Watch Quebec students discuss literary works for Indigenous History Month
Will I See?, The Marrow Thieves, Those Who Run in the Sky featured during this year's book club event
Do you think it's important to see yourself in media and literature?
That's one of the questions discussed with high school students during the Turtle Island Reads Book Club.
Turtle Island Reads celebrates stories written by and about Indigenous people in Canada; the taping of the event is being released in time for National Indigenous History Month.
This year, we chose three young adult fiction books: Will I See? by David A. Robertson, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline and Those Who Run in the Sky by Aviaq Johnston.
Hosted by CBC Radio's Rosanna Deerchild and featuring Tracey Deer, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Dayna Danger, the book club discusses how the modern Indigenous experience is reflected in literature and why bringing Indigenous books into the classroom is important.
About Turtle Island Reads
Now in its third year, the TIR initiative kicked off in September at McGill. On April 8, we held two back to back live events at John Abbott College in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue.
Our first event was a panel discussion entitled Indigenous stories in the media: What journalists, filmmakers and other media professionals get right, what they get wrong, and how to improve things.
Watch the panel discussion here.
This discussion was followed by our Turtle Island Reads Book Club,
For our 2019 edition, three high schools in Quebec were also selected to each read one of the books. The students and teachers from these three classrooms worked with the advocates over the course of the year to discuss book themes and overall impressions.
The Turtle Island Reads initiative is a partnership between CBC Montreal, LEARN, Quebec Writers' Federation, CODE NGO and McGill Faculty of Education as well as McGill University's Social Equity and Diversity Education Office.
Every English-language and Indigenous school in the province of Quebec received copies of all three Turtle Island Reads book club titles for their libraries.
A teacher's guide is also available on the Curio website.
Available for download, the introductory guide provides background on the project, outlines special considerations, and offers a pre-reading activity and extension activities to begin exploring the Indigenous-settler narrative in Canada. The second guide offers book summaries and activities specific to each of the three Turtle Island Reads 2019 books.