Annie Muktuk and Other Stories


Book Description

I woke up with Moses Henry’s boot holding open my jaw and my right eye was looking into his gun barrel. I heard the slow words, “Take. It. Back.” I know one thing about Moses Henry; he means business when he means business. I took it back and for the last eight months I have not uttered Annie Mukluk’s name. In strolls Annie Mukluk in all her mukiness glory. Tonight she has gone traditional. Her long black hair is wrapped in intu’dlit braids. Only my mom still does that. She’s got mukluks, real mukluks on and she’s wearing the old-style caribou parka. It must be something her grandma gave her. No one makes that anymore. She’s got the faint black eyeliner showing off those brown eyes and to top off her face she’s put pretend face tattooing on. We all know it’ll wash out tomorrow. — from "Annie Muktuk" When Sedna feels the urge, she reaches out from the Land of the Dead to where Kakoot waits in hospital to depart from the Land of the Living. What ensues is a struggle for life and death and identity. In “Kakoot” and throughout this audacious collection of short stories, Norma Dunning makes the interplay between contemporary realities and experiences and Inuit cosmology seem deceptively easy. The stories are raucous and funny and resonate with raw honesty. Each eye-opening narrative twist in Annie Muktuk and Other Stories challenges readers’ perceptions of who Inuit people are.




We Have Never Lived On Earth


Book Description

Kasia Van Schaik’s debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte’s town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. The stories traverse the most intimate and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2023.




This is How You Start to Disappear


Book Description

These twelve new short stories from Astrid Blodgett explore the consequences of grief and denial and single moments that change perceptions, lives, and attachments forever. Crisp prose and unexpected plot twists move relatable characters through vivid outdoor settings and interior depths. A child negotiates adult behaviour when an injured dog is put down. An older sister bribes a younger one to go on her first date. A family canoe trip launches from Disaster Point. A woman wants to hurl her granddaughter’s birthday cake out the window. This Is How You Start to Disappear shows all the heartbreaking ways we evolve when coping with change or trauma.




Introduction to Determinants of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples’ Health in Canada


Book Description

This critical new volume to the field of health studies offers an introductory overview of the determinants of health for Indigenous Peoples in Canada, while cultivating an understanding of the presence of coloniality in health care and how it determines First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples’ health and well-being.The text is broken down into the What, Where, Who, and How, and each part contains a comprehensive and holistic approach to understanding the many factors, historical and contemporary, that are significant in shaping the life and health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and beyond. Comprising wisdoms from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders, knowledge holders, artists, activists, clinicians, health researchers, students, and youth, this book offers practical insights and applied knowledge about combating coloniality and transforming health care systems in Canada. Compiled by experienced editors associated with the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, Introduction to Determinants of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples’ Health in Canada draws together the work and writings of primarily Indigenous authors, including academics, community leaders, and health care practitioners. This accessible and timely introduction is a vital undergraduate resource, and invaluable for introducing key concepts and ideas to students new to the field. FEATURES: - written in accessible, engaging language, with pertinent context for theory, to garner a more thorough understanding of core concepts - showcases poetry and visual art by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis artists - contains additional pedagogical features, including questions for critical thought, a glossary of terms, figures, charts, tables, and comprehensive part introductions




Me Tomorrow


Book Description

First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists, activists, educators and writers, youth and elders come together to envision Indigenous futures in Canada and around the world. Discussing everything from language renewal to sci-fi, this collection is a powerful and important expression of imagination rooted in social critique, cultural experience, traditional knowledge, activism and the multifaceted experiences of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. In Me Tomorrow... Darrel J. McLeod, Cree author from Treaty-8 territory in Northern Alberta, blends the four elements of the Indigenous cosmovision with the four directions of the medicine wheel to create a prayer for the power, strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples. Autumn Peltier, Anishinaabe water-rights activist, tells the origin story of her present and future career in advocacy—and how the nine months she spent in her mother’s womb formed her first water teaching. When the water breaks, like snow melting in the spring, new life comes. Lee Maracle, acclaimed Stó:lō Nation author and educator, reflects on cultural revival—imagining a future a century from now in which Indigenous people are more united than ever before. Other essayists include Cyndy and Makwa Baskin, Norma Dunning, Shalan Joudry, Shelley Knott-Fife, Tracie Léost, Stephanie Peltier, Romeo Saganash, Drew Hayden Taylor and Raymond Yakeleya. For readers who want to imagine the future, and to cultivate a better one, Me Tomorrow is a journey through the visions generously offered by a diverse group of Indigenous thinkers.




Uumajursiutik unaatuinnamut / Hunter with Harpoon / Chasseur au harpon


Book Description

Fifty years ago, Markoosie Patsauq, then a bush pilot in his late twenties living in the tiny, isolated High Arctic community of Resolute, spent his spare time quietly writing a story that effectively emerged as the first Indigenous novel released in Canada. Published in English under the title Harpoon of the Hunter in 1970 by McGill-Queen's University Press, that version of the story was Patsauq's own adaptation. In the years that followed the widely acclaimed English edition was translated into many different languages, but what has remained obscured until the present day is the Inuktitut text originally produced by the author. In collaboration with Patsauq, Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu have foregrounded the original Inuktitut text to inform their translations into both English and French. This critical edition, complete with the story in both Inuktitut syllabics and Latin script, utilizes the author's handwritten manuscript as well as interviews with Patsauq to produce a new, rigorous examination of this literary and cultural milestone. This work also includes the first comprehensive account of the critical response to his writing while underscoring the way the much-altered English adaptation from 1970 shaped that response. A momentous achievement that situates a new classic in the twenty-first century, Hunter with Harpoon brings readers back to the roots of Markoosie Patsauq's Inuit story to experience it as it was originally written.




Tainna


Book Description

Drawing on both lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning brings together six powerful new short stories centred on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Ranging from homeless to extravagantly wealthy, from spiritual to jaded, young to elderly, and even from alive to deceased, Dunning’s characters are united by shared feelings of alienation, displacement and loneliness resulting from their experiences in southern Canada. In Tainna—meaning “the unseen ones” and pronounced Da‐e‐nn‐a—a fraught reunion between sisters Sila and Amak ends in an uneasy understanding. From the spirit realm, Chevy Bass watches over his imperilled grandson, Kunak. And in the title story, the broken-hearted Bunny wanders onto a golf course on a freezing night, when a flock of geese stand vigil until her body is discovered by a kind stranger. Norma Dunning’s masterful storytelling uses humour and incisive detail to create compelling characters who discover themselves in a hostile land where prejudice, misogyny and inequity are most often found hidden in plain sight. There, they must rely on their wits, artistic talent, senses of humour and spirituality for survival; and there, too, they find solace in shining moments of reconnection with their families and communities.







Book Review Index


Book Description

Every 3rd issue is a quarterly cumulation.