Download or read book Cree Narrative Memory written by Neal McLeod and published by Purich Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The importance of storytelling to Cree culture, and how such stories are vital to understanding the history of the Cree and their rejuvenated future, are central to the themes examined in this visionary book. Neal McLeod examines the history of the nehiyawak (the Cree people) of western Canada from the massive upheavals of the 1870s and the reserve period to the vibrant cultural and political rebirth of contemporary times. Central to the text are the narratives of McLeod's family, which give first hand examples of the tenacity and resiliency of the human spirit while providing a rubric for reinterpreting the history of indigenous peoples, drawing on Cree worldviews and Cree narrative structures." "In a readable style augmented with extensive use of the Cree language throughout, McLeod draws heavily on original research, the methodology of which could serve as a template for those doing similar work. While the book is based on the Cree experience of the Canadian prairies, its message and methodology are applicable to all Indigenous societies."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Songs to Kill a W htikow written by Neal McLeod and published by Regina : Hagios Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lights On Rats Out written by Cree LeFavour and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir. In these pages, we watch Cree LeFavour evolve from a wounded (and wounding) lost girl to a woman who can at last regard her existence with a modicum of mercy and forgiveness...a story of true self-salvation and transformation.”—Elizabeth Gilbert As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour's began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed to an unblemished patch of skin calling out for attention and the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to the skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame. In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years, allowing us to feel the pull of a stark compulsion taking over a mind. We see the world as Cree did—turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady, vertiginous thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. X—whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing—comes to be the only bright spot in her mental solitude. Her extraordinary access to and inclusion of the notes kept by Dr. X during treatment offer concrete evidence of Cree’s transformation over 3 years of therapy. But it is her own evocative and razor-sharp prose that traces a path from a lonely and often sad childhood to her reluctant commitment to and emergence from a psychiatric hospital, to the saving refuge of literature and eventual acceptance of love. Moving deftly between the dialogue and observations from psychiatric records and elegant, incisive reflection on youth and early adulthood, Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.
Download or read book Stolen Life written by Yvonne Johnson and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Written with primal intensity, touched with redeeming compassion, Rudy Wiebe--has explored our history, our roots and the secrets of our hearts with moral seriousness and great feeling." Governor General's Award for Fiction Citation, 1994 A powerful, major work of non-fiction, beautifully written, from the twice winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear. 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 that led 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.
Download or read book Northern Light written by Kazim Ali and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the lingering effects of a hydroelectric power station on Pimicikamak sovereign territory in Manitoba, Canada. The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, the celebrated poet and essayist finds himself thinking of the boreal forests and lush waterways of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational? When Ali goes searching, however, he finds not news of Jenpeg, but of the local Pimicikamak community. Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, they have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the dam on Cross Lake. In a place where water is an integral part of social and cultural life, the community demands accountability for the harm that the utility has caused. Troubled, Ali returns north, looking to understand his place in this story and eager to listen. Over the course of a week, he participates in community life, speaks with Elders and community members, and learns about the politics of the dam from Chief Cathy Merrick. He drinks tea with activists, eats corned beef hash with the Chief, and learns about the history of the dam, built on land that was never ceded, and Jenpeg, a town that now exists mostly in his memory. In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power?and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to. Praise for Northern Light An Outside Magazine Favorite Book of 2021 A Book Riot Best Book of 2021 A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2021 “Ali’s gift as a writer is the way he is able to present his story in a way that brings attention to the myriad issues facing Indigenous communities, from oil pipelines in the Dakotas to border walls running through Kumeyaay land.” —San Diego Union-Tribune “A world traveler, not always by choice, ponders the meaning and location of home. . . . A graceful, elegant account even when reporting on the hard truths of a little-known corner of the world.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Ali’s] experiences are relayed in sensitive, crystalline prose, documenting how Cross Lake residents are working to reinvent their town and rebuild their traditional beliefs, language, and relationships with the natural world. . . . Though these topics are complex, they are untangled in an elegant manner.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
Download or read book Home Is the Hunter written by Hans M. Carlson and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec's massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and their memory of themselves as a people. By investigating the Cree's three hundred years of contact with outsiders, he illuminates the process of cultural negotiation at the foundation of ongoing political and environmental debates. This book offers a way of thinking about indigenous peoples' struggles for rights and environmental justice in Canada and elsewhere.
Download or read book Gender Power and Representations of Cree Law written by Emily Snyder and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the insights of Indigenous feminist legal theory, Emily Snyder examines representations of Cree law and gender in books, videos, graphic novels, educational websites, online lectures, and a video game. Although these resources promote the revitalization of Cree law and the principle of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), Snyder argues that they do not capture the complexities of gendered power dynamics. The majority of the resources either erase women’s legal authority by not mentioning them, or they diminish women’s agency by portraying them primarily as mothers and nurturers. Although these latter roles are celebrated, Snyder argues that Cree laws and gender roles are represented in inflexible, aesthetically pleasing ways that overlook power imbalances and difficult questions regarding interpretations of tradition. What happens when good relations are represented in ways that are oppressive? Grappling with this question, Snyder makes the case that educators need to critically engage with issues of gender and power in order to create inclusive resources that meaningfully address the everyday messiness of law. As with all legal orders, gendered oppression can be perpetuated through Cree law, but Cree law is also a dynamic resource for challenging gendered oppression.
Download or read book Birdie written by Tracey Lindberg and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monkey Beach meets Green Grass, Running Water meets The Beachcombers in this wise and funny novel by a debut Cree author Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from wounds of the past, informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions. Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, seeking to understand the messages from The Frugal Gourmet (one of the only television shows available on CBC North) that come to her in her dreams. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns, who played Jesse on The Beachcombers, because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Bernice heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers but they are not the ones she expected. With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Bernice finds the strength to face the past and draw the lessons from her dreams that she was never fully taught in life. Part road trip, dream quest and travelogue, the novel touches on the universality of women's experience, regardless of culture or race.
Download or read book Indigenous Poetics in Canada written by Neal McLeod and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous Poetics in Canada broadens the way in which Indigenous poetry is examined, studied, and discussed in Canada. Breaking from the parameters of traditional English literature studies, this volume embraces a wider sense of poetics, including Indigenous oralities, languages, and understandings of place. Featuring work by academics and poets, the book examines four elements of Indigenous poetics. First, it explores the poetics of memory: collective memory, the persistence of Indigenous poetic consciousness, and the relationships that enable the Indigenous storytelling process. The book then explores the poetics of performance: Indigenous poetics exist both in written form and in relation to an audience. Third, in an examination of the poetics of place and space, the book considers contemporary Indigenous poetry and classical Indigenous narratives. Finally, in a section on the poetics of medicine, contributors articulate the healing and restorative power of Indigenous poetry and narratives.
Download or read book Black Water written by David A. Robertson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Book of the Year A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year A Maclean’s 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter “An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity and love.” —Cherie Dimaline In this bestselling memoir, a son who grew up away from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to the family trapline and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but creates a new future The son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A. Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His father, Dulas—or Don, as he became known—lived on the trapline in the bush in Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where he couldn’t speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless in secret. David’s mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town that had no Indigenous people until Don arrived as the new United Church minister. They married and had three sons, whom they raised unconnected to their Indigenous history. David grew up without his father’s teachings or any knowledge of his early experiences. All he had was “blood memory”: the pieces of his identity ingrained in the fabric of his DNA, pieces that he has spent a lifetime putting together. It has been the journey of a young man becoming closer to who he is, who his father is and who they are together, culminating in a trip back to the trapline to reclaim their connection to the land. Black Water is a memoir about intergenerational trauma and healing, about connection and about how Don’s life informed David’s own. Facing up to a story nearly erased by the designs of history, father and son journey together back to the trapline at Black Water and through the past to create a new future.
Download or read book Life Stages and Native Women written by Kim Anderson and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2012-08-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities. The process of “digging up medicines” - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings of fourteen elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario to illustrate how different life stages were experienced by Metis, Cree, and Anishinaabe girls and women during the mid-twentieth century. These elders relate stories about their own lives, the experiences of girls and women of their childhood communities, and customs related to pregnancy, birth, post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles of post-menopausal women, and women’s roles in managing death. Through these teachings, we learn how evolving responsibilities from infancy to adulthood shaped women’s identities and place within Indigenous society, and were integral to the health and well-being of their communities. By understanding how healthy communities were created in the past, Anderson explains how this traditional knowledge can be applied toward rebuilding healthy Indigenous communities today.
Download or read book Mamaskatch written by Darrel J. McLeod and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a small boy in remote Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod is immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. There he is surrounded by her tales of joy and horror—of the strong men in their family, of her love for Darrel, and of the cruelty she and her sisters endured in residential school—as well as his many siblings and cousins, and the smells of moose stew and wild peppermint tea. And there young Darrel learns to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that will guide him throughout his life. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turns wild and unstable, and their home life becomes chaotic. Sweet and eager to please, Darrel struggles to maintain his grades and pursue interests in music and science while changing homes, witnessing domestic violence, caring for his younger siblings, and suffering abuse at the hands of his brother-in-law. Meanwhile, he begins to question and grapple with his sexual identity—a reckoning complicated by the repercussions of his abuse and his sibling’s own gender transition. Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch—“It’s a wonder!” in Cree—is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next, and an uplifting story of one individual who overcame enormous obstacles in pursuit of a fulfilling and adventurous life.
Download or read book Prison of Grass written by Howard Adams and published by Saskatoon : Fifth House. This book was released on 1989 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1975, this important book is now back in print in a revised and updated edition. Since its first publication it has become a classic of revisionist history. Bringing a Native viewpoint to the settlement of the West, Howard Adam's book shook its readers. What Native people had to say for themselves was quite different from the convenient picture of history that even the most sympathetic books by white authors had presented. Until Adams's book, the cultural, historical, and psychological aspects of colonialism for Native people had not been explored in depth. In Prison of Grass Adams objects to the popular historical notion that Natives were warring savages, without government, seeking to be civilized. He contrasts the official history found in the federal government's documents with the unpublished history of the Indian and Metis people. In this new edition Howard Adams brings the latest statistics to bear on his arguments and provides a new Preface.
Download or read book Canoeing with the Cree written by Eric Sevareid and published by Minnesota Historical Society. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930 two novice paddlers?Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port?launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay?with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. ?Praise for Canoeing with the Cree ?"Canoeing with the Cree is an all-time favorite of mine." ?Ann Bancroft, Arctic explorer and co-author of No Horizon Is So Far ?"Two high school graduates make an amazing journey . . . showing indomitable courage that carried them through to their destination. Humor and a spirit of adventure made a grand, good time of it, in spite of storms, rapids, long portages and silent wildernesses." ?Library Journal.
Download or read book Treaty Words written by Aimée Craft and published by Annick Press. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first treaty that was made was between the earth and the sky. It was an agreement to work together. We build all of our treaties on that original treaty. On the banks of the river that have been Mishomis’s home his whole life, he teaches his granddaughter to listen—to hear both the sounds and the silences, and so to learn her place in Creation. Most importantly, he teaches her about treaties—the bonds of reciprocity and renewal that endure for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the rivers flow. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Luke Swinson and an author’s note at the end, Aimée Craft affirms the importance of understanding an Indigenous perspective on treaties in this evocative book that is essential for readers of all ages.
Download or read book Take Us to Your Chief written by Drew Hayden Taylor and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-08 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A forgotten Haudenosaunee social song beams into the cosmos like a homing beacon for interstellar visitors. A computer learns to feel sadness and grief from the history of atrocities committed against First Nations. A young Native man discovers the secret to time travel in ancient petroglyphs. Drawing inspiration from science fiction legends like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Drew Hayden Taylor frames classic science-fiction tropes in an Aboriginal perspective. The nine stories in this collection span all traditional topics of science fiction--from peaceful aliens to hostile invaders; from space travel to time travel; from government conspiracies to connections across generations. Yet Taylor's First Nations perspective draws fresh parallels, likening the cultural implications of alien contact to those of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, or highlighting the impossibility of remaining a "good Native" in such an unnatural situation as a space mission. Infused with Native stories and variously mysterious, magical and humorous, Take Us to Your Chief is the perfect mesh of nostalgically 1950s-esque science fiction with modern First Nations discourse.
Download or read book Peyakow written by Darrel J. McLeod and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heart-wrenchingly personal story with the power to inspire and empower people across cultures and generations.
