Books

Beading fosters traditional methods of teaching and learning and enables intergenerational transmissions of pattern and skill. These conversations, interviews, essays, and full-colour reproductions of artwork from expert and emerging artists, academics, and curators from the prairies invite us all into the beading circle.

Looking beyond the patriarchy to document and celebrate the scholarship of Métis women, Around the Kitchen Table brings together writing by new and established scholars, artists, storytellers, and community leaders that reflects the diversity of research created by Métis women as it is lived, conceptualized, and re-imagined.

This first-of-its-kind collection shares stories not only of entrepreneurial excellence and persistence but of savvy leadership, innovation, and reciprocity, providing hope to Indigenous business leaders, youth, and elected officials working on the front lines to improve economic conditions and achieve “a good life” for their communities.

Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s colonial project, laying bare the processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities by charting the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s.

Stored in the Bones enriches discussions of treaty rights, land claims, and environmental policy. Presenting an international framework that may be used to advance community interests in dealings with governments, the study offers a pathway for Indigenous peoples to document intangible cultural heritage.

Legends of the Capilano updates E. Pauline Johnson’s 1911 classic Legends of Vancouver, restoring Johnson’s intended title for the first time, and celebrating the storytelling abilities of Johnson’s Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) collaborators, Joe and Mary Capilano.

Baskatawang envisions a hopeful future for Indigenous nations where their traditional laws are formally recognized and affirmed by the governments of Canada. Baskatawang thereby details the efforts being made in Treaty #3 territory to revitalize and codify the Anishinaabe education law, kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin.

Joan Scottie's I Will Live for Both of Us is a reflection on recent political and environmental history and a call for a future in which Inuit traditional laws and values are respected and upheld.

Aboriginal™ explores the origins, meaning, and usage of the term “Aboriginal” and its displacement by the word “Indigenous.” More than legal vernacular, the term has had real-world consequences for the people it defined. Adese offers insight into Indigenous-Canada relations and Indigenous identity, authenticity, and agency.

In Our Backyard tells the story of the Keeyask dam and accompanying development on the Nelson River from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, academics, scientists, and regulators.

The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being demonstrates the healing possibilities of Indigenous works of art, literature, film, and music from a diversity of Indigenous peoples and arts traditions.

Returning to Ceremony is the follow-up to Chantal Fiola’s award-winning Rekindling the Sacred Fire and continues her ground-breaking examination of Métis spirituality. Among the Métis, Fiola asserts, spirituality exists on a continuum of Indigenous and Christian traditions, and Métis spirituality includes ceremonies.

Dadibaajim examines that history of encroaching settlement and dispossession as it reasserts the voices and presence of the Namegosibii Anishinaabeg too long ignored for the convenience of settler society.

Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.

Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future looks to both the past and the future as it examines the foundational work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and the legacy of its 1996 report. It assesses the Commission’s influence on subsequent milestones in Indigenous-Canada relations and considers our prospects for a constructive future.

In Daniels v. Canada, the Supreme Court determined that Métis and non-status Indians were “Indians” under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867. This volume demonstrates the importance of understanding “law” beyond its jurisprudential manifestations.

Indigenous Celebrity speaks to the popular forms of recognition, critically recasting the lens through which we understand Indigenous people’s entanglements with celebrity. A wide range of essays explore the theoretical, material, social, cultural, and political impacts of celebrity on and for Indigenous people.

In presenting a Cree woman’s view of her world, the texts in this volume directly reflect the spoken word: Sarah Whitecalf’s memoirs are here printed in Cree exactly as she recorded them, with a close English translation on the facing page. They constitute an autobiography of great personal authority and rare authenticity.