Indigenous Digital Library

About institutional arrangements hold indigenous back economically and which institutions assist them going forward, and considers which norms Indigenous communities hold that inform their priorities and economic behaviour.

Led by a diverse team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous creators, it is a unique multi-media resource developed with Indigenous peoples from across Canada.

A collection of Native American stories of girls becoming women. These are stories from a broad array of tribes and tradtions.

A new work of historical fiction about Sequoyah and the creation of the Cherokee alphabet.

A twelve-year-old Jake Forrest's mother gets a job in a new city, everything changes. He has to move away from the Iroquois reservation he's lived on his entire life and away from the friends he plays lacrosse with. The lacrosse coach and players at his new school in Washington, D.C., believe that winning is everything, and they don't know anything about the ways of his people. As Jake struggles to find a place where he truly belongs, tragedy strikes and he must find out who he really is.

Joseph Bruchac, the award-winning author of Skeleton Man, puts a contemporary spin on Native American lore to create a spine-tingling tale of monsters and darkness.

A twelve-year-old Iroquois boy rethinks his calling after witnessing the arrival of a mystical figure with a message of peace in this historical novel based on the creation of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Louis Nollette, a fifteen-year-old Abenaki Indian, joins the Irish Brigade in 1864 to fight for the Union in the Civil War. Based on the author's great-grandfather; includes author's note.

A tale inspired by the folklore of indigenous Americans.

As the tension between hunter and hunted mounts, Bruchac seamlessly weaves stories within the story, the lore that connects the people to each other and to their heritage, so that the novel becomes not just an archetypal battle of good versus evil but a vivid depiction of traditional New England Indian culture in pre-Columbian times.

The poetic descriptions of the frailty of humans and the beauty of the world from both human and bird perspectives combine with a rich, realistic romance to make a fluid and well-paced novel about love in various forms.

Pocahontas, the beloved daughter of the Powhatan chief, Mamanatowic, is just eleven; but in spite of her age, this astute young girl acts with wisdom and compassion, and plays a fateful, peaceful role in the destinies of two peoples.

Master storytellers Joseph and James Bruchac present a hip and funny take on an Iroquois folktale about the importance of patience, the seasons, and listening to your friends.

A chilling middle grade novel featuring a brave young girl, missing parents, and a terrifying stranger, based on a Native American legend.

In this sequel to the middle grade modern horror classic Skeleton Man, Joseph Bruchac revisits his most terrifying villain yet.

A boy discovers his Native American heritage in this Depression-era. A tale of identity and friendship.

Young Sacajawea has been asked to join Lewis and Clark in their exploration of the American West. As a translator, peacemaker, caretaker, and guide, Sacajawea alone will make the historic journey of Lewis and Clark possible. This captivating novel, which is told in alternating points of view -- by Sacajawea herself and by William Clark--provides an intimate glimpse into what it would have been like to witness firsthand this fascinating time in our history.

Code Talker is about a Navajo (Native American) who uses his language to help win the war. It is World War Two and the United States of America is fighting against Japan. Every code the Americans have used to send secret information has been cracked by the Japanese.

These narratives compare earthdivers in myths who brought dirt up from the watery earth to form land, with present-day earthdivers, mixed bloods, who dive into urban areas connecting dreams to the earth.

Hiroshima Bugi is a dance that exposes the vacillation necessary for the preservation of the vital lies of war and capitalism. Its central rhythm is a reminder of our obligation to live lives of peace and reconciliation, burdens that humanity seems to find impossible." - Dex Westrum, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

In this collection of eleven linked stories, Gerald Vizenor brings back one of his most popular characters, Almost Browne, in full trickster force. Born in the back of a hatchback, almost on the White Earth Reservation, this crossblood storyteller sells blank books -- some autographed (by him) with such names as Isaac Singer, Geoffrey Chaucer, N. Scott Momaday, and Jesus Christ; projects laser demons over the reservation; lectures in the Transethnic Situations Department at the University of California; is crowned Indian Princess of the University of Oklahoma by posing as the "mature" senior Penny Birdwind (who majors in native animations and simulations) and delivering a heartstopping, lip-synched rendition of Peggy Lee's "Fever"; and much more. The stories feature many members of the Browne family, including Grandmother Wink, who can drop an insect in flight with a single puff of her poison breath, and great-uncle Gesture, the acudenturist who creates false teeth with tricky smiles from the Naanabozho Express, the free railroad train he runs on the reservation.

Centered on the volatile issue of the repatriation of Native American skeletal remains, Chancers follows a group of student Solar Dancers who set out to resurrect native remains housed in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gerald Vizenor weaves an engrossing historical portrayal of Native American soldiers in World War I. Blue Ravens is a story of courage in poverty and war, a human story of art and literature from a recognized master of the postwar American novel and one of the most original and outspoken Native voices writing today.

Griever de Hocus, an American, reservation-born tribal trickster, becomes a teacher at Zhou Enlai University in China, but is soon flouting the state bureaucracy like the cosmic trickster common to both Chinese and Native American mythology.

Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes. This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange," winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition. Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.

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Discusses the life and career of the part-Indian author.

Based on memory, court testimony, and other sources, this narrative recounts the experiences of the Chippewa as they met missionaries, capitalists, bureaucrats, and anthropologists.

Gerald Vizenor examines singular acts of resistance, natural reason, literary practices, and other strategies of survivance that evade and subvert the terminal notions of tragedy and victimry. Native Liberty nurtures survivance and creates a sense of cultural and historical presence.

the novel follows the lives of seven mixedblood trickster siblings who began their lives on a reservation in northern Minnesota. Behaving in unpredictable ways, these siblings defy any attempt to fit them within stereotypical notions of the Indian.

Gerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities-the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self.

Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence.

A sweeping, multifaceted tale of a young Native American pulled between the cherished traditions of a heritage on the brink of extinction and an encroaching white culture, Gardens in the Dunes is the powerful story of one woman's quest to reconcile two worlds that are diametrically opposed.

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is a surprising pastiche of Leslie Marmon Silko's non-fiction. Core to these stories is Silko's need to come to grips with a mixed-blood identity which has sometimes isolated her in Pueblo as well as non-Native eyes.

Strongly influenced by Native American storytelling traditions, The Turquoise Ledge becomes a moving and deeply personal contemplation of the enormous spiritual power of the natural world-of what these creatures and landscapes can communicate to us, and how they are all linked.

In the "Introduction" to Storyteller, Silko writes about the history and importance of language and storytelling as culture and as a way to survive. She details the importance of storytelling both for all people and specifically for the Laguna people.

The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors.

Ceremony follows a half-Pueblo, half-white man named Tayo after his return from World War II.Tayo is struggling with the death of his cousin Rocky during the Bataan Death March, and the loss of his uncle Josiah, who died on the Pueblo while Tayo was at war.

Cecelia Capture Welles, an Indian law student and mother of two, is jailed on her thirtieth birthday for drunk driving. Held on an old welfare fraud charge, she reflects back on her life on the reservation in Idaho, her days as an unwed mother in San Francisco, her marriage to a white liberal, and her decision to return to college. This mixed inheritance of ambition and despair brings her to the brink of suicide.

This historic and personal work tells the Native American side, poignant revealing how disastrous the encounter was for the "victors," the last great gathering of Plains Indians under the leadership of Sitting Bull.

James Welch never shied away from depicting the lives of Native Americans damned by destiny and temperament to the margins of society. The Death of Jim Loney is no exception. Jim Loney is a mixed-blood, of white and Indian parentage. Estranged from both communities, he lives a solitary, brooding existence in a small Montana town. His nights are filled with disturbing dreams that haunt his waking hours. Rhea, his lover, cannot console him; Kate, his sister, cannot penetrate his world. In sparse, moving prose, Welch has crafted a riveting tale of disenfranchisement and self-destruction.

About Sylvester Yellow Calf a former reservation basketball star, a promising young lawyer, and a possible congressional candidate. But when a parolee ensnares him in a blackmail scheme, he'll have to decide just who he is, and what he wants.

In Winter in the Blood, Welch tells the story of a nameless, aimless young man whose attempts to track down an absconding girlfriend lead him on an odyssey of beer-drenched encounters, one-night stands, and improbable mock intrigues.

At once tragic and up-lifting, Heartsong tells the story of an Oglala Sioux who travels the extraordinary geographical and cultural distance from tribal life in South Dakota to surviving by his wits on the streets of Marseilles. Marooned after a horse-riding accident, Charging Elk struggles for survival in an alien world. Scared, disoriented and hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape, he becomes embroiled in a shocking murder and love affair that will change his life - beyond his wildest imaginings. Welch has produced a haunting epic of culture shock, discovery and personal redemption.

Greg Sarris weaves together stories from Mabel McKay's life with an account of how he tried, and she resisted, telling her story straight—the white people's way. ... Hearing Mabel McKay's life story, we see that distinctions between material and spiritual and between mundane and magical disappear.

From the River's Edge tells the story of John Tatekeya, a Dakota rancher on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation. This work of fiction is based on an actual trial, and, as in the actual case, the story reveals how race-based biases and injustices permeate relations in South Dakota.

Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner, and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. "Makes clear the myriad ways that native voices are routinely silenced, ignored, and overwhelmed." This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual.

Irvin Morris's first book, From the Glittering World: A Navajo Story, tells about a people's capacity to survive beyond unimaginably real and continuing evil. The book begins at the beginning, with Morris's retelling of the Navajo emergence story.

Coyote is featured in myths of the Chemehuevi, Paiute, Shoshone and Ute peoples. In this region most of the stories feature him as a malevolent and lecherous trickster. However, there are some echoes of his divine role as expressed in the myths of California, in particular obtaining fire for the people.

In Why I Am a Pagan, Zitkala-Sa depicts vividly how the voice of the white-American majority has swallowed the one of the Native-American community. Interestingly, at the same time, that voice of the American aborigines plays as their finest weapon to defend against the assimilation of America.

In this short story, A Warrior's Daughter (1921), Zitkala-Sa presents Tusee as the daughter of a warrior who is the chief in his Native American tribe. Tusee is a beautiful girl, but she is brave as her father. Further, when there is a war, her lover is captured by the enemies of the tribe.

Zitkála-Šá reflects on her experience teaching in an Indian school after leaving college. The section “My First Day” describes how she was ill when she first arrived at the school. She notes the school’s sparse look and recalls meeting the school director. He calls her “the little Indian girl,” leaving Zitkála-Šá feeling even more exhausted.

The despondency and isolation Zitkala-Sa felt at the school as an outsider among white people and her urges of rebellion and revenge represent the despair and anger of all Native Americans under white oppression in her time.

Old Indian Legends is a collection of Sioux stories retold by the Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Sa and published in 1901. Concerned about the effect of assimilation on the tribe's children, she wanted to preserve the traditional stories of her people.

Its a thought-provoking collection of searing prose from a Sioux woman that covers race, identity, assimilation, and perceptions of Native American culture.

American Indian Stories is a collection of childhood stories, allegorical fictions and essays. First published in 1921, American Indian Stories details the hardships encountered by Zitkala-Ša and other Native Americans in the missionary and manual labour schools.

A captivating anthology of fiction, prose, and poetry. Contributors include Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and Diane Glancy.

“The Death of Sitting Bear” is a celebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief.

In Earth Keeper: Reflections on an American Land, Momaday reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people and the person he is.

It is about the journey of Momaday's Kiowa ancestors from their ancient beginnings in the Montana area to their final war and surrender to the United States Cavalry at Fort Sill, and subsequent resettlement near Rainy Mountain, Oklahoma.

It narrates, from several different points of view, the dilemma of a young man returning home to his Kiowa pueblo after a stint in the U.S. Army. The book won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Circles of Time documents the experiences of Aboriginal people, their history and recent negotiations in Ontario, and provides insight into the historiography of the treaty-making process, particularly in the last quarter-century. Controversial decisions such as the Temagami case and Oka are detailed, and McNab, who draws on archival sources that support oral history, provides a new perspective on land claims issues. Such compelling background information will be invaluable to anyone endeavoring to understand the origin and the current controversies surrounding Aboriginal land and treaty rights, and will clarify the reasons for resistance. Above all, this book will remind us we must never forget that this history belongs to Aboriginal people. Turtle Island is their place, and their oral history can no longer be ignored.

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In the wake of her elderly mother's tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering.

courageous account of what it takes to grow into one's self and one's Metis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles.

Children of the Day opens on a June morning in 1953, when Sara Vandal, convinced that her husband has been having a decades-long affair, decides that she is too sick to get out of bed. With ten children in the house (and a possible eleventh on the way), this decision sets off a day of chaos, reflection and near disaster for the Vandal family.

Traces four generations of the Lafrenière family in the fictional small town of Agassiz, Manitoba, from the time of the great flood of 1950 to the present. There is Mika, the matriarch of the family, tired of being a mother to her children, and her Métis husband, Maurice, who is by turns fascinated and ashamed of his Native heritage. Their marriage has long been an uneasy truce. As their children grow up to pursue their own lives, the frustrations of one generation will collide with the dreams of another, and the past will leave an indelible mark on all that is to come.

The Chrome Suite is an emotionally charged novel of darkness and light. Sandra Birdsell's unforgettable characters are portrayed as complex, fallible beings and, through them, she explores the private, sometimes cruel realm of relationships and the universal quest for an often elusive self-acceptance.

On a chilly early morning in late spring, Joe Beaudry and his wife, Laurie, wake up in circumstances that would challenge saints: they are on the lam in a stolen motorhome on the edge of a Walmart parking lot in Regina, Saskatchewan. They've gone bust, spectacularly: lost the house that was Joe's gift from his dad, lost the business Joe started when he got married, and stuck his ancient father in a nursing home in Winnipeg so they could flee their creditors.

Katherine (Katya) Vogt is now an old woman living in Winnipeg, but the story of how she and her family came to Canada begins in Russia in 1910. Here they lived in a world bounded by the prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of the Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, Katya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family.

Baker pushes readers to reconsider their desire for resolution. Eschewing the easy, the neat, the smoothed over, allows us to consider the things about ourselves we might not like. There's a political dimension to this. One thread running through this book is the threat of environmental collapse - drought, massive bee death, dwindling salmon stock - and humans' awkward interventions.

This book grew out of the experiences of life and political struggle under colonization in Metis and other Aboriginal communities in Canada. It provides a uniquely Aboriginal socio-political perspective on the effects of colonization on Aboriginal peoples in Canada.

In Prison of Grass Adams objects to the popular historical notion that Natives were warring savages, without government, seeking to be civilized. He contrasts the official history found in the federal government's documents with the unpublished history of the Indian and Métis people.

the story of a young Inuit hunter who happens upon a camp in grave peril.

A memoir of an Inuvialuit girl searching for her true self when she returns from residential school. Coming ashore, Margaret spots her family, but her mother barely recognizes her, screaming, "Not my girl." Margaret realizes she is now marked as an outsider. She has forgotten the language and stories of her people, and she can’t even stomach the food her mother prepares.

Fatty Legs (2010) is a memoir about a young Inuvialuit girl's two years at a religious residential school. It is based on the experiences of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, who cowrote the novel with her daughter-in-law Christy Jordan-Fenton.

the story of Kamik, a young hero who comes to manhood while on a perilous hunt for a wounded polar bear. In this astonishing tale of a people struggling for survival in a brutal environment, Patsauq describes a life in the Canadian Arctic as one that is reliant on cooperation and vigilance.

This story explores the Inuit belief that the Northern Lights are the souls of the dead, playing soccer in the sky.

the story of Mini Aodla Freeman's experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic.

Larry leads the reader through his life as a High Arctic Exile—through broken promises, a decades-long fight to return home, and a life between two worlds as southern culture begins to encroach on Inuit traditions.

Peter Pitseolak's account of his life in People from Our Side shows how these developments changed the Inuit existence forever. The text consists of Peter Pitseolak's manuscript -- originally written in syllabics -- and a narrative drawn from interviews conducted by Dorothy Eber with the help of young Inuit interpreters.

Through 48 short but sequential episodes, Sanaaq tells the story of an extended Inuit family and the various activities—such as making and repairing clothing, building seasonal ice shelters, gathering bird eggs, and hunting seals—that make up their day-to-day, semi-nomadic existence living almost entirely off the land apart. The novel is loosely set around the time of the early 1950s,[8] when the Inuit of Kangirsujuaq had regular but limited contact with Qallunaat, or Euro-Canadians

Combination of twenty short stories that uniquely combined both visual and written imagery to illustrate the history of the Arctic in the mythological world of the Inuit people.

Tells the story of the unsolved murder of indigenous activists, police investigation misconduct, and the community who tracked down the clues which officials failed to uncover.

Antane Kapesh wrote to preserve and share her culture, experience, and knowledge, all of which, she felt, were disappearing at an alarming rate because many Elders – like herself – were aged or dying. She wanted to publicly denounce the conditions in which she and the Innu were made to live, and to address the changes she was witnessing due to land dispossession and loss of hunting territory, police brutality, and the effects of the residential school system.

Since first contact, Natives and newcomers have been involved in an increasingly complex struggle over power and identity. Modern “Indian wars” are fought over land and treaty rights, artistic appropriation, and academic analysis, while Native communities struggle among themselves over membership, money, and cultural meaning. In cultural and political arenas across North America, Natives enact and newcomers protest issues of traditionalism, sovereignty, and self-determination. In these struggles over domination and resistance, over different ideologies and Indian identities, neither Natives nor other North Americans recognize the significance of being rooted together in history and culture, or how representations of “Indianness” set them in opposition to each other.

When freelance journalist Alexandra Shimo arrives in Kashechewan, a fly-in, northern Ontario reserve, to investigate rumours of a fabricated water crisis and document its deplorable living conditions, she finds herself drawn into the troubles of the reserve.

Warrior Life is an unflinching critique of the colonial project that is Canada and a rallying cry for Indigenous Peoples and allies alike to forge a path toward decolonial future through resistance and resurgence.

Beginning with an historic overview of legislative enactments defining Indian status and their impact on First Nations, the author examines contemporary court rulings dealing with Aboriginal rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in relation to Indigenous identity.

This book masterfully portrays how a community looks to the past for guidance and comfort while fearing a future of poverty and shame. This is the debut novel from Adam Garnet Jones, based on the award-winning film of the same name.

historically accurate graphic portrayal of Indigenous resistance to the European colonization of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish invasion under Christopher Columbus and ending with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario in 2006.

An alternative and unorthodox view of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans is offered in this concise history. Eurocentric studies of the conquest of the Americas present colonization as a civilizing force for good, and the native populations as primitive or worse. Colonization is seen as a mutually beneficial process, in which "civilization” was brought to the natives who in return shared their land and cultures. The opposing historical camp views colonization as a form of genocide in which the native populations were passive victims overwhelmed by European military power. In this fresh examination, an activist and historian of native descent argues that the colonial powers met resistance from the indigenous inhabitants and that these confrontations shaped the forms and extent of colonialism. This account encompasses North and South America, the development of nation-states, and the resurgence of indigenous resistance in the post-World War II era.

Assi in innu means Earth. Poetry of public utility that this Manifesto that cries out with one voice revolution and love. If the word was given to the peoples of the First Nations, it would be like Assi, the dream land of these women and men who lurk in their song the words dignity, hope and freedom.

Naomi Fontaine writes a long letter to Shuni, a Quebecer who came to her community to help the Innu. She talks to him, evoking the history, traditions and culture of the Innu. She tells him the story of his mother, father, son and the doubt that can sink into colonized hearts. It tells the story of the daily struggle to be yourself.

Naomi Fontaine, herself an Innu, wrote this novel (in French) at the age of twenty-three; with grace and perfect pitch, she depicts a community of nomadic hunters and fishers, and of hard-working mothers and their children, enduring a harsh, sometimes cruel reality with quiet dignity.

About a young teacher’s return to her remote Innu community transforms the lives of her students, reminding us of the importance of hope in the face of despair

This memoir chronicles the author's experiences growing up on the Okanese First Nation reservation, opening up her experience to outsiders. Dumont manages to convey the mindset of herself as a little girl living in that environment, and she does it with a lot of humour.

This collection of short stories by Dawn Dumont follows the friendships of four interconnected Indigenous people over two decades against the cultural, political and historical backdrop of the 90s and early 2000s.

In a world without time and steeped in ceremony and magic, walks a chosen few who hold an ancient power: the Grey Eyes. True stewards of the land, the Grey Eyes use their magic to maintain harmony and keep evil at bay. With only one elderly Grey-Eye left in the village of the Nehiyawak, the birth of a new Grey-Eyed boy promises a renewed line of defence against their only foe: the menacing Red-Eyes, whose name is rarely spoken but whose presence is ever felt.

“This night in Oppenheimer Park Dan asked me to shit-kick this chick in the face as she owed money and I said no because I didn’t know who she was and I wasn’t about to play with fire so he sat on the bench then stood up and did a flying kick twice to her chin and she convulsed and passed out he said he didn’t want to spill blood because she had HIV...” —“Tales”  

Dissecting herself and the life she once knew living a transient life that included time spent in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside as a bonafide drug addict, Blanchard writes plainly about violence, drug use and sex work in Fresh Pack of Smokes, offering insight into an often overlooked or misunderstood world.

In this poetry collection, Joséphine Bacon challenges traditional notions of culture and perception, landscape and wilderness, the limits of experience, and the nature of human being.