Adele Joubert loves being one of the popular girls at Keziah Christian Academy. She knows the upcoming semester at school is going to be great with her best friend Delia at her side. Then Delia dumps her for a new girl with more money, and Adele is forced to share a room with Lottie, the school pariah, who doesn’t pray and defies teachers’ orders.
When Irene is removed from her First Nations family to live in a residential school, she is confused, frightened and terribly homesick. She tries to remember who she is and where she came from despite being told to do otherwise. When she goes home for summer holidays, her parents decide never to send her away again.
When a young girl helps tend to her grandmother’s garden, she begins to notice things that make her curious.
At a very strict school in Indigenous Nation, everyone but Holden stays in line until they reach the door at the end of the school day.
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.
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.
Tim Giago weaves memoir, commentary, reflection and poetry together to boldly illustrate his often-horrific experiences as a child at an Indian Mission boarding school run by the Catholic Church. Through his words, the experience of one Indian child becomes a metaphor for the experience of many who were literally ripped from their tribal roots and torn from their families for nine months of the year in order to be molded to better fit into mainstream America. They were not allowed to speak their own languages or follow their traditional customs, and cases of physical, sexual and psychological abuse were common. As a result, the Mission school experience often resulted in isolation, confusion, and intense psychological pain. This has contributed to problems including alcoholism, drug abuse, family violence and general alienation in an entire generation of Native Americans. Dramatic and intensely moving black-and white illustrations by Giagos daughter Denise illuminate the text.
Despite her father’s warnings that their tribe is always in danger, Casita, a ten-year-old Lipan Apache girl, has led a relatively peaceful life with her tribe in Mexico, doing her daily chores and practicing for her upcoming Changing Woman ceremony, in which she will officially become a woman of the tribe.
At an English boarding school in the 1930s, crime-solving friends Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells struggle to find an exciting mystery to investigate until Hazel discovers the dead body of Miss Bell, the science teacher.
Through a series of strange coincidences, orphan Edie finds herself at Knight’s Haddon, a stately boarding school for girls. But Edie is not just another student–under normal circumstances, she could never afford to go to boarding school. She’s been sent to Knight’s Haddon by her art-dealer uncle to investigate the disappearance of a precious crystal bird that belongs to his secretive client’s daughter. Anastasia, a Russian royal, has a fragile disposition and a melodramatic bent–or so the headmistress and all the other girls say. Edie’s assignment is not only to find the missing glass bird; it’s to befriend the troubled blueblood and keep a watchful eye on her.