Indigenous Interest
Read the powerful stories and rich history of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and North America with the books listed below.
There are, of course, hundreds, if not thousands of titles that we could include in this list, however we wanted to focus primarily on recent titles as well as those that have a strong legacy.
We are also continually updating this list as we discover new books by or about Indigenous Peoples, and if you feel that we should include a particular title or author we encourage you to contact us with more information.
Moon of the Turning Leaves
- Waubgeshig Rice 
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Twelve years after the lights go out . . .
An epic journey to a forgotten homeland
The hotly anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow.
In the years since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky has led his community in remote northern Canada off the rez and into the bush, where they've been rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions, isolated from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in a world after everything, Evan's people are stronger than ever. But resources around their new settlement are drying up, and elders warn that they cannot stay indefinitely.
Evan and his teenaged daughter, Nangohns, are chosen to lead a scouting party on a months-long trip down to their traditional home on the shores of Lake Huron--to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life--and what danger--still exists in the lands to the south.
Waubgeshig Rice's exhilarating return to the world first explored in Moon of the Crusted Snow is a brooding story of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth.
Life in Two Worlds
- Ted Nolan , Meg Masters
Hardcover
$35.00
Reader Reward Price: $31.50
#1 BESTSELLER
In 1997 Ted Nolan won the Jack Adams Award for best coach in the NHL. But he wouldn't work in pro hockey again for almost a decade. What happened?
Growing up on a First Nation reserve, young Ted Nolan built his own backyard hockey rink and wore skates many sizes too big. But poverty wasn't his biggest challenge. Playing the game meant spending his life in two worlds: one in which he was loved and accepted and one where he was often told he didn't belong.
Ted proved he had what it took, joining the Detroit Red Wings in 1978. But when his on-ice career ended, he discovered his true passion wasn't playing; it was coaching. First with the Soo Greyhounds and then with the Buffalo Sabres, Ted produced astonishing results. After his initial year as head coach with the Sabres, the club was being called the "hardest working team in professional sports." By his second, they had won their first Northeast Division title in sixteen years.
Yet, the Sabres failed to re-sign their much-loved, award-winning coach.
Life in Two Worlds chronicles those controversial years in Buffalo--and recounts how being shut out from the NHL left Ted frustrated, angry, and so vulnerable he almost destroyed his own life. It also tells of Ted's inspiring recovery and his eventual return to a job he loved. But Life in Two Worlds is more than a story of succeeding against the odds. It's an exploration of how a beloved sport can harbour subtle but devastating racism, of how a person can find purpose when opportunity and choice are stripped away, and of how focusing on what really matters can bring two worlds together.
The All + Flesh
- Brandi Bird
Trade paperback
$19.99
Reader Reward Price: $17.99
Winner, 2024 Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry in English
Finalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award
Longlist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial Award
CBC Best Poetry of 2024
I am made of centuries & carbohydrates
the development of my molars
the hunger the teeth grew
has been with me since childhood
I can't escape the mouths of others
?Brandi Bird's long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s). Bird's work is highly concerned with how outer and inner landscapes move and change within the confines of the English language, particularly the "I" of the self, a tradition of movement that has been lost for many who don't speak their Indigenous languages or live on their homelands. By exploring the landscapes the poet does inhabit, both internally and externally, Bird's poems seek to delve into and reflect their cultural lineages-specifically Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis-and how these transformative identities shape the person they are today.
The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle
- Kent Monkman ,
Hardcover
$48.00
Reader Reward Price: $43.20
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From global art superstar Kent Monkman and his long-time collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers' understanding of the land called North America.
For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character--an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island is a genre-demolishing work of genius, the imagined history of a legendary figure through which profound truths emerge--a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities.
Volume One, which covers the period from the creation of the universe to the confederation of Canada, follows Miss Chief as she moves through time, from a complex lived experience of Cree cosmology to the arrival of European settlers, many of whom will be familiar to students of history. An open-hearted being, she tries to live among those settlers, and guide them to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings and the world itself. As their numbers grow, though, so does conflict, and Miss Chief begins to understand that the challenges posed by the hordes of newly arrived Europeans will mean ever greater danger for her, her people, and, by extension, all of the world she cherishes.
Blending history, fiction, and memoir in bold new ways, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle are unlike anything published before. And in their power to reshape our shared understanding, they promise to change the way we see everything that lies ahead.
The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle
- Kent Monkman , Gisèle Gordon
Hardcover
$44.00
Reader Reward Price: $39.60
From global art superstar Kent Monkman and his longtime collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers' understanding of the land called North America.
For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character--an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years, and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island is a genre-demolishing work of genius, the imagined history of a legendary figure through which a profound truths emerge--a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities.
Volume Two, which takes us from the moment of confederation to the present day, is a heartbreaking and intimate examination of the tragedies of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Zeroing in on the story of one family told across generations, Miss Chief bears witness to the genocidal forces and structures that dispossessed and attempted to erase Indigenous peoples. Featuring many figures pulled from history as well as new individuals created for this story, Volume Two explores the legacy of colonial violence in the children's work camps (called residential schools by some), the Sixties Scoop, and the urban disconnection of contemporary life. Ultimately, it is a story of resilience and reconnection, and charts the beginnings of an Indigenous future that is deeply rooted in an experience of Indigenous history--a perspective Miss Chief, a millennia-old legendary being, can offer like none other.
Blending history, fiction, and memoir in bold new ways, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle are unlike anything published before. And in their power to reshape our shared understanding, they promise to change the way we see everything that lies ahead.
Double Eagle
- Thomas King
Trade paperback
$24.99
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
From the #1 bestselling author of Indians on Vacation and Deep House
Buffalo Mountain is set to host a gold coin exhibition with dealers coming from all over, and Thumps DreadfulWater winds up with the task of making sure the event goes off without a hitch. As if he didn't already have enough to do.
For starters, he and Claire Merchant are trying to work out their relationship. Should they move in together or should they continue on as they have in the past? And there's Sheriff Duke Hockney, who wants Thumps to give up landscape photography and return to law enforcement. And last but not least, Cisco Cruz, the ninja assassin, shows up in town with a fiancée in tow.
Can things get any more complicated for our hero?
Yes, they can.
When one of the dealers at the exhibition winds up dead, Cruz's fiancée is revealed to be an FBI agent responsible for his protection. And Claire's adoption of Ivory hits a major snag. Like it or not, Thumps is going to have to help Claire as best he can, discover why Cruz is really back in town and try to unravel the murder of the coin dealer--before anyone else dies.
In this new DreadfulWater instalment, our favourite reluctant investigator returns with his signature wit and wry humour to solve a mystery that only Thomas King could create.
Cheated
- Bill Waiser , Jennie Hansen
Trade paperback
$29.95
Reader Reward Price: $26.96
"Canadians and politicians have a common responsibility: to learn from the mistakes inherited from a colonialist legacy; and to not repeat the wrongs, corruption, and injustices our people suffered in the hands of government officials, politicians, and their oppressive laws. Reading and learning from Cheated would be a good place to start reconciliation and reparation." -- Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations
The story of how Laurier Liberals took hold of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1896 and transformed it into a machine for expropriating Indigenous land.
You won't find the Ocean Man and Pheasant Rump reserves on a map of southeastern Saskatchewan. In 1901, the two Nakoda bands reluctantly surrendered the 70 square miles granted to them under treaty. It's just one of more than two dozen surrenders aggressively pursued by the Laurier Liberal government over a fifteen-year period. One in five acres was taken from First Nations.
This confiscation was justified on the grounds that prairie bands had too much land and that it would be better used by white settlers. In reality, the surrendered land was largely scooped up by Liberal speculators -- including three senior civil servants and a Liberal cabinet minister --and flipped for a tidy profit. None were held to account.
Cheated is a gripping story of single-minded politicians, uncompromising Indian Affairs officials, grasping government appointees, and well-connected Liberal speculators, set against a backdrop of politics, power, patronage, and profit. The Laurier government's settlement of western Canada can never be looked at the same way again.
An Ordinary Violence
- Adriana Chartrand
Trade paperback
$23.99
Reader Reward Price: $21.59
Terrible things happen side by side with the ordinary.
Dawn hasn't spoken to her brother, Cody, since he was sent to prison for a violent crime seven years ago. But when Dawn's seemingly perfect life in the big city implodes, she is forced to return to her childhood home and the prairie city that still holds so much pain for her and her fractured family. Cody is released from prison with a mysterious new friend by his side, and Dawn must follow increasingly sinister leads to uncover their nefarious plans to access a dangerous supernatural network. As the lines between right and wrong blur and dissolve, Dawn recons with trauma and violence, loss and reclamation in an unsettling world where spirit realms entwine with the living-and where it is humans who carry out the truly monstrous acts.
A Season in Chezgh'un
- Darrel J McLeod
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
A subversive novel by acclaimed Cree author Darrel J. McLeod, infused with the contradictory triumph and pain of finding conventional success in a world that feels alien. James, a talented and conflicted Cree man from a tiny settlement in Northern Alberta, has settled into a comfortable middle-class life in Kitsilano, a trendy neighbourhood of Vancouver. He is living the life he had once dreamed of--travel, a charming circle of sophisticated friends, a promising career and a loving relationship with a caring man--but he chafes at being assimilated into mainstream society, removed from his people and culture. The untimely death of James's mother, his only link to his extended family and community, propels him into a quest to reconnect with his roots. He secures a job as a principal in a remote northern Dakelh community but quickly learns that life there isn't the fix he'd hoped it would be: His encounters with poverty, cultural disruption and abuse conjure ghosts from his past that drive him toward self-destruction. During the single year he spends in northern BC, James takes solace in the richness of the Dakelh culture--the indomitable spirit of the people, and the splendour of nature--all the while fighting to keep his dark side from destroying his life.
And Then She Fell
- Alicia Elliott
Hardcover
$34.00
Reader Reward Price: $30.60
*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
*Indigenous Voices Award winner*
*Amazon First Novel Award winner*
*First Nations Communities READ Award winner*
*Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction*
*Named a Globe and Mail and CBC Best Book of the Year*
From the bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground comes a mind-bending, gripping novel about Native life, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences.
On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be. She's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve, is nothing but supportive; and they've recently moved to a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. And yet, Alice feels like an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from her watchful white neighbors. Her growing self-doubt hinders the one vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.
At first, Alice is convinced her discomfort is of her own making, but then strange things start happening. She finds herself losing bits of time, hearing voices she can't explain, and speaking with things that should not be talking back to her, all while her neighbors' passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn's survival. . . . She just has to finish it before it's too late.
Told in Alice's darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching look at inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable--and surreal--climax.
Empty Spaces
- Jordan Abel
Hardcover
$30.00
Reader Reward Price: $27.00
Winner of the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction o Shortlisted for the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award
From the acclaimed, boundary-breaking author of NISHGA comes a hypnotic and mystifying exploration of land and legacy.
Reimagining James Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga'a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, the successive chapters of Empty Spaces move toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing.
Jordan Abel's extraordinary debut work of fiction grows out of his groundbreaking visual compositions in NISHGA, which integrated descriptions of the landscape from Cooper's settler classic into his father's traditional Nisga'a artwork. In Empty Spaces, Abel reinscribes those words on the page itself, subjecting them to bold rewritings and inviting us to come to a crucial understanding: that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as our world lurches toward uncertainty.
Indigenous Resistance and Development in Winnipeg
- Shauna MacKinnon , Kathy Mallett
Trade paperback
$24.00
Reader Reward Price: $21.60
Tracing through Indigenous institutional development in Winnipeg, and providing a unique perspective on the history of Indigenous housing development, education, and economic development, Indigenous Resistance and Development in Winnipeg 1960-2000 explores Indigenous resistance in Winnipeg through the work of various Winnipeg institutions, including The Indian and Métis Friendship Centre, Children of the Earth and Niji Mahkwa schools, The Indigenous Women?s Collective of Manitoba: Dibenimisowin (We Own Ourselves), the Ma Maw Wi Chi Itata Centre, The Native Women?s Transition Centre, and Two Spirited People of Manitoba, among others. Taking on a rich historical grounding and encompassing a new generation of Indigenous organizing, this is the first book that explores Winnipeg history exclusively through the impactful development and resistance work of Indigenous organizations. Contributors include Nicole Lamy, Shauna MacKinnon, Kathy Mallett, Lawrie Deane, Lynne Fernandez, Doris Young, Annetta Armstrong, Josie Hill, John Loxley, Chantal Fiola, and Albert McLeod.
Stolen
- , ,
Trade paperback
$24.99
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
NOW A NETFLIX FILM
"An extraordinary novel. A coming-of-age-story you will get lost in." --Fredrik Backman, internationally bestselling author of The Winners
Part coming-of-age novel, part sweeping family saga, and part love song to a disappearing natural world, Stolen is the internationally bestselling and award-winning debut novel about a young Sámi girl and her struggle to defend her family's reindeer herd and their traditional way of life--for readers of Katherena Vermette and Michelle Good.
It is winter, north of the Arctic Circle. A few hours of pale light is all the sun has to offer before the landscape is once more enveloped in complete darkness. This is Sápmi, land of the Sámi, Scandinavia's Indigenous people.
Nine-year-old Elsa is the daughter of Sámi reindeer herders. Her community is under constant threat--from the Swedish population who don't always value the Sámi way of life, from the government that wants to claim their land for mining, and from violent poachers who slaughter their reindeer for sport and for sale on the black market.
One morning, when Elsa goes skiing alone, she witnesses a man brutally killing her beloved reindeer calf. Elsa is terrified by what she sees. Fearing for her own life and for the lives of her family members, she remains silent.
Ten years pass, and Elsa is now trying to claim a role for herself in her community, where male elders expect young women to know their place. Meanwhile, the hostility toward the Sámi continues to escalate, and the police won't do anything to protect them. When Elsa becomes the target of the man who killed her reindeer calf all those years ago, something inside of her breaks. The guilt, fear, and anger she's been carrying since childhood come crashing over her, leading to a final catastrophic confrontation.
Told in three parts, Stolen is a powerful, propulsive, and cinematic novel about a courageous young Sámi woman struggling to defend her Indigenous heritage against the cruelty of the modern world for justice and for the future of her people.
Bad Cree
- Jessica Johns
Trade paperback
$24.99
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
2024 CBC CANADA READS SELECTION
AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD SHORTLIST
A CBC BOOKS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ALEX AWARD WINNER
AURORA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL SHORTLIST
RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTION SHORTLIST
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A haunting debut novel where dreams, family and spirits collide
Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.
Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie's life spirals into a living nightmare--crows are following her around and she's getting texts from her dead sister on the other side--it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.
Haunting, fierce, an ode to female relations and the strength found in kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.
Opimotewina wina kapagamawat Witigowa / Journeys of The One to Strike the Wetigo
- Ken Carriere
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
A first-hand account of a Swampy Cree boy's experiences helping his father in muskrat trapping, commercial fishing, and guiding of hunters in the upstream region of the Saskatchewan River Delta, Opimotewina wina kapagamawat Witigowa / Journeys of The One to Strike the Wetigo contains interviews, stories, and photographs depicting what life in Northern Saskatchewan was like in the past, and how the effect of commercial fishing and hunting, hydro-electric dams, and other Western endeavours have impacted a certain Indigenous lifestyle that existed way past the Fur Trade era.
This is a selection of our current Indigenous Interest titles. To find other titles or authors, or just to browse, please use the search box.
