September 30 marks the annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, inviting us to acknowledge and reflect on the difficult chapters of our history and the impact of their lasting legacy—both visible and invisible—in today’s society.
This day is also an opportunity to honour the resilience, strength, and enduring culture of our Indigenous communities. It is through the present that the past and the future can convene into stories that inspire a more hopeful path forward, and it is in this spirit that we have compiled nine reads that not only shed light on the painful truths of the past but also celebrate the boundless joy, love and creativity of Indigenous voices and experiences.
POETRY
Old Gods by Conor Kerr (Harbour Publishing)
Métis Ukrainian writer Conor Kerr’s sharp and incisive poems move restlessly across landscapes and time: cars streak through the night, racing with coyotes and roving across the land; buses travel from town to town, from one memory to another, from past to present; friends and lovers search for each other on Instagram and find nothing. And always the natural world travels alongside: the watching magpies, woodpeckers and cedar waxwings, the coyotes and porcupines. Family is the crisp wings of mallard ducks flying at dawn, just as it is a game of crib, a Mario Kart race, a dance party.
Old Gods is Kerr’s artistry in rich, constant motion. Impossible to render simple and solitary, defying colonialism on the Prairies and situating readers in the Métis mindset: the old gods of the land are alive within the rivers, the birds, the hills, and the prairies that surround us—and they will always be here.
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Best Of Chief Dan George (Hancock House)
This collection is exactly as it’s titled: the very best of Chief Dan George, an accomplished performer, poet, philosopher, and champion of First Nations peoples. Best of Chief Dan George combines his two bestsellers My Heart Soars and My Spirit Soars in one volume, eloquently illustrated throughout by Helmut Hirnschall. Included in this edition is Chief Dan George’s now famous Lament for Confederation, for which he gained national recognition in 1967.
Poetic and spiritual, this is, in the words of Ron MacIsaac, a “delightful, must-have book” written by “a foremost Canadian philosopher, whose works should and will be studied for future generations of scholars. [Chief Dan George] puts the position of our Natives and their invaders in a way that calls out for understanding and immediate rectification.”
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COLLECTED WRITING
Love After The End, edited by Joshua Whitehead (Arsenal Pulp Press)
From bioengineered AI rats and virtual reality to the very bending of space-time continuums, this bold and groundbreaking Lambda Award-winning anthology, edited by Joshua Whitehead, showcases in vivid colour the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms of all our utopic dreams.
Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom, each with their own visionary story exploring how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness.
Credited by Booklist as “a welcome breath of fresh air in the often hyperindividualist, survivalist subgenre of postapocalyptic fiction,” Love After The End is essential reading for anyone interested in confronting the tendril-like effects of colonialism while also seeing the potential that lies beyond the apocalyptic as we embrace and amplify the beauty and joy of Indigenous love.
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In Our Own Aboriginal Voice (Rebel Mountain Press)
In this heartrending collection of work from Aboriginal writers and artists in BC, art and photography give shape to a colourful gradient of writings contributed by, as Navigator newspaper Managing Editor Molly Barrieau describes, “those who have suppressed their desires to see their work on the page.” This includes both a teenager and a man serving a life prison sentence, an Elder’s prayer to Mother Earth and an account of seventh grade students meeting weekly to create the Indigenous drums on the cover of this collection, spanning the breadth of Indigenous experience and reminding us of the ways that reconciliation can take on different shapes and definitions in each individual.
“To be Native in a world continually fighting my very existence is heartache enough,” sings one poem, and with truly singular short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scripts, each piece within the pages of In Our Own Aboriginal Voice is an unflinching and heartfelt ode to that heartache. This anthology is a letter to the past—one that does not deny its contributors the complexities that remain in the present, nor the love that lies still in the future.
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The Journey Forward, Novellas On Reconciliation by Richard Van Camp & Monique Gray Smith (McKellar & Martin)
Two captivating stories on reconciliation, two beautiful covers, all in one unforgettable “flipbook” from award-winning authors Richard Van Camp and Monique Gray Smith. The Journey Forward, Novellas On Reconciliation binds together two novellas, giving readers, educators, parents, caregivers, and more the chance to share and experience two points-of-view on Residential schools and reconciliation in one compelling package.
With Tessa Macintosh’s wonderful photographs featured on the cover and interior, Richard Van Camp’s When We Play Our Drums, They Sing! deftly navigates the story of 12-year-old Dene Cho, who is angry that his people are losing their language, traditions, and ways of being. Elder Snowbird is there to answer some of Dene Cho’s questions, and to share their history including the impact Residential schools continue to have on their people. It is through this conversation with Snowbird that Dene Cho begins to find himself, and begins to realize that understanding the past can ultimately change the future.
Lucy & Lola by Monique Gray Smith, on the other hand, tackles what it means to be intergenerational survivors as it follows a pair of 11-year-old twins heading to Gabriola Island to spend the summer with their grandmother. While their mother studies for the bar exam, Lucy and Lola begin to learn about residential schools from their Kookum, and the result is a spellbinding novella only buoyed by stunning art from award-winning illustrator Julie Flett.
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NONFICTION
Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls by Angela Sterritt (Greystone Books)
As a Gitxsan teenager kicked out of the family home and living on the street, Angela Sterritt inhabited places that are infamous today for being communities where women have gone missing or been murdered. But she navigated the street, group homes, and SROs to finally find her place in journalism and academic excellence at university, relying entirely on her own strength, resilience, and creativity along with the support of her ancestors and community to find her way.
Unbroken is Steritt’s memoir mapping those years, shared alongside investigative reporting into cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. It is one survivor’s story against all odds, but also a thorough look at how colonialism and racism led to a society where Sterritt struggled to survive as a young person, and where the lives of Indigenous women and girls are ignored and devalued.
“She could have been me,” Sterritt acknowledges today, and her empathy for victims, survivors, and families drives her present-day investigations into the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Yet this visibility and responsibility also places her in a position of power—power to demand accountability from the media and the public, to expose racism, to show that there is much work to do on the path towards understanding the truth.
Above all, in this brilliant debut from an award-winning journalist, Sterritt proves that the strength and brilliance of Indigenous women is unbroken, and that together, they can build lives of joy and abundance.
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A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend by Ralph Maud (Talonbooks)
This valuable reference tool by Ralph Maud examines work by luminaries of British Columbia field research—Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness—and evaluates their role in the building of Indian folklore. In conjunction, other scholars, amateurs and Indigenous informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this book a comprehensive survey of myth collecting in BC as it aims to reveal the true extent of this neglected body of world literature and sort out the more valuable texts from those damaged in transmission.
A Guide to BC Indian Myth and Legend is, in the words of the Vancouver Sun, “important not for what it might tell us about [Indigenous] culture in the past, but for what these myths may tell us about our society.” It is especially essential reading for beginning or advanced students of anthropology, providing an absorbing look at the research process itself and the vulnerable ways we handle information inside and outside academia.
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Back to the Red Road by Florence Kaefer & Edward Gamblin (Caitlin Press)
Edward Gamblin was five when he was brought to the Norway House Indian Residential School of Manitoba. Florence Kaefer was nineteen when she, in 1954, accepted a job as a teacher at Norway House. Unaware of the difficult conditions the students were enduring, Florence remembers Edward as a shy and polite young boy, a memory she retains years after Norway House closed in 1967.
Many years later, the two lives overlap once more in the unlikeliest of ways: Florence, now a widow on a trip from Vancouver to Manitoba, discovers the music of a now grown-up and successful Edward, whose career gives him the opportunity to write songs about the many political issues facing Indigenous people in Canada. Florence is captivated by his voice—and at the same time shocked to hear him singing about the abuse he and the other children had been subjected to at Norway House.
Motivated to apologize on behalf of the school and her colleagues, Florence contacted Edward. Back to the Red Road is their story, a dual account both heartfelt and heartbreaking as Edward begins to share his painful truths with his family, Florence, and the media. Yet this is more than their story: it is a roadmap for how healing can begin, one conversation, one relationship, one apology at a time.
As Edward tells Florence, “Reconciliation will not be one grand, finite act. It will be a multitude of small acts and gestures played out between individuals.”
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Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for Her Grandmother by Norma Dunning (Douglas and McIntyre)
In 2001, Governor General’s Award winner Dr. Norma Dunning applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary program, requesting enrolment to legally solidify her existence as an Inuk woman. But in the process, she was faced with a question she could not answer, tied to a colonial institution retired decades ago: “What was your disc number?”
Still haunted by this question years later, Dunning took it upon herself to reach out to Inuit community members who experienced the Eskimo Identification Tag System first-hand, providing vital perspective and nuance to the scant records available on the subject. Written with incisive detail and passion, Dunning provides readers with a comprehensive look into a bureaucracy sustained by the Canadian government for over thirty years, neglected by history books but with lasting echoes revealed in Dunning’s intimate interviews with affected community members. Not one government has taken responsibility or apologized for the E-number system to date—a symbol of the blatant dehumanizing treatment of the smallest Indigenous population in Canada.
A necessary and timely offering, Kinauvit? provides a critical record and response to a significant piece of Canadian history, collecting years of research, interviews, and personal stories from an important voice in literature.
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