Two recent collections, You Were Made for This World: Celebrated Indigenous Voices Speak to Young People and A Steady Brightness of Being: Truths, Wisdom, and Love from Celebrated Indigenous Voices, offer something rare in conversations about Indigenous experiences: a shift away from narratives that confine us to trauma, and toward stories that illuminate healing, agency, and responsibility to one another.
In Tyson Stewart’s debut novel, themes of broken family ties, reconnection, and ethical dilemmas are explored within an Anishinaabe family in northern Ontario.
A Steady Brightness of Being is a moving collection of letters by celebrated Indigenous Voices from across Turtle Island (North America) with titles like “Dear Relative,” “Letter to Clouds,” and “Dreaming, Listening, Belonging.”
This is a particularly raw collection of poetry, I felt, the blank verse tumbling across the page in a cry to be read and felt.
Here, Skeet’s invasion of white space picks up where Eyes Bottle Dark left off and begins with the haunting image of a herd of 191 free-roaming horses found dead, thigh and neck-deep at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation, evaporated through extreme drought caused by “decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate”.
Echo Maker is the portrait of a memorable personality, an insight into his unusual family life and his career in the outdoors, and, almost as a bonus, a detailed account of adventure expeditions based on traditional Aboriginal routes and techniques.
It is, for a lack of a better term, a living explanation, one which comes to the reader in images and feelings, delivered with a logic that is not static but flowing. For me, it was an exhausting but beautiful reading experience, intense and unforgettable.
There is so much to learn here, so many starting points for dialogue, so many opportunities to clear space and grow.
[…] learn about what Indigenous self-government can be, even after hundreds of years of colonialism in North America and the necessary healing and repair that needs to be done.
Featuring Halina St. James, Giles Blunt, John Brady McDonald, and A. Jamali Rad
The REDress project documents the comprehensive use of art installation to bear witness to the rippling pain of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people.
Amazing storytelling from a First Nations perspective of the Dogrib and the Chipewyan peoples, with the Crane family in the middle of a treaty that makes for such a creative and fascinating plot.
Those relationships are described in two treaties, represented in wampum belts and oral stories: the Two Row Wampum and the Covenant Chain. Those treaties, and much else, are the subject of this important, even necessary book.
This is a remarkable book about a remarkable — and ongoing — project.
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