A young boy is having trouble sleeping at night. He is being called to fulfill his destiny, a destiny which lives on today in the traditions and culture of the Dene people and their relationship to the caribou and the land on which they live.
This is a story of how one great-grandfather decides to give his great-grandson his special name in the Sechelt language. These traditional teaching legends come straight from the oral traditions of the Sechelt Nation.
Discusses the history, culture, beliefs, changing ways and notable people of the Cree.
Her name was Seepeetza when she was at home with her family. But now that she’s living at the Indian residential school her name is Martha Stone, and everything else about her life has changed as well. Told in the honest voice of a sixth grader, this is the story of a young Native girl forced to live in a world governed by strict nuns, arbitrary rules, and a policy against talking in her own dialect, even with her family. Seepeetza finds bright spots, but most of all she looks forward to summers and holidays at home. This autobiographical novel is written in the form of Seepeetza’s diary.
When Maddie Harper was seven years old, she found herself in the Brantford School in Ontario with about 200 other little girls who called it “mush-hole” because mush was their daily fare. Here, Harper tells of her eight years at the school, the cultural degradation she was forced to endure, her escape at age 15, her alienation from her community, her descent into alcoholism and finally, her return to traditional ways and recovery.
Renowned Native painter Allen Sapp’s inspired and stunning artwork beautifully complements this sweet story of a boy preparing for his first powwow. The young boy’s Nokum — his beloved grandmother — guides him through the events of the day and helps him to understand what the singing and dancing are about. Award-winning author David Bouchard adds rhythmic and informative text based on remembrances from Allen Sapp’s own Cree childhood. A portion of the royalties for The Song Within My Heart will be donated to the Indian Federated College.
In this redesigned edition of Scott O’Dell’s classic novel, a young Eskimo girl encounters frightening obstacles when she takes her father’s place in the Iditarod, the annual 1,172-mile dogsled race in Alaska.
During five long visits to Alaska’s remote northwest coast to sketch and paint, the late Claire Fejes became guest and friend to the Native inhabitants there, learning their ways and customs. A personal narrative in text, drawings, and paintings, People of the Notatak concerns the people of two villages–Noatak, the summer settlement of a nomadic tribe that lives mainly in the wilderness interior, and Point Hope, whose economy centers around the hunting of the great bowhead whale.
Claire captures the life of the Native Inupiat in Northwest Alaska, before outside influences changed their lives. In a few simple strokes, her drawings evoke the heart and life of the Inupiat. Thanks in part to her habit of journal-keeping, Claire was able to record what she had witnessed in her years of travel and painting up the Yukon River into the Arctic Refuge.
A native New Yorker, Claire received her art training at the Newark Art Museum and taught art until moving to Alaska. She wrote with rare insight and understanding about the intimate daily lives of mothers and fathers and their children, of husbands and wives and in-laws in the villages in which she lived, an aspect of Eskimo life rarely treated in books.
Originally published in 1966, People of the Noatak is an excellent portrayal of the Inupiat people before modern changes, a glimpse into the Inupiat world when traditional values and roots were strong.
Glen Jackson, Jr., an eleven-year-old Ojibway Indian in northern Minnesota, goes with his father to harvest wild rice, the sacred food of his people.