One of CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction Books of 2024There have been many things written about Canada’s violent siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke in the summer of 1990, but When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance is the first book from the perspective of Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, who was the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) spokesperson during the siege. When the Pine Needles Fall*,* written in a conversational style by Gabriel with histo...

Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peopl...

This important collection makes a compelling argument for the importance of theory in Native studies. Within the field, there has been understandable suspicion of theory stemming both from concerns about urgent political issues needing to take precedence over theoretical speculations and from hostility toward theory as an inherently Western, imperialist epistemology. The editors of Theorizing Native Studies take these concerns as the ground for recasting theoretical endeavors as a...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERWinner of the RBC Taylor PrizeFinalist for Canada ReadsFinalist for Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction**Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King’s critical examination of the history and experience of Native peoples in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since t...

**New York Times BestsellerNow part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul PeckRecipient of the American Book AwardThe first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples**Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this la...

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s "National Dream."It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and m...

A haunting dream that will not relent pulls author Kent Nerburn back into the hidden world of Native America, where dreams have meaning, animals are teachers, and the “old ones” still have powers beyond our understanding. In this moving narrative, we travel through the lands of the Lakota and the Ojibwe, where we encounter a strange little girl with an unnerving connection to the past, a forgotten asylum that history has tried to hide, and the complex, unforgettable characters we have come...

Today, a fraction of the Cherokee people remains in their traditional homeland in the southern Appalachians. Most Cherokees were forcibly relocated to eastern Oklahoma in the early nineteenth century. In 1830 the U.S. government shifted its policy from one of trying to assimilate American Indians to one of relocating them and proceeded to drive seventeen thousand Cherokee people west of the Mississippi.The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears recounts this moment in Amer...

The captivating story of Mary John (who passed away in 2004), a pioneering Carrier Native whose life on the Stoney Creek reserve in central BC is a capsule history of First Nations life from a unique woman's perspective. A mother of twelve, Mary endured much tragedy and heartbreak--the pangs of racism, poverty, and the deaths of six children--but lived her life with extraordinary grace and courage. Years after her death, she continues to be a positive role model for Aboriginals across Cana...

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now A...

One of the first books published to deal with the phenomenon of residential schools in Canada, Resistance and Renewal is a disturbing collection of Native perspectives on the Kamloops Indian Residential School(KIRS) in the British Columbia interior. Interviews with thirteen Natives, all former residents of KIRS, form the nucleus of the book, a frank depiction of school life, and a telling account of the system's oppressive environment which sought to stifle Native culture.

Of all the characters in myths and legends told around the world, it's the wily trickster who provides the real spark in the action, causing trouble wherever he goes. This figure shows up time and again in Native American folklore, where he takes many forms, from the irascible Coyote of the Southwest, to Iktomi, the amorphous spider man of the Lakota tribe. This dazzling collection of American Indian trickster tales, compiled by an eminent anthropologist and a master storyteller, serves as...