National Network for Equitable Library Service

As the first inland surveyor for the Hudson's Bay Company, Philip Turnor stands tall among the explorers and mapmakers of Canada. Accompanied by Cree guides and his Cree wife, Turnor travelled 15,000 miles by canoe and foot between 1778 and 1792 to produce ten maps, culminating in his magnum opus, a map that was the foundation of all northern geographic knowledge at that time. Barbara Mitchell's biography brings to life the man who taught David Thompson and Peter Fidler how to survey.

"So often, it is through humour that the big lessons in life are learned"--about adult responsibilities, honour, and respect. Cree people love to make jokes and laugh, so the tales in Woods Cree Stories are filled with wit. The book includes nine stories--including Boys Get Lost, Foolishness, and Animals Become Friends--and a Woods Cree-English glossary. All the stories are presented in Cree syllabics, standard Roman Orthography, and English translation.

Like all First Nations languages, Lillooet (Lil'wat) is a repository for an abundantly rich oral literature. In These Are Our Legends, the fifth volume of the First Nations Language Readers series, the reader will discover seven traditional sptakwlh (variously translated into English as "legends," "myths," or "bed-time stories"). The texts are presented in a technical transcription that can be used by linguists, and also in a practical orthography that can be used by Lillooet speakers themselves. An English translation is also given.

This memoir offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school. Now a retired fisherman and trapper, the author was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of "aggressive assimilation." As Augie Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children in the ways of white society. They were taught to be ashamed of their native heritage and, as he experienced, often suffered physical and sexual abuse.

Louis Riel prophesied that a polyglot Metis nation would rise on the prairies five hundred years after his death, and that it would be called by the "joyous name" of the House of Charlemagne. This new polity would be built on the principles of Riel's Massinahican, a radical philosophical system which now survives only in fragments. Its hallmarks would be justice, ontological accord, and the blurring of all separations dividing women and men, the earth and human beings.

"Fascinating and impressive." Thomas Gunton, Director of Resource and Environmental Planning, Simon Fraser University and former Deputy Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks, Government of British Columbia. The Magnificent Nahanni extols the natural wonders of the South Nahanni Valley--its untamed waters, high, glaciated mountains, great falls, deep canyons, extensive forests, alpine tundra, and diverse wildlife, including caribou, wolf, Dall's sheep, and grizzly bear.

From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. 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.

In 1880, two Inuit families from Labrador in northern Canada were exhibited in European zoos. Spectators flocked to the zoo exhibit expecting to see "exotics" from some "primitive race". What they found instead were Labradorimiut who spoke three languages, played German hymn tunes on violin and who were keeping their own ethnographic notes on the "uncivilised" Europeans. While spectators gaped at them, the Inuit gazed back. And one of them - Abraham Ulrikab - kept a diary.

An astonishing untold story from America's past-a sweeping, powerful, and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. Blood Moon is the story of the century-long blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. The two men's mutual hatred, while little remembered today, shaped the tragic history of the tribe far more than anyone, even the reviled President Andrew Jackson, ever did.

S.C. Gwynne's New York Times bestselling historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West is now available from Encore for the first time and at a great low price. Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history.