Books shelved under “Indigenous”

I won’t mince words: The Knowing is essential reading for all non-Indigenous Canadians, and it should be required reading for teachers like myself. Tanya Talaga has written a history that is at times painful, at times healing, yet always powerful and true. After her impressive work in Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations, her latest takes a far more personal approach to the story of Canada, reminding us that residential schools are not…

Darcie Little Badger is one to watch. That’s what I say to myself anyway, as I pound back endless cups of tea and anyone else reads these words on the internet. But if you are reading these words, then you ought to know Sheine Lende is a fantastic experience all around, just like my experiences with Elatsoe and A Snake Falls to Earth before it. At every turn, Little Badger crafts a narrative so compelling…

Damn, I don’t think I can write a review that’s going to do this book justice. It’s not just because I’m a white woman, and I’m going to miss a thousand little elements that Alicia Elliott has put in her for her fellow Indigenous readers. It’s not just because I read this weeks ago and am behind on writing reviews, so my memory has faded a bit. No, it’s mostly because And Then She Fell…

Although I have never dealt with loss of this magnitude, I understand how it can reshape someone. Bad Cree is a story about the shape of loss, the way grief carves itself into your soul even when you think you haven’t let it. Jessica Johns uses traditional Cree stories to explore the power of family, of trusting yourself, and confronting those parts of yourself that you would prefer not to look at. It’s a “horror”…

My silly “summer of witches” reading stretches into autumn and now (at least with my reviews) winter. Anyway, VenCo was published earlier this year to much acclaim. More importantly, it felt like Kara bait! Cherie Dimaline writing a contemporary fantasy book about witches? Sign me up. The result is as enjoyable as it is uneven, and while I wouldn’t call this one a masterpiece in the same vein as some of her other works, it’s…

Give me more books like this. Directly. Into. My eyeballs. Please. A Snake Falls to Earth satisfied so many cravings I didn’t know I was having! It’s the perfect blend of humour, compassion, tension, and more. Darcie Little Badger impressed me with Elatsoe, but this novel has truly blown me away. It’s going to be one of my favourites for this year—and this has been a good year of reading for me in general.

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This book was the November selection for the Rad Roopa Book Club in which I participate, but it was also one I just really wanted to read soonish (and I’ve purchased a copy as a birthday gift for a friend!). Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives was an important book for me a few years ago. I haven’t read anything from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, but her words here proved just as significant. Rehearsals for Living is…

Although I read fewer murder mysteries these days than I did in my youth, I still have a soft spot. Add in the allure of an alternative world in which Europeans never colonized what we call North America, and … yeah, I’m into it. The Peacekeeper is both a satisfying mystery and a thoughtful work of science fiction, and as such, it works for me on multiple levels.

Thanks to NetGalley and publisher 47North for…

Cherie Dimaline in her author’s note says she didn’t anticipate writing a sequel to The Marrow Thieves, and I understand why. French’s story of finding a new family in a post-apocalyptic world where Indigenous people’s bone marrow is being harvested to give non-Indigenous people back their dreams is quite a powerful tale on its own. There isn’t a need for a sequel … or at least, there wasn’t. Now that Dimaline has given…

Anyone who has read even a smattering of my reviews probably knows a few things about me. First, I am a teacher. Second, I live in Thunder Bay, Canada, which unfortunately is a strong contender for one of the most racist cities in the world. Third, a large proportion of the adult students I teach in this racist city are Indigenous. So over nearly a decade, I’ve done a lot of learning about anti-Indigenous racism…

Every so often one encounters a book that should be required reading for all Canadians. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance is one such book. The moment I cracked open the first chapter, I knew I had to use this in my English class of adult learners (all of whom, at the moment, are Anishinaabeg from Treaty 9 nations). Jesse Wente appears in a documentary, Reel Injun, that I often use in my English…

It’s always satisfying when a trilogy comes to a full-stop close, loose ends wrapped up and most questions answered. In Son of a Trickster, Eden Robinson introduced us to Jared Martin, a Haisla/Heiltsuk boy on the cusp of manhood and also learning about his magical heritage. Robinson could have stopped there—nearly did, by her account, not being much of a series writer—yet she didn’t. Trickster Drift followed Jared’s move to Vancouver, his attempts to…

One of my favourite passages to assign to my English classes is an excerpt from All Our Relations, by Tanya Talaga. In it, she says, “The New World, so to speak, was already an Old World.” I love this excerpt, the facts that Talaga shares as she grounds them in her own search for identity and relations, because it approaches issues of colonialism through a different lens from the one we often see in…

There were many reasons I added Elatsoe to my to-read list when it started making the rounds on Twitter: supernatural mystery, asexual protagonist (which I forgot until I started reading it), Indigenous author and protagonist, etc. It’s great when a novel has so many draws, isn’t just a single thing. Darcie Little Badger’s debut is one part ghost story, one part educational piece about stolen land and colonial ambitions—and all about a main character who…

Empire of Wild is a supernatural thriller that combines the legend of the rogarou with a woman’s search for her missing husband. But it would be a mistake not to recognize that this is also a story about colonialism, about European/settler ideologies clashing with Indigenous ideas of hearth, home, and connection to one’s community and the land. Just as The Marrow Thieves showcases how settlers can go to any length to extract and exploit resources…

You ever read a book and have an epiphany, only for that epiphany to evaporate before you get around to writing it down or telling others? I think that happened here—I think one of Alicia Elliott’s essays in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground inspired an epiphany regarding my relationship with poetry … yet I have totally forgotten the thought now! I even paged through the book again to see if I could recover…

I picked this up several years ago and am finally diving into it. It’s not what I expected—I was looking for something with essays, including personal essays, but this includes a lot more poems and other, shorter and more artistic pieces. IMPACT: Colonialism in Canada is an anthology that makes quite a statement. If it’s what you’re looking for, it’s going to satisfy. In my case, it wasn’t quite what I wanted, but don’t interpret…

Rebecca Roanhorse bottled lightning once, and now she is back to do it again

Storm of Locusts picks up not too long after Trail of Lightning. Maggie agrees to help the Thirsty Boys apprehend the White Locust, a strange cult leader buying up explosives. The mission goes sideways in a big way, and Maggie picks up the pieces and finds herself responsible for a young woman, Ben, with some clan powers, a chip on…

My enjoyment of post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction is waning heavily these days. In particular, I’ve never been a fan of The Road–style stories of survival of small groups. So The Marrow Thieves was fighting an uphill battle, yet Cherie Dimaline manages to make me appreciate the intensity of the experience.

Frenchie is a 15-year-old Indigenous (Anishnaabe, I think?) boy who, after losing his immediate family, falls in with another group of Indigenous survivors on the…

Sometimes the perfect storm occurs. No one decision, no one action or inaction, leads to the outcome—it’s the combination that brings us to disaster. Sometimes, though, that perfect storm happens because of structural racism, as Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry seek to demonstrate in Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City. This is the story of Brian Sinclair: his life, his death in a Winnipeg emergency room,…