National Network for Equitable Library Service

A collection of articles that examine many of the struggles that Aboriginal women have faced, and continue to face, in Canada. Sections include: Profiles of Aboriginal Women; Identity; Territory; Activism; Confronting Colonialism; the Canadian Legal System; and Indigenous Knowledges. Photographs and poetry are also included.

The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring.

Poised between hope and despair, each man faces how best to move beyond the past and adapt to a future in which cultural legacy seems destined to diminish. Symbolic and politically charged, Inspiration Point speaks about life on a small Maritime reservation and the constant struggle for cultural survival.

A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, an exploration emerges of the roles of woman within local as well as historic literary and global situations.

Father August Brabant (1845–1912) was the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among indigenous peoples on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. He endured long periods of isolation, built a number of log churches and undertook extraordinarily difficult trips along the west coast in dugout canoes. His thirty-three-year-long effort to transform Nuu-chah-nulth culture gives us a provocative case study of the dynamics that shaped, and continue to define, the settler-colonial relationship between indigenous peoples and the state in Canada.

In Skin Like Mine Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems on what it feels like to be inside the skin of many contemporary native individuals. He pulls no punches as he reflects on the challenges facing native people today. He speaks of minds full of anticipation yet with tongues pointing arrowheads. He tells of how so many native young people are afraid to live / afraid to die / afraid of ourselves. As he looks around what was once a pristine natural environment, he finds the forests being / eaten from the inside out.

This historical novel reimagines the North-West resistance of 1885 through the Métis women of Batoche, and in particular the rebellious outsider, Josette Lavoie. When Riel arrives from Montana, he discovers that Josette is the granddaughter of Chief Big Bear, whom he needs as an ally, but Josette resists becoming his disciple when she learns that he considers the Métis a lost tribe of Israel and himself the prophet who will lead them to the Promised Land.

In her fourth historical novel dealing with British North America and the American Revolution, Jean Rae Baxter focuses on Broken Trail, a young boy who was born white but captured and adopted by the Oneida people. The great Mohawk leader Thayendanegea - known to Euro-Canadians as Joseph Brant - has chosen Broken Trail to assist him in the daunting task of uniting all the tribes and nations with the goal of establishing a country of their own.

Follow Garry Gottfriedson in this new collection of combative poems as he compels us and Heaven to listen to the challenges facing First Nation communities today. Employing many of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) images and stories, Gottfriedson takes us inside the rez and into the rooming houses in the city cores, but always drawing new strength from the land and the people who have moved upon it. He speaks of “the smell of grandmothers and grandfathers / breathing the stories into our blood” so as to “wrap our newborn in freshly made Star Quilts.”

Dr. Frank Arthur Calder of BC’s Nisga’a First Nation was the first indigenous person to be elected to any Canadian governing body. For twenty-six years he served as an MLA in the legislature of British Columbia. He was the driving force behind Canada’s decision to grant recognition of indigenous land title to First Nations people throughout the country.