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30 September 2021 marks the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. To honour this day of reflection and action we have compiled a by no means exhaustive list of titles reflecting the unique experiences of Indigenous, Métis, and Inuit Peoples in Canada. The books below include several memoirs from survivors of the residential school system as well as the complete Final Report of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission of Canada.
Browse all books in the McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies series.
Browse all books in Indigenous studies.
Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to “civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and their home communities.
For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. Education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers.
Legal action by the schools’ former students led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2008. The product of over six years of research, the Commission’s final report outlines the history and legacy of the schools, and charts a pathway towards reconciliation.
Edited by Constance Backhouse, Cynthia E. Milton, Margaret Kovach, and Adele Perry
This volume dives deep into the Royal Society of Canada’s history to learn why academia has more often been an aid to colonialism than a force against it. Royally Wronged poses difficult questions about what is required – for individual academics, fields of study, and the RSC – to move meaningfully toward reconciliation.
By Eli Baxter
Aki-wayn-zih is one man’s story of growing up in the hunting and gathering society of the Ojibways and surviving the residential school system, woven together with traditional legends in their original language. Through spiritual teachings, historical accounts, and autobiographical anecdotes, Eli Baxter offers a new form of storytelling from the Anishinaabay point of view.
By Kathryn Magee Labelle
In collaboration with the Wendat/Wandat Women’s Advisory Council
Daughters of Aataentsic highlights and connects the unique lives of seven Wendat/Wandat women whose legacies are still felt today. Spanning the continent and the colonial borders of New France, British North America, Canada, and the United States, this book shows how Wendat people and place came together in Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and how generations of activism became intimately tied with notions of family, community, motherwork, and legacy from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The lives of the seven women tell a story of individual and community triumph despite difficulties and great loss.
By Markoosie Patsauq
Edited and translated by Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu
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. 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—bringing readers back to the roots of Markoosie Patsauq’s Inuit story to experience it as it was originally written.
By Raymond Mason
Edited by Jackson Pind and Theodore Michael Christou
Raymond Mason is an Ojibway activist who campaigns for the rights of residential school survivors and a founder of Spirit Wind, an organization that played a key role in the development of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. This memoir offers a firsthand account of the personal and political challenges Mason confronted on this journey.
Edited by Nancy J. Turner
Plants, People, and Places argues that the time is long past due to recognize and accommodate Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with plants and their ecosystems. A timely book featuring Indigenous perspectives on reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and pathways toward ethnoecological restoration, this collection reveals how much there is to learn from the history of human relationships with nature.
By Georges E. Sioui
In Eatenonha Georges Sioui presents the history of a group of Wendat known as the Seawi Clan and reveals the deepest, most honoured secrets possessed by his people, by all people who are Indigenous, and by those who understand and respect Indigenous ways of thinking and living.
By Marianne Ignace and Ronald E Ignace
Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws is a journey through the 10,000-year history of the Interior Plateau nation in British Columbia. Told through the lens of past and present Indigenous storytellers, this volume detail how a homeland has shaped Secwépemc existence while the Secwépemc have in turn shaped their homeland.
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