Ojibway Ceremonies provides a unique and fascinating glimpse of Ojibway culture before its disruption by European civilization. It is the story of the Ojibway told through the ceremonies which dominated the most important occasions and stages of their existence. As a young boy grows up, we see him develop through his involvement in the many rituals so important to the Ojibway way of life. From the Naming Ceremony and the Vision Quest to the War Path, from the Marriage Ceremony to ...

This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury.“Spanish! It was a word synonymous with residential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exi...

Moose Meat and Wild Riceis a unique comic collection by one of Canada’s first and most successful Aboriginal authors, who turns his talents to a mischievous (but never malicious) depiction of Ojibway and Ojibway-White relations, with the gentle satire cutting both ways.Light, but nevertheless realistic, told as fiction but based in fact, the escapades undertaken by the populace of Moose Meat Point Reserve encompass havoc and hilarity, prejudice and pretence.

The Ojibway Indians were first encountered by the French early in the seventeenth century along the northern shores of Lakes Huron and Superior. By the time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized them in The Song of Hiawatha, they had dispersed over large areas of Canada and the United States, becoming known as the Chippewas in the latter. A rare and fascinating glimpse of Ojibway culture before its disruption by the Europeans is provided in Ojibway Ceremonies by Basil Johnston, ...

Rarely accessible to the general public, Ojibway mythology is as rich in meaning, as broad, as deep, and as innately appealing as the mythologies of Greece, Rome, and other Western civilizations. In Ojibway Heritage Basil Johnston introduces his people's ceremonies, rituals, songs, dances, prayers, arid legends. Conveying the sense of wonder and mystery at the heart of the Ojibway experience, Johnston describes the creation of the universe, followed by that of plants and animals a...

What does it mean to be an Indigenous man today? Between October 2010 and May 2013, Sam McKegney conducted interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists, and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood. In offices, kitchens, and coffee shops, and once in a car driving down the 401, McKegney and his participants tackled crucial questions about masculine self-worth and how to foster balanced and empowered gender relations.Masculindians captures twenty of the...

The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known ...

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is an exuberant comedy and feminist revisioning of Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. It takes us from a dusty office in Canada’s Queen’s University, into the fraught and furious worlds of two of Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, and turns them upside-down. Constance Ledbelly is the beleaguered “spinster” academic, and unlikely heroine who embarks on a quest for Shakespearean origins and, ultimately, her own id...

My Home As I Remember describes literary and artistic achievements of First Nations, Inuit and Metis women across Canada and the United States, including contributions from New Zealand and Mexico. Their voices and creative expression of identity and place are richly varied, reflecting the depth of the culturally diverse energy found on these continents.Over 60 writers and visual artists are represented from nearly 25 nations, including writers such as Lee ...

"Wabusk Outside the Wire / Nanook Looking In" is Joseph Boyden's contribution to Northwords, a cross-platform project that takes urban Canadian writers to some of the world's most extreme environments.Introduced by award-winning journalist and radio personality Shelagh Rogers, Northwords is a collection of stories written by acclaimed Canadian authors as they experienced one of Canada’s most awe-inspiring northern national parks Torngat Mountains National Park, th...

Many promote Reconciliation as a “new” way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance. Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence t...

Louis Riel is regarded by some as a hero and visionary, by others as a madman and misguided religious zealot. The Métis leader who fought for the rights of his people against an encroaching tide of white settlers helped establish the province of Manitoba before escaping to the United States. Gabriel Dumont was a successful hunter and Métis chief, a man tested by warfare, a pragmatist who differed from the devout Riel. Giller Prize—winning novelist Joseph Boyden argues that Dumont, part of ...