Etseh and Etsi traveled the Idaa Trail when they were children and as they paddle north with their grandchildren, they pass along their knowledge of special sites along the way — the history behind an abandoned village, the legend of the wolverine and its babies at the Sliding Hill, the story of a mysterious gravesite. They also explain how their people survived in the old days – building birch bark canoes, fishing with willow lines and muskrat-tooth hooks, and ambushing herds of caribou.
Age
Catalog sorted by age group
Pyramid
Text and black-and-white illustrations follow the intricate step-by-step process of the building of an ancient Egyptian pyramid.
Huron Carol
In the early 1600s Father Jean de Brébeuf came to Canada from his native France as a Jesuit missionary. He settled among the Huron, or Ouendat, people in what is now Midland, Ontario. Despite his missionary zeal, Brébeuf was sensitive to the people with whom he lived. He learned their language and he wrote, in Huron, the original version of this famous Christmas carol. He and his fellow priests, called Black Robes, and many of their Huron parishioners were killed in an Iroquois raid in 1649. But Brébeuf’s carol continued to be sung by successive generations of Hurons. Then in 1926, Toronto writer Jesse Edgar Middleton, inspired by Brébeuf, wrote his own version of the carol in English. His are the familiar words we sing today, describing the Huron landscape, flora and fauna in telling the Christmas story.
Sister Heart
A young Aboriginal girl is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. There, she slowly makes a new life for herself and, in the face of tragedy, finds strength in new friendships. Poignantly told from the child’s perspective, Sister Heart affirms the power of family and kinship.
Grandpa’s Girls
A young girl delights in a visit to her grandpa’s farm. She and her cousins run through the fields, explore the root cellar where the smoked salmon and jars of fruit are stored, swing on a rope out the barn loft window, visit the appaloosa in the corral and tease the neighbor’s pig. The visit is also an opportunity for this child to ask Grandpa what her grandmother, Yahyah, was like, and explore the “secret room,” with its old wooden box of ribbons, medals and photos of Grandpa in uniform.
Sometimes I Feel Like A Fox
Good For Nothing
The year is 1959, and fifteen-year-old Nipishish returns to his reserve in northern Quebec after being kicked out of residential school, where the principal tells him he can look forward, like all Native Americans, to a life of drunkenness, prison, and despair. But despite his new freedom, the reserve offers little to a young Métis man. Both his parents are dead, his father Shipu, a respected leader, dying mysteriously at a young age. When Nipishish is sent to a strange town to live with a white family and attend high school, he hopes for the new life the change promises. But despite some bright spots, the adjustments prove overwhelming. Forced to return to his people, he must try to rediscover the old ways, face the officials who find him a threat, and learn the truth about his father’s death.
Looks Like Daylight
A compelling collection of interviews with children aged nine to eighteen. They come from all over the continent, from Iqaluit to Texas, Haida Gwaai to North Carolina, and their stories run the gamut — some heartbreaking; many others full of pride and hope.
Ancient Thunder
Leo Yerxa, an artist of Ojibway ancestry, brings us an art book in which he celebrates wild horses and the natural world in which they lived in harmony.
Missing Nimâmâ
A young mother, one of the many missing indigenous women, watches over her small daughter as she grows up without her nimama, experiencing important milestones – her first day of school, first dance, first date, wedding, first child – from afar.