Two hundred years after his death, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh is still considered one of the greatest leaders of North America’s First Peoples. This pictorial biography tells the story of his remarkable life, culminating in the events of the War of 1812.
53 portraits of Native Americans in dance regalia, taken at the 1994 Sault St. Marie Pow-Wow
Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall takes us on a dreamlike voyage into nature at that secret moment when fall turns into winter. We find ourselves in a kind of paradise, which humans may be part of but which they have not despoiled. A Native father and son lead us through forests, down rivers, over lakes and ponds. Along the way we experience the primordial beauty of the physical world. This is nature as we all feel in our hearts it must once have been.
Tess has visited her grandmother many times without really being aware of the garden. But today they step outside the door and Tess learns that all of nature can be a garden. And if you take care of the plants that are growing, if you learn about them — understanding when they flower, when they give fruit, and when to leave them alone — you will always find something to nourish you. At the end of their day Tess is thankful to Mother Earth for having such a lovely garden, and she is thankful to have such a wise grandma.
Photographs by the great nineteenth-century photographer depict the beauty of the North American Indian and his way of life and are accompanied by an insightful commentary.
This collection includes poems that explore human relationships, music, death … universal concerns written about in a way that recognizes and uses the universality while selecting the images from her Cree background. We are privileged to glimpse another way of relating to the world while being presented with the difficulties of growing up in a minority culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.