All Our Relations


Book Description

How Native American history can guide us today: “Presents strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.” —Whole Earth Written by a former Green Party vice-presidential candidate who was once listed among “America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty” by Time magazine, this thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. “Moving and often beautiful prose.” —Ralph Nader “Thoroughly researched and convincingly written.” —Choice




All Our Relations US Edition


Book Description

Winner, 2024 Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize, for the whole of her work Finalist, 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding Finalist, 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Tanya Talaga, the bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples — youth suicide. “Talaga’s research is meticulous and her journalistic style is crisp and uncompromising. She brings each story to life, skillfully weaving the stories of the youths’ lives, deaths, and families together with sharp analysis... The book is heartbreaking and infuriating, both an important testament to the need for change and a call to action.” — Publishers Weekly *Starred Review* “Talaga has crafted an urgent and unshakable portrait of the horrors faced by Indigenous teens going to school in Thunder Bay, Ontario... Talaga’s incisive research and breathtaking storytelling could bring this community one step closer to the healing it deserves.” — Booklist *Starred Review* In this urgent and incisive work, bestselling and award-winning author Tanya Talaga explores the alarming rise of youth suicide in Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health — income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services — leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism. Based on her Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series, All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.




All Our Relations


Book Description

The world’s Indigenous communities are fighting to live and dying too young. In this vital and incisive work, Tanya Talaga explores intergenerational trauma and the alarming rise of youth suicide. From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonised nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health — income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services — leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism, from the Occupation of Alcatraz led by the Indians of All Tribes, to the Northern Ontario Stirland Lake Quiet Riot, to the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which united Indigenous Nations from across Turtle Island in solidarity. All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.




All My Relations


Book Description

In All My Relations, Susan Chernak McElroy offers ten poignant stories examining such concepts as ownership, naming and unnaming things, interpreting signs and language, and animals as mirrors of the soul. In these pages, you’ll meet Fashion, the old, arthritic mare who reminds the author of the joys of giving for its own sake; Kulu, the zoo chimpanzee who adopts the author as a surrogate mother and demonstrates the heartbreaking realities of captivity; and a host of other critters who will capture your heart and stir your soul. The meditations and practices that accompany the stories will guide you toward a deeper connection with both the animal world and your own stories.




Seven Fallen Feathers


Book Description

Winner, 2017 Shaughnessy Cohen Writers' Trust Prize for Political Writing Winner, 2017 RBC Taylor Prize Winner, 2017 First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Winner, 2024 Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize, for the whole of her work Finalist, 2017 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction The groundbreaking and multiple award-winning national bestseller work about systemic racism, education, the failure of the policing and justice systems, and Indigenous rights by Tanya Talaga. Over the span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning author Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.




Biodiversity and Native America


Book Description

Exploring the relationship between Native Americans and the natural world, Biodiversity and Native America questions the widespread view that indigenous peoples had minimal ecological impact in North America. Introducing a variety of perspectives - ethnopharmacological, ethnographic, archaeological, and biological - this volume shows that Native Americans were active managers of natural ecological systems. The book covers groups from the sophisticated agriculturalists of the Mississippi River drainage region to the low-density hunter-gatherers of arid western North America. This book allows readers to develop accurate restoration, management, and conservation models through a thorough knowledge of native peoples’ ecological history and dynamics. It also illustrates how indigenous peoples affected environmental patterns and processes, improving crop diversity and agricultural patterns.




"Our Relations...the Mixed Bloods"


Book Description

In the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, "mixed bloods" were a class of people living within changing indigenous communities. As such, they were considered in treaties signed between the tribal nations and the federal government. Larry Nesper focuses on the implementation and long-term effects of the mixed-blood provision of the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa of Wisconsin. That treaty not only ceded lands and created the Ojibwe Indian reservations in the region, it also entitled hundreds of "mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior," as they appear in this treaty, to locate parcels of land in the ceded territories. However, quickly dispossessed of their entitlement, the treaty provision effectively capitalized the first mining companies in Wisconsin, initiating the period of non-renewable resource extraction that changed the demography, ecology, and potential future for the region for both natives and non-natives. With the influx of Euro-Americans onto these lands, conflicts over belonging and difference, as well as community leadership, proliferated on these new reservations well into the twentieth century. This book reveals the tensions between emergent racial ideology and the resilience of kinship that shaped the historical trajectory of regional tribal society to the present.




All Our Relatives


Book Description

Discusses Lakota ceremonies and prayers that we all share in Creation of people, birds, animals, plants, trees, rocks, and rivers.




All My Relations


Book Description

Set against the stark but seductive landscape of the American Southwest, the stories in All My Relations explore the inner landscape of mind and heart, where charting the simplest course is subject to a complex constellation of relationships. In the title story of the collection, a Pima Indian hires on with a rancher in an attempt to quit drinking and to win back the wife and son who have left him. His efforts to master land and horses and to bake the perfect cake mirror his efforts to subdue his own demons and to embrace a peaceful domesticity. In "The Big Bang and the Good House", Tony, a former drug dealer, pits his urge toward chaos against the orderly pleasures of marriage, finally yielding to the solidity and spaciousness of domestic love: "I feel myself gathering weight, density. Cautiously, I allow myself to inhabit this Good House, which surprisingly fits like my own body". Julia, the aging protagonist of "Simplifying", risream house with their own hands, and eventually they are forced to leave behind the illusion of safety and permanence: "Once the three had imagined themselves as a house on a hill, dug into stone with the tenacity of a lion. Now they sat tensely in canvas-backed chairs stretched like slingshots. They talked cautiously, with encouragement, hoping for the return of pleasure". Embodying the transience and openness of the New West, the characters in All My Relations reinvent themselves, even as they struggle with the age-old, perilous necessity of loving.




Last Standing Woman


Book Description

Born at the turn of the 21st century, The Storyteller, also known as Ishkwegaabawiikwe (Last Standing Woman), carries her people’s past within her memories. The White Earth Anishinaabe people have lived on the same land for over a thousand years. Among the towering white pines and rolling hills, the people of each generation are born, live out their lives, and are buried. The arrival of European missionaries changes the community forever. Government policies begin to rob the people of their land, piece by piece. Missionaries and Indian agents work to outlaw ceremonies the Anishinaabeg have practised for centuries. Grave-robbing anthropologists dig up ancestors and whisk them away to museums as artifacts. Logging operations destroy traditional sources of food, pushing the White Earth people to the brink of starvation. Battling addiction, violence, and corruption, each member of White Earth must find their own path of resistance as they struggle to reclaim stewardship of their land, bring their ancestors home, and stay connected to their culture and to each other. In this highly anticipated 25th anniversary edition of her debut novel, Winona LaDuke weaves a nonlinear narrative of struggle and triumph, resistance and resilience, spanning seven generations from the 1800s to the early 2000s.