Cree Narrative Memory

"The importance of storytelling to Cree culture, and how such stories are vital to understanding the history of the Cree and their rejuvenated future, are central to the themes examined in this visionary book. Neal McLeod examines the history of the nehiyawak (the Cree people) of western Canada from the massive upheavals of the 1870s and the reserve period to the vibrant cultural and political rebirth of contemporary times. Central to the text are the narratives of McLeod's family, which give first hand examples of the tenacity and resiliency of the human spirit while providing a rubric for reinterpreting the history of indigenous peoples, drawing on Cree worldviews and Cree narrative structures." "In a readable style augmented with extensive use of the Cree language throughout, McLeod draws heavily on original research, the methodology of which could serve as a template for those doing similar work. While the book is based on the Cree experience of the Canadian prairies, its message and methodology are applicable to all Indigenous societies."--BOOK JACKET.

Monkey Beach meets Green Grass, Running Water meets The Beachcombers in this wise and funny novel by a debut Cree author Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from wounds of the past, informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions. Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, seeking to understand the messages from The Frugal Gourmet (one of the only television shows available on CBC North) that come to her in her dreams. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns, who played Jesse on The Beachcombers, because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Bernice heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers but they are not the ones she expected. With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Bernice finds the strength to face the past and draw the lessons from her dreams that she was never fully taught in life. Part road trip, dream quest and travelogue, the novel touches on the universality of women's experience, regardless of culture or race.

Drawing on the insights of Indigenous feminist legal theory, Emily Snyder examines representations of Cree law and gender in books, videos, graphic novels, educational websites, online lectures, and a video game. Although these resources promote the revitalization of Cree law and the principle of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), Snyder argues that they do not capture the complexities of gendered power dynamics. The majority of the resources either erase women’s legal authority by not mentioning them, or they diminish women’s agency by portraying them primarily as mothers and nurturers. Although these latter roles are celebrated, Snyder argues that Cree laws and gender roles are represented in inflexible, aesthetically pleasing ways that overlook power imbalances and difficult questions regarding interpretations of tradition. What happens when good relations are represented in ways that are oppressive? Grappling with this question, Snyder makes the case that educators need to critically engage with issues of gender and power in order to create inclusive resources that meaningfully address the everyday messiness of law. As with all legal orders, gendered oppression can be perpetuated through Cree law, but Cree law is also a dynamic resource for challenging gendered oppression.

As a small boy in remote Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod is immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. There he is surrounded by her tales of joy and horror—of the strong men in their family, of her love for Darrel, and of the cruelty she and her sisters endured in residential school—as well as his many siblings and cousins, and the smells of moose stew and wild peppermint tea. And there young Darrel learns to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that will guide him throughout his life. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turns wild and unstable, and their home life becomes chaotic. Sweet and eager to please, Darrel struggles to maintain his grades and pursue interests in music and science while changing homes, witnessing domestic violence, caring for his younger siblings, and suffering abuse at the hands of his brother-in-law. Meanwhile, he begins to question and grapple with his sexual identity—a reckoning complicated by the repercussions of his abuse and his sibling’s own gender transition. Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch—“It’s a wonder!” in Cree—is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next, and an uplifting story of one individual who overcame enormous obstacles in pursuit of a fulfilling and adventurous life.

Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec's massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and their memory of themselves as a people. By investigating the Cree's three hundred years of contact with outsiders, he illuminates the process of cultural negotiation at the foundation of ongoing political and environmental debates. This book offers a way of thinking about indigenous peoples' struggles for rights and environmental justice in Canada and elsewhere.

Originally published in 1975, this important book is now back in print in a revised and updated edition. Since its first publication it has become a classic of revisionist history. Bringing a Native viewpoint to the settlement of the West, Howard Adam's book shook its readers. What Native people had to say for themselves was quite different from the convenient picture of history that even the most sympathetic books by white authors had presented. Until Adams's book, the cultural, historical, and psychological aspects of colonialism for Native people had not been explored in depth. 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 Metis people. In this new edition Howard Adams brings the latest statistics to bear on his arguments and provides a new Preface.

“A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir. In these pages, we watch Cree LeFavour evolve from a wounded (and wounding) lost girl to a woman who can at last regard her existence with a modicum of mercy and forgiveness...a story of true self-salvation and transformation.”—Elizabeth Gilbert As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour's began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed to an unblemished patch of skin calling out for attention and the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to the skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame. In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years, allowing us to feel the pull of a stark compulsion taking over a mind. We see the world as Cree did—turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady, vertiginous thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. X—whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing—comes to be the only bright spot in her mental solitude. Her extraordinary access to and inclusion of the notes kept by Dr. X during treatment offer concrete evidence of Cree’s transformation over 3 years of therapy. But it is her own evocative and razor-sharp prose that traces a path from a lonely and often sad childhood to her reluctant commitment to and emergence from a psychiatric hospital, to the saving refuge of literature and eventual acceptance of love. Moving deftly between the dialogue and observations from psychiatric records and elegant, incisive reflection on youth and early adulthood, Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.

"Written with primal intensity, touched with redeeming compassion, Rudy Wiebe--has explored our history, our roots and the secrets of our hearts with moral seriousness and great feeling." Governor General's Award for Fiction Citation, 1994 A powerful, major work of non-fiction, beautifully written, from the twice winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear. This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence. Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life that led to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children. He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life. How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

Indigenous Poetics in Canada broadens the way in which Indigenous poetry is examined, studied, and discussed in Canada. Breaking from the parameters of traditional English literature studies, this volume embraces a wider sense of poetics, including Indigenous oralities, languages, and understandings of place. Featuring work by academics and poets, the book examines four elements of Indigenous poetics. First, it explores the poetics of memory: collective memory, the persistence of Indigenous poetic consciousness, and the relationships that enable the Indigenous storytelling process. The book then explores the poetics of performance: Indigenous poetics exist both in written form and in relation to an audience. Third, in an examination of the poetics of place and space, the book considers contemporary Indigenous poetry and classical Indigenous narratives. Finally, in a section on the poetics of medicine, contributors articulate the healing and restorative power of Indigenous poetry and narratives.