National Network for Equitable Library Service

A thoughtful account of life on a reserve and of the interaction of Native people with White society, this volume is based on the author’s three years’ experience with one Indian band on the prairie, during a period in which there were intense negotiations between the band and the federal government. Lithman’s analysis of the political manoeuvring of both sides makes this a rare contemporary account.

The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree).

Inuit qaujimajatuqangit--which means a complete body of knowledge and experience passed from generation to generation--is a collection of contributions by Inuit Elders. It not only helps preserve important knowledge and tradition, but also provides an Inuit perspective on personal growth and development, and how we relate to each other, to other living beings, and to the environment.

Wild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon. In her search for sources for telling the new (or old, forbidden story) against a tradition of narrative absence, Brandt turns to Canadian fiction representing a varety of cultural traditions — Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Jovette Marchessault, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee — and a collection of oral interviews about childbirth told by Mennonite women.

In 2012, journalist Hugo Meunier went undercover as a Walmart employee for three months in St. Leonard, Quebec, just north of Montreal. In great detail, Meunier charts the daily life of an impoverished Walmart worker, referring to his shifts at the box store giant as "somewhere between the army and Walt Disney." Each shift began with a daily chant before bowing to customer demands and the constant pressure to sell. Meanwhile Meunier and his fellow workers could not afford to shop anywhere else but Walmart, further indenturing them to the multi-billion-dollar corporation.

Through Harlo Jones's eyes, we explore the prairie landscape from coulee to slough; watch the construction of the first buildings, with basements dug by fresnos, and walls insulated with wood shavings; and peer inside village landmarks, from that "most excellent of jakes" with the knothole that turned the structure into a giant pinhole camera, to his father's garage, scene of many semi-official town-hall meetings.

For many Canadians, the first introduction to Viola Desmond will have been was seeing her portrait on the new $10 banknote. Those who are familiar with her life Others know that she was wrongfully arrested in 1946 for refusing to give up her seat in the racially segregated Roseland Theater in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Her singular act of courage was a catalyst in the struggle for racial equality, which ultimately resulted in the passage of human rights legislation that officially ended the practice of racial segregation in Nova Scotia.

Margaret Laurence’s much admired Manawaka fiction — The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners -– has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books achieve resolution through acts of mourning, placing this fiction within the larger tradition of writing that explores the nuances and strategies of mourning.

How We Go Home shares contemporary first-person stories in the long and ongoing fight to protect Native land, rights, and life. Each of the twelve narrators' lives has been shaped by loss, injustice, and resilience—and by the struggle to share space with settler nations whose essential aim is to take all that is Indigenous. In her introduction, Sinclair writes: “These are stories about returning to place, revitalizing culture and language, and re-forming traditional support systems.

Policing Black Bodies is a timely and much-needed exposure of historical and contemporary practices of state-sanctioned violence against Black lives in Canada. This groundbreaking work dispels many prevailing myths that cast Canada as a land of benevolence and racial equality, and uncovers long-standing state practices that have restricted Black freedom.