus establishes a dark, unbroken line that extends from the policies of John A. Macdonald to the government of today. He provides chilling insight into how Canada--through breaches of treaties, broken promises, and callous neglect--deliberately denied First Nations children their basic human rights.

    This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence.Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life thatled to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children.He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life. How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

    It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world’s land—and why does it matter?

    National Geographic’s Book of Peoples of the World propels that important quest with concern, authority, and respect. Created by a team of experts, this hands-on resource offers thorough coverage of more than 200 ethnic groups—some as obscure as the Kallawaya of the Peruvian Andes, numbering fewer than 1,000; others as widespread as the Bengalis of India, 172 million strong. We’re swept along on a global tour of beliefs, traditions, and challenges, observing the remarkable diversity of human ways as well as the shared experiences. Spectacular photographs reveal how people define themselves and their worlds. Specially commissioned maps show how human beings have developed culture in response to environment. Thought-provoking text examines not only the societies and the regions that produced them, but also the notion of ethnicity itself—its immense impact on history, the effects of immigration on cultural identity, and the threats facing many groups today. Threading through the story are the extraordinary findings of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project—a research initiative to catalog DNA from people around the world, decoding the great map of human migration embedded in our own genetic makeup.At once a comprehensive reference, an appreciation of diversity, and a thoughtful look at our instinct to belong, this uplifting book explores what it means to be human and alive.

    She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political--from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Native communities.With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott provides a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future.

    Working from government reports, manuscripts, and the diaries and letters of those persons—both white and Indian—who knew him, Margaret Coel has developed an unusually readable, interesting, and closely documented account of his life and the life of his tribe during the fateful years of the mid-1800s.It was in these years that thousands of gold-seekers on their way to California and Oregon burst across the plains, first to traverse the territory consigned to the Indians and then, with the discovery of gold in 1858 on Little Dry Creek (formerly the site of the Southern Arapaho winter campground  and presently Denver, Colorado), to settle.Chief Left Hand was one of the first of his people to acknowledge the inevitability of the white man’s presence on the plain, and thereafter to espouse a policy of adamant peacefulness —if not, finally, friendship—toward the newcomers.Chief Left Hand is not only a consuming story—popular history at its best—but an important work of original scholarship. In it the author:Clearly establishes the separate identities of the original Left Hand, the subject of her book, and the man by the same name who succeeded Little Raven in 1889 as the principal chief of the Southern Arapahos in Oklahoma—a longtime source of confusion to students of western history;Lays to rest, with a series of previously unpublished letters by George Bent, a century-long dispute among historians as to Left Hand’s fate at Sand Creek;Examines the role of John A. Evans, first governor of Colorado, in the Sand Creek Massacre. Colonel Chivington, commander of the Colorado Volunteers, has always (and justly) been held responsible for the surprise attack. But Governor Evans, who afterwards claimed ignorance and innocence of the colonel’s intentions, was also deeply involved. His letters, on file in the Colorado State Archives, have somehow escaped the scrutiny of historians and remain, for the most part, unpublished. These Coel has used extensively, allowing the governor to tell, in his own words, his real role in the massacre. The author also examines Evans’s motivations for coming to Colorado, his involvement with the building of the transcontinental railroad, and his intention of clearing the Southern Arapahos from the plains —an intention that abetted Chivington’s ambitions and led to their ruthless slaughter at Sand Creek.

    This project is animated by a hope that debate—in the spirit of the catechesis itself—will take place in book clubs across the country, composed of people who like discussion and are energized, engaged, and jazzed by the journey of rebuilding, reconciliation, and renewal.This collection of essays returns us to the proper work of dialogue, answering some questions but inevitably, and necessarily, provoking more. I hope it will prod us to get off our big fat complacencies. We must investigate our own histories, asking questions about the land on which we work and live. What is the history of this land? Who was here before us? How did we come to occupy and define it? What was my family’s relationship to Indigenous peoples?” — Shelagh RogersDrawing from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation’s three-volume series Truth and Reconciliation—which comprises the titles From Truth to Reconciliation; Response, Responsibility, and Renewal; and Cultivating Canada—acclaimed veteran broadcast-journalist and host of The Next Chapter on CBC Radio Shelagh Rogers joins series editors Mike DeGagné and Jonathan Dewar to present these selected reflections, in reader format, on the lived and living experiences and legacies of Residential Schools and, more broadly, reconciliation in Canada.This book is available at: http://www.speakingmytruth.ca/

    Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the “mouth of hell” of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians — as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see.

    Presents an illustrated history of North American Indians from their origins to the present, and includes contemporary interviews and excerpts from journals.

    In Ojibway Heritage Basil Johnston introduces his people's ceremonies, rituals, songs, dances, prayers, arid legends. Conveying the sense of wonder and mystery at the heart of the Ojibway experience, Johnston describes the creation of the universe, followed by that of plants and animals and human beings, and the paths taken by the latter. These stories are to be read, enjoyed, and freely interpreted. Their authorship is perhaps most properly attributed to the tribal storytellers who have carried on the oral tradition that Johnston records and preserves in this book.

    Most arrive safely and go home with their families in a matter of days. But not all babies come into the world healthy and almost half a million arrive well before they are expected. These newborns need tiny medicine. Told from the first-person perspective, Dr. Chris DeRienzo—a neonatologist, health system leader and frequent keynote speaker—walks readers through the human experience of caring for the world's smallest and sickest patients. His stories share the absurd and the sublime parts of being a doctor and detail how they have shaped who he is as a husband, father, and person. Readers will learn the secrets of the NICU, the loneliness that comes with life and death decisions, and the incredibly powerful sense of purpose and triumph that comes with just making it through the night and keeping everyone alive. In the end, this book delivers an insider's view of a doctor's life never before accessible without a white coat.