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As the days fill with crisp air and gorgeous foliage, the longer nights are spent with good books–something we love to do here at the library. Whether you’re spending your fall cozied up on the couch with books or outside in nature, we’ve highlighted some great books on food, harvest and land for you to read this Autumn season.

 

Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place edited by Nathalie Kermoal and Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez looks at how patriarchy, gender, and colonialism shape the experiences of Indigenous women as both knowledge holders and knowledge producers. Different writers explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women’s knowledge, how knowledge is rootedness in relationships both human and spiritual, and how knowledge is not inseparable from land and landscape.

 

 

 

 

 

Land-Based Education: Embracing the Rhythms of the Earth from an Indigenous Perspective by Herman J. Michell, PhD explores two different land-based educators insights and experiences on connecting learning to the land and environment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America by Nancy J. Turner creates and explains a complex understanding of the traditions of use and management of plant resource throughout North America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Downstream: Reimagining Water edited by Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong showcases artists, writers, scientists, scholars, environmentalists, and activists who examine the shared human need for clean water that is crucial to building peace and good relationships with each other and the planet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food will Win the War: the Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front by Ian Mosby looks at the symbolic and material transforming that food and eating undertook in Canada during the 1940s and those transformations through a profound social, political, and cultural lens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food sovereignty in Canada: Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems edited by Hannah Wittman, Annette Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe explores how Canadian agricultural and food policies are contributing to the current global food crisis and community responses to those policies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience by Enrique Salmón touches an array of indigenous farmers who uphold traditional practices in the face of modern changes to food systems  in this personal narrative from the University of Arizona Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘We Are Still Didene’: Stories of Hunting and History from Northern British Columbia by Thomas McIlwraith examines Iskut, BC’s transition from subsistence hunting to wage work in trapping, guiding, construction, and service job, and challenges the idealized images of Indigenous Peoples that underlie state-sponsored traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) studies

 

 

 

 

 

 

And just in time for Thanksgiving! Let us know if you make something from our cookbooks for your families this thanksgiving:

 

The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley is a rich cookbook with a delicious introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Feast for All Seasons: Tradional Native People’s Cuisine by Andrew George Jr. and Robert Gairns features recipes with ingredients from the land, sea, and sky, and focuses on an enduring cuisine that illustrates respect for the environment and the spiritual power that food can have in our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aahksoyo’p Nootski Cookbook: Authentic Indigenous Comfort Food by Shantel Tallow & Paul Conley features Blackfeet comfort food like bannock and chili. Aahksoyo’p means “we’re going to eat” in the Blackfoot language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Nations Recipes: a Selection From Coast to Coast by Gregory Lepine combines traditional Native cooking with historic and currently available ingredients.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Hearts: 13 tales of Food & Love edited by Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond is a collection of interconnected short stories that shows the many meanings food can take on beyond mere nourishment in our lives.

 

 

 

 

MMIWG Selected Titles

1. Stolen Sisters: the story of two missing girls, their families, and how Canada has failed Indigenous Women by Emmannuelle Walter

In 2014, the nation was rocked by the brutal violence against young Aboriginal women Loretta Saunders, Tina Fontaine and Rinelle Harper. But tragically, they were not the only Aboriginal women to suffer that year. In fact, an official report revealed that since 1980, 1,200 Canadian Aboriginal women have been murdered or have gone missing. This alarming official figure reveals a national tragedy and the systemic failure of law enforcement and of all levels of government to address the issue.

Journalist Emmanuelle Walter spent two years investigating this crisis and has crafted a moving representative account of the disappearance of two young women, Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander, teenagers from western Quebec, who have been missing since September 2008. Via personal testimonies, interviews, press clippings and official documents, Walter pieces together the disappearance and loss of these two young lives, revealing these young women to us through the voices of family members and witnesses.

Find me at UBC Library

 

2. Highway of Tears a film by Matt Smiley

Highway of Tears‘ is about the missing or murdered women along a 724 kilometer stretch of highway in northern British Columbia. None of the 18 cold-cases since the 1960’s had been solved, until project E-Pana (a special division of the RCMP) managed to link DNA to Portland drifter, Bobby Jack Fowler with the 1974 murder of 16 year-old hitchhiker, Colleen MacMillen. In Canada, over 600 Aboriginal women have been reported missing or been murdered since the 1960s. Viewers will discover what the effects of generational poverty, residential schools, systemic violence, and high unemployment rates have done to First Nations reserves and how they tie in with the missing and murdered women in the Highway of Tearscases. Aboriginal women are considered abject victims of violence. Now find out what First Nations leaders are doing to try and swing the pendulum in the other direction.

Find me at UBC Library

 

3. Injustice in Indian Country: Jurisdiction, American Law, and Sexual Violence Against Native Women by Amy L. Casselman

Living at the intersection of multiple identities in the United States can be dangerous. This is especially true for Native women who live on the more than 56 million acres that comprise America’s Indian country – the legal term for American Indian reservations and other land held in trust for Native people. Today, due to a complicated system of criminal jurisdiction, non-Native Americans can commit crimes against American Indians in much of Indian country with virtual impunity. This has created what some call a modern day ‘hunting ground’ in which Native women are specifically targeted by non-Native men for sexual violence. In this urgent and timely book, author Amy L. Casselman exposes the shameful truth of how the American government has systematically divested Native nations of the basic right to protect the people in their own communities. A problem over 200 years in the making, Casselman highlights race and gender in federal law to challenge the argument that violence against Native women in Indian country is simply collateral damage from a complex but necessary legal structure. Instead, she demonstrates that what’s happening in Indiancountry is part of a violent colonial legacy – one that has always relied on legal and sexual violence to disempower Native communities as a whole. Injustice in Indian Country tells the story of American colonization through the eyes of Native women as they fight for justice. In doing so, it makes critical contributions to the fields of American law and policy, social justice and activism, women’s studies, ethnic studies, American Indian studies, and sociology.

Find me at UBC Library

 

4. Will I see? by Davis A. Robertson; illustrated by GMB Chomichuk

May, a young teenage girl, traverses the city streets, finding keepsakes in different places along her journey. When May and her kookum make these keepsakes into a necklace, it opens a world of danger and fantasy. While May fights against a terrible reality, she learns that there is strength in the spirit of those that have passed. But will that strength be able to save her? A story of tragedy and beauty, Will I See illuminates the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Based on the story by Iskwé and Erin Leslie.

Find me at UBC Library

 

5. Sans Nimama by Melanie Florence; illustrated by Francois Thisdale

A young mother, one of the many missing indigenous women, watches over her small daughter as she grows up without her nimama. Together, but separated, they experience important milestones: the first day of school, first dance, first date, a wedding, and new life. A free-verse story of love, loss, and acceptance told in alternating voices, Missing Nimama shows the human side of a national tragedy. An afterword by the author provides a simple, age-appropriate context for young readers.

Find me at UBC Library

 

5. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

The National Inquiry’s Final Report reveals that persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses are the root cause behind Canada’s staggering rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people. The two volume report calls for transformative legal and social changes to resolve the crisis that has devastated Indigenous communities across the country.
The Final Report is comprised of the truths of more than 2,380 family members, survivors of violence, experts and Knowledge Keepers shared over two years of cross-country public hearings and evidence gathering. It delivers 231 individual Calls for Justice directed at governments, institutions, social service providers, industries and all Canadians.
As documented in the Final Report, testimony from family members and survivors of violence spoke about a surrounding context marked by multigenerational and intergenerational trauma and marginalization in the form of poverty, insecure housing or homelessness and barriers to education, employment, health care and cultural support. Experts and Knowledge Keepers spoke to specific colonial and patriarchal policies that displaced women from their traditional roles in communities and governance and diminished their status in society, leaving them vulnerable to violence.

Find the report online

 

Upcoming: we are currently developing a MMIWG research guide

 

Xwi7xwa would like to thank Andrea Groban-Oakunsheyld for allowing us to use their image in this spotlight series.

Xwi7xwa would like to thank Elena Pederson, Publications & Web Services Assistant, from UBC Education Library for her work on designing our digital signage.

 

Did you know that you can watch X̱wi7x̱wa’s playlist of videos online?

UBC Library uses a platform called McIntyre Media to stream videos we’ve subscribed to.

1. Search the phrase “Mcintyre media” in simple search and filter the results to Online OR click this link.
2. Select any of the titles on the list to see their record.
3. Under Actions on the right hand side click Online to gain access to 165 titles

Not sure what to watch? Check out these selected titles!

 

1. Indigo by Amanda Strong

Indigo tells the story of a woman who confronts her internal war with the help of grandmother spider and faces the many layers of herself and life, to revitalize her spirit. Indigo examines the implications of the decline of the imagination concurrent with the rise of rationality and the cyclical war these two archetypes engage in.

 

2. Butterfly Monument by Jules Koostachin and Rick Miller

Butterfly Monument documents the creation a public memorial dedicated to the late Shannen Koostachin, a young Cree education advocate from Attawapiskat First Nation, Moskekowok territory. Through personal stories shared by Shannen’s immediate family we learn about who Shannen was and what motivated her passionate crusade for equitable access to education for Indigenous children and youth.

 

3. Crossed Mask by Christiana Latham

This work is based on questions about nicknames, what they were and why they were. It is an analysis of the labels and nicknames used within and in relation to my family.

 

4. He Who Dreams by Dana Claxton

A supernatural spiritual art film about a man who is in the dreamworld and the real world. The dreamworld and real worlds can be very similar.

 

5. The Oldest Tree in the World by Cara Mumford and Leanne Simpson

The Oldest Tree in the World is a love song to the oldest sugar maple in the region, living just outside of Peterborough in Mark S. Burnham Provincial Park. This grandmother tree, one of our oldest living relations, has witnessed over 500 years of history.

 

6. Stolen by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs and Prospector Films

14 year old Shayna runs away from her group-home and into the truck of a dangerous man. As a result, she becomes one of Canada’s 1200+ Missing and Murdered Indigenous women.

 

 

Xwi7xwa would like to thank Elena Pederson, Publications & Web Services Assistant, from UBC Education Library for her work on designing our digital signage.