Essays. A lot of memoir – which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, but certainly didn’t mind. The author is Cowlitz, a Coast Salish people from the northwest of what is currently the United States. She grew up in a coal-mining family in Appalachia, and then for much of the period covered in the book …
Thank-you to Breanne, Chantale, and Kianna of Red River Echoes for the great interview just now about grassroots organizing among Métis people in Manitoba. Listen for it Talking Radical Radio soon!
John Sylliboy is Mi’kmaq and he grew up as part of Esaksoni and Millbrook First Nations in Nova Scotia. He is also the acting executive director of the Wabanaki Two Spirit Alliance, an organization of Two-Spirit people on the east coast that has been making space, reclaiming culture, producing knowledge, and speaking up for more …
Thanks to John from the Wabanaki Two-Spirit Alliance for the interview just now about the alliance’s years of work doing education, research, capacity building, and advocacy among Two-Spirit people in Atlantic Canada. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio soon!
Literary fiction. Draws, I think, on Nishnaabeg storytelling traditions, which I know little about. The building blocks of the book are units of text ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages, each focused on one of the book’s characters. These characters are human and not, and introduced in a way to unsettle the …
Lyric memoir. By a queer Cree poet, writer, scholar. Intense, compelling. Memory, poetry, theory, love, lust, rage, grief, joy, opacity, play. Keenly situated in the painful space between worlds violently unmade and worlds straining to grow. As is often true with this kind of book, I feel a pull to find a “right way” to …
Sarah Edo works with a publication called Nuance. pihêsiw is part of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN). In the context of this year’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Week (SRH Week), Scott Neigh interviews them about what it means to centre Black, Indigenous, racialized, and migrant youth in questions of sexual health and rights. …
Scholarly. Anthropology, Indigenous studies. The book emerges from ethnographic research conducted among Mohawk people from Kahnawà:ke, and the author herself is Mohawk and from Kahnawà:ke. Unlike a lot of anthropological research, the book takes up questions of key concern to the community itself – things like membership, belonging, and borders – in the context of …
Sound studies. Indigenous sound studies, to be precise, by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. The centre of the work is consideration, through very close and careful attention to a range of works and performances, of the various ways in which settler art music and Indigenous music get put in relation and taken up. That might seem …
Based on stories of the rogarou, a figure something like a werewolf that haunts Metis communities. Set in such a community on Georgian Bay in Ontario, following a woman whose husband suddenly disappeared almost a year ago. At the beginning of the book, she encounters someone who looks just like him but seems to be …