Sewing new understandings

Indigenous beadwork has taken the art world by storm, but it is still sometimes misunderstood as static, anthropological artifact. Today's prairie artists defy this categorization, demonstrating how beads tell stories and reclaim cultural identity. Whether artists seek out and share techniques through YouTube videos or in-person gatherings, beading fosters traditional methods of teaching and learning and enables intergenerational transmissions of pattern and skill.

In Bead Talk, editors Carmen Robertson, Judy Anderson, and Katherine Boyer gather conversations, interviews, essays, and full-colour reproductions of beadwork from expert and emerging artists, academics, and curators to illustrate the importance of beading in contemporary Indigenous arts. Taken together, the book poses and responds to philosophical questions about beading on the prairies: How do the practices and processes of beading embody reciprocity, respect, and storytelling? How is beading related to Indigenous ways of knowing? How does beading help individuals reconnect with the land? Why do we bead?

Showcasing beaded tumplines, text, masks, regalia, and more, Bead Talk emphasizes that there is no one way to engage with this art. The contributors to this collection invite us all into the beading circle as they reshape how beads are understood and stitch together generations of artists.

Several centuries ago, the five nations that would become the Haudenosaunee--Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca--were locked in generations-long cycles of bloodshed. When they established Kayanerenkó wa, the Great Law of Peace, they not only resolved intractable conflicts, but also shaped a system of law and government that would maintain peace for generations to come.

This law remains in place today in Haudenosaunee communities: an Indigenous legal system, distinctive, complex, and principled. It is not only a survivor, but a viable alternative to Euro-American systems of law. With its emphasis on lasting relationships, respect for the natural world, building consensus, and on making and maintaining peace, it stands in contrast to legal systems based on property, resource exploitation, and majority rule.

Although Kayanerenkó wa has been studied by anthropologists, linguists, and historians, it has not been the subject of legal scholarship. There are few texts to which judges, lawyers, researchers, or academics may refer for any understanding of specific Indigenous legal systems. Following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a growing emphasis on reconciliation, Indigenous legal systems are increasingly relevant to the evolution of law and society.

In Kayanerenkó wa: The Great Law of Peace Kayanesenh Paul Williams, counsel to Indigenous nations for forty years, with a law practice based in the Grand River Territory of the Six Nations, brings the sum of his experience and expertise to this analysis of Kayanerenkó wa as a living, principled legal system. In doing so, he puts a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous and settler communities.

Reclaiming crops and culture on Turtle Island

Manomin, more commonly known by its English misnomer wild rice, is the only cereal grain native to Turtle Island (North America). Long central to Indigenous societies and diets, this complex carbohydrate is seen by the Anishinaabeg as a gift from Creator, a spirit berry that has allowed the Nation to flourish for generations. Manomin: Caring for Ecosystems and Each Other offers a community-engaged analysis of the under-studied grain, weaving together the voices of scholars, chefs, harvesters, engineers, poets, and artists to share the plant's many lessons about the living relationships between all forms of creation.

Grounded in Indigenous methodologies and rendered in full colour, Manomin reveals and examines our interconnectedness through a variety of disciplines--history, food studies, ethnobotany, ecology--and forms of expression, including recipes, stories, and photos. A powerful contribution to conversations on Indigenous food security and food sovereignty, the collection explores historic uses of Manomin, contemporary challenges to Indigenous aquaculture, and future possibilities for restoring the sacred crop as a staple.

In our time of ecological crisis, Manomin teaches us how to live well in the world, sustaining our relations with each other, our food, and our waterways.

Drawing attention to the ways in which creative practices are essential to the health, well-being, and healing of Indigenous peoples, The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being addresses the effects of artistic endeavour on the good life, or mino-pimatisiwin in Cree, which can be described as the balanced interconnection of physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being.

In this interdisciplinary collection, Indigenous knowledges inform an approach to health as a wider set of relations that are central to well-being, wherein artistic expression furthers cultural continuity and resilience, community connection, and kinship to push back against forces of fracture and disruption imposed by colonialism. The need for healing--not only individuals but health systems and practices--is clear, especially as the trauma of colonialism is continually revealed and perpetuated within health systems. The field of Indigenous health has recently begun to recognize the fundamental connection between creative expression and well-being. This book brings together scholarship by humanities scholars, social scientists, artists, and those holding experiential knowledge from across Turtle Island to add urgently needed perspectives to this conversation. Contributors embrace a diverse range of research methods, including community-engaged scholarship with Indigenous youth, artists, Elders, and language keepers.

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. This book will resonate with health practitioners, community members, and any who recognize the power of art as a window, an entryway to access a healthy and good life.

A manifesto for the future of Indigenous education in Canada

In Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law Leo Baskatawang traces the history of the neglected treaty relationship between the Crown and the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3, and the Canadian government's egregious failings to administer effective education policy for Indigenous youth--failures epitomized by, but not limited to, the horrors of the residential school system.

Rooted in the belief that Indigenous education should be governed and administered by Indigenous peoples, 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. Kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin considers education wholistically, such that it describes ways of knowing, being, doing, relating, and connecting to the land that are grounded in tradition, while also positioning its learners for success in life, both on and off the reserve.

As the backbone of an Indigenous-led education system, kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin enacts Anishinaabe self-determination and has the potential to bring about cultural resurgence, language revitalization, and a new era of Crown-Indigenous relations in Canada. Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law challenges policy makers to push beyond apologies and performative politics, and to engage in meaningful reconciliation practices by recognizing and affirming the laws that the Anishinaabeg have always used to govern themselves.

What do we know of masculinities in non-patriarchal societies? Indigenous peoples of the Americas and beyond come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine, concepts that were unimaginable and shocking to Euro-western peoples at contact. Indigenous Men and Masculinities, edited by Kim Anderson and Robert Alexander Innes, brings together prominent thinkers to explore the meaning of masculinities and being a man within such traditions, further examining the colonial disruption and imposition of patriarchy on Indigenous men.

Building on Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous feminism, and queer theory, the sixteen essays by scholars and activists from Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand open pathways for the nascent field of Indigenous masculinities. The authors explore subjects of representation through art and literature, as well as Indigenous masculinities in sport, prisons, and gangs.

Indigenous Men and Masculinities highlights voices of Indigenous male writers, traditional knowledge keepers, ex-gang members, war veterans, fathers, youth, two-spirited people, and Indigenous men working to end violence against women. It offers a refreshing vision toward equitable societies that celebrate healthy and diverse masculinities.

Sanaaq is an intimate story of an Inuit family negotiating the changes brought into their community by the coming of the qallunaat, the white people, in the mid-nineteenth century.

Composed in 48 episodes, it recounts the daily life of Sanaaq, a strong and outspoken young widow, her daughter Qumaq, and their small semi-nomadic community in northern Quebec. Here they live their lives hunting seal, repairing their kayak, and gathering mussels under blue sea ice before the tide comes in. These are ordinary extraordinary lives: marriages are made and unmade, children are born and named, violence appears in the form of a fearful husband or a hungry polar bear. Here the spirit world is alive and relations with non-humans are never taken lightly. And under it all, the growing intrusion of the qallunaat and the battle for souls between the Catholic and Anglican missionaries threatens to forever change the way of life of Sanaaq and her young family.

The first comprehensive study of Indian residential schools in the North

In this ground-breaking book, Crystal Gail Fraser draws on Dinjii Zhuh (Gwich'in) concepts of individual and collective strength to illuminate student experiences in northern residential schools, revealing the many ways Indigenous communities resisted the institutionalization of their children.

After 1945, federal bureaucrats and politicians increasingly sought to assimilate Indigenous northerners--who had remained comparatively outside of their control--into broader Canadian society through policies that were designed to destroy Indigenous ways of life. Foremost among these was an aggressive new schooling policy that mandated the construction of Grollier and Stringer Halls: massive residential schools that opened in Inuvik in 1959, eleven years after a special joint committee of the House of Commons and the Senate recommended that all residential schools in Canada be closed.

By Strength, We Are Still Here shares the lived experiences of Indigenous northerners from 1959 until 1982, when the territorial government published a comprehensive plan for educational reform. Led by Survivor testimony, Fraser shows the roles both students and their families played in disrupting state agendas, including questioning and changing the system to protect their cultures and communities.

Centring the expertise of Knowledge Keepers, By Strength, We Are Still Here makes a crucial contribution to Indigenous research methodologies and to understandings of Canadian and Indigenous histories during the second half of the twentieth century.

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.

It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer. So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7000 survivor statements and five million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources.

A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Research Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, gathers material from the several reports the TRC has produced to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools in a concise and accessible package that includes new materials to help inform and contextualize the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon.

Survivor and former National Chief of the Assembly First Nations, Phil Fontaine, provides a Foreword, and an Afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, home to the archive of recordings, and documents collected by the TRC.

As Aimée Craft writes in the Afterword, knowing the historical backdrop of residential schooling and its legacy is essential to the work of reconciliation. In the past, agents of the Canadian state knocked on the doors of Indigenous families to take the children to school. Now, the Survivors have shared their truths and knocked back. It is time for Canadians to open the door to mutual understanding, respect, and reconciliation.

Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined Indigenous identity. This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational efforts to reconnect that occur in response. Rather, it is about white, French-descendant people discovering an Indigenous ancestor born 300 to 375 years ago through genealogy and using that ancestor as the sole basis for an eventual shift into an Indigenous identity today.

After setting out the most common genealogical practices that facilitate race shifting, Leroux examines two of the most prominent self-identified Indigenous organizations currently operating in Quebec. Both organizations have their origins in committed opposition to Indigenous land and territorial negotiations, and both encourage the use of suspect genealogical practices. Distorted Descent brings to light to how these claims to an Indigenous identity are then used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples, exposing along the way the shifting politics of whiteness, white settler colonialism, and white supremacy.

Levelling the playing field

Life in the Canadian countryside at the turn of the twentieth century is often generalized as insular, backwards, and arduous. These assumptions are redressed in Rebecca Beausaert's Pursuing Play, which highlights the complexity of small-town culture through a lively examination of women's efforts to negotiate space for themselves and their leisure pursuits.

Amply illustrated, Pursuing Play draws on diaries, letters, newspapers, and census records to investigate women's recreational activities in three southern Ontario towns--Dresden, Tillsonburg, and Elora--between 1870-1914. Though women's recreational choices were restricted by pervasive ideas about propriety, Beausaert reveals how they increasingly spearheaded both formal and informal clubs, events, and social gatherings, and integrated them into their daily lives.

In telling the story of what small-town women did for fun while navigating social hierarchies, nurturing ties of kinship and friendship, and advancing community development, Pursuing Play adds a new dimension to Canadian histories of gender, leisure, and popular culture. Encompassing public and private pastimes, the growth of sports, the phenomenon of armchair travelling, and the ease with which recreation can slip from reputable to disreputable, this rich study uncovers how gender, class, and ethnicity shaped the nature and scope of women's leisure in small-town Ontario and beyond.

Newly discovered work by one of Canada's favourite writers

The Canadian Shields brings together fifty short writings by Carol Shields (1935-2003), including more than two dozen previously unpublished short stories and essays and two dozen essays previously published but never before collected. Invaluable to scholars and admirers of Shields's work, the writings discovered in the National Library Archives by Nora Foster Stovel and presented to the public here for the first time reflect Shields's interest in the relationships between reality and fiction, mothers and daughters, and gender and genre. They also reveal her love of Canada, especially Winnipeg, her home for twenty years. Originally written for women's magazines, travel journals, convocation addresses, and even graduate school term papers, Shields's imaginative essays explore ideas about home, Canadian literature, contemporary women's writing, and the future of fiction. Whether autobiographical, cultural, or feminist in focus, these works vividly illuminate the multiple chapters of Shields's writing life.

Margaret Atwood and Lorna Crozier frame Shields's texts with tributes to her work and impact. An introduction by Stovel situates Shields as a Canadian author and subversive feminist writer, demonstrating how American-born-and-raised Carol Anne Warner became the Canadian Shields--a quintessential and beloved Canadian writer and the only author to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Gold Medal for Fiction.

Born at a traditional Inuit camp in what is now Nunavut, Joan Scottie has spent decades protecting the Inuit hunting way of life, most famously with her long battle against the uranium mining industry. Twice, Scottie and her community of Baker Lake successfully stopped a proposed uranium mine. Working with geographer Warren Bernauer and social scientist Jack Hicks, Scottie here tells the history of her community's decades-long fight against uranium mining.

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. Drawing on Scottie's rich and storied life, together with document research by Bernauer and Hicks, their book brings the perspective of a hunter, Elder, grandmother, and community organizer to bear on important political developments and conflicts in the Canadian Arctic since the Second World War.

In addition to telling the story of her community's struggle against the uranium industry, I Will Live for Both of Us discusses gender relations in traditional Inuit camps, the emotional dimensions of colonial oppression, Inuit experiences with residential schools, the politics of gold mining, and Inuit traditional laws regarding the land and animals. A collaboration between three committed activists, I Will Live for Both of Us provides key insights into Inuit history, Indigenous politics, resource management, and the nuclear industry.

Residential school life through the eyes of a child

Enos Montour's Brown Tom's Schooldays, self-published in 1985, tells the story of a young boy's life at residential school. Drawn from Montour's first-hand experiences at Mount Elgin Indian Residential School between 1910 and 1915, the book is an ironic play on the school novel, namely 1857's Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes.

An accomplished literary text and uncommon chronicle of federal Indian schooling in the early twentieth century, Brown Tom's Schooldays positions Brown Tom and his schoolmates as citizens of three worlds: the reserve, the white man's world, and the school in between. It follows Tom leaving his family home, making friends, witnessing ill health and death, and enduring constant hunger.

Born at Six Nations of the Grand River in 1899, Montour earned degrees in Arts and Divinity at McGill University and served as a United Church minister for more than thirty years, honing his writing in newspapers and magazines and publishing two books of family history. Brown Tom's Schooldays reflects Montour's intelligence and skill as well as his love of history, parody, and literature.

This critical edition includes a foreword by the book's original editor, Elizabeth Graham, and an afterword by Montour's granddaughters, Mary Anderson and Margaret McKenzie. In her introduction, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum documents Montour's life and work, details Brown Tom's Schooldays's publication history, and offers further insight into the operations of Mount Elgin. Entertaining and emotionally riveting, Montour's book opens a unique window into a key period in Canada's residential school history.

Honouring the scholarship of Métis matriarchs

While surveying the field of Indigenous studies, Laura Forsythe and Jennifer Markides recognized a critical need for not only a Métis-focused volume, but one dedicated to the contributions of Métis women. To address this need, they brought together work by new and established scholars, artists, storytellers, and community leaders that reflects the diversity of research created by Métis women as it is lived, considered, conceptualized, and re-imagined.

With writing by Emma LaRocque and other forerunners of Métis studies, Around the Kitchen Table looks beyond the patriarchy to document and celebrate the scholarship of Métis women. Focusing on experiences in post-secondary environments, this collection necessarily traverses a range of methodologies. Spanning disciplines of social work, education, history, health care, urban studies, sociology, archaeology, and governance, contributors bring their own stories to explorations of spirituality, material culture, colonialism, land-based education, sexuality, language, and representation. The result is an expansive, heartfelt, and accessible community of Métis thought.

Reverent and revelatory, this collection centres the strong aunties and grandmothers who have shaped Métis communities, culture, and identities with teachings shared in classrooms, auditoriums, and around the kitchen table.

The legacy of the Hamiltons' psychic archive

In the wake of the First World War and the 1918-19 pandemic, the world was left grappling with a profound sense of loss. It was against this backdrop that a Winnipeg couple, physician T.G. Hamilton and nurse Lillian Hamilton, began their research, documenting and photographing séances they held in their home laboratory. Their extensive study of the survival of human consciousness after death resulted in a stunning collection of hundreds of photographs, including images of tables flying through the air, mediums in trances, and, most curious of all, ectoplasm--a strange, white substance through which ghosts could apparently manifest.

The Art of Ectoplasm invites readers to explore the Hamiltons' research and photographic evidence which has attracted international attention from scholars and artists alike. Notable figures like Arthur Conan Doyle participated in the Hamilton family's séances, and their investigations garnered support among the psychical scientific community, including renowned physicist Oliver Lodge, the inventor of wireless telegraphy. In the century since their creation, the Hamilton photographs (now housed at the University of Manitoba) have continued to perplex and inspire as the subject of academic study, comedic parody, and artistic and cinematic renderings.

This fascinating collection reflects on the history and legacy of the startling and uncanny images found in the Hamilton Family archive. As contemporary society continues to feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Art of Ectoplasm offers a compelling look at a chapter in social history not entirely unlike our own.

The life and times of the Premier from Red River

John Norquay, orphan and prodigy, was a leader among the Scots Cree peoples of western Canada. Born in the Red River Settlement, he farmed, hunted, traded, and taught school before becoming a legislator, cabinet minister, and, from 1878 to 1887, premier of Manitoba.

Once described as Louis Riel's alter ego, he skirmished with prime minister John A. Macdonald, clashed with railway baron George Stephen, and endured racist taunts while championing the interests of the Prairie West in battles with investment bankers, Ottawa politicians, and the CPR. His contributions to the development of Canada's federal system and his dealings with issues of race and racism deserve attention today.

Recounted here by Canadian historian Gerald Friesen, Norquay's life story ignites contemporary conversations around the nature of empire and Canada's own imperial past. Drawing extensively on recently opened letters and financial papers that offer new insights into his business, family, and political life, Friesen reveals Norquay to be a thoughtful statesman and generous patriarch. This masterful biography of the Premier from Red River sheds welcome light on a neglected historical figure and a tumultuous time for Canada and Manitoba.

I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry.--Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923)

[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school.--N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948)

For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the circle of civilization; the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.

Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards.

A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Indigenous children.

If one seeks to understand Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) history, one must consider the history of Haudenosaunee land. For countless generations prior to European contact, land and territory informed Haudenosaunee thought and philosophy, and was a primary determinant of Haudenosaunee identity.

In The Clay We Are Made Of, Susan M. Hill presents a revolutionary retelling of the history of the Grand River Haudenosaunee from their Creation Story through European contact to contemporary land claims negotiations. She incorporates Indigenous theory, fourth world post-colonialism, and Amerindian autohistory, along with Haudenosaunee languages, oral records, and wampum strings to provide the most comprehensive account of the Haudenosaunee's relationship to their land. Hill outlines the basic principles and historical knowledge contained within four key epics passed down through Haudenosaunee cultural history. She highlights the political role of women in land negotiations and dispels their misrepresentation in the scholarly canon. She guides the reader through treaty relationships with Dutch, French, and British settler nations, including the Kaswentha/Two-Row Wampum (the precursor to all future Haudenosaunee-European treaties), the Covenant Chain, the Nanfan Treaty, and the Haldimand Proclamation, and concludes with a discussion of the current problematic relationships between the Grand River Haudenosaunee, the Crown, and the Canadian government.