Native Peoples

★ Permanent Astonishment

Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Permanent Astonishment is playwright and novelist Tomson Highway’s brilliant, funny, beautiful account of his childhood in both Canada’s remote North and at the Guy Hill ... Read More »

October 29, 2021 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Native Peoples, Reviews

★ Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada

By Samir Shaheen-Hussain

Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting for a Hand to Hold explores how a policy in Quebec disallowing Indigenous parents to accompany their sick children on medevac flights resulted in significant, actively constructed barriers to care. These barriers ... Read More »

December 14, 2020 | Filed under: Native Peoples, Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

★ A History of My Brief Body

By Billy-Ray Belcourt

In his highly anticipated memoir, Billy-Ray Belcourt – the youngest winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize – proves yet again his astonishing linguistic precision and beauty. Reimagining the form and structure of a conventional memoir, ... Read More »

September 24, 2020 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Native Peoples, Reviews

★ From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way

By Jesse Thistle

Jesse Thistle has lived a hard life. A descendent of Saskatchewan’s Michif “road allowance” people (who lived on small strips of land between homesteads that were unused by the Crown), his parents were not able ... Read More »

July 29, 2019 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Native Peoples, Reviews

Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice: The Gerald Stanley and Colten Boushie Case

By Kent Roach

Settler or Indigenous, it’s impossible to approach Kent Roach’s Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice: The Gerald Stanley and Colten Boushie Case without baggage. As an Indigenous person, this might include still-fresh traumas – including the injury ... Read More »

February 25, 2019 | Filed under: Native Peoples, Politics & Current Affairs

★ Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

By Daniel Heath Justice

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve no doubt encountered ongoing public conversations about Indigenous writing and storytelling. What is it? Whom should we read? And perhaps the most contentious debate: who gets to ... Read More »

May 3, 2018 | Filed under: Native Peoples, Politics & Current Affairs

★ Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic

By Kenn Harper

On March 15, 1920, Robert Janes was shot and killed on Baffin Island. The man who killed him was Nuqallaq, an Inuk. Neither Nuqallaq nor the witnesses to the killing ever denied these basic facts. ... Read More »

November 15, 2017 | Filed under: History, Native Peoples

★ Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations

By Richard Wagamese

The theme of healing is present in two recent non-fiction books by indigenous authors. But each author approaches the process of healing, and the question of what needs to be healed in the first place, ... Read More »

January 30, 2017 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Native Peoples