19 books to read in honour of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
Reading List | CBC Books | Posted: September 27, 2024 8:02 PM | Last Updated: October 4
In June 2021, the Government of Canada passed Bill C-5 to make Sept. 30 a federal statutory day. It is observed as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
In honour of the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the following titles are books that can encourage deeper reflection, learning and public dialogue on the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
A Season in Chezgh'un by Darrel J. McLeod
A Season in Chezgh'un is a fictionalized year in the life of a Nehiyaw man and what he experiences working in a remote B.C. First Nation. James, a man from a small settlement in Northern Alberta has created a comfortable life for himself in a trendy neighbourhood in Vancouver. He has all the things he once dreamed of — he travels, has great friends, a great career and a caring partner — but part of him is wary of assimilating into mainstream culture. When his mother dies suddenly, James embarks on a journey to reconnect with his roots.
Darrel J. McLeod was from Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. Before his retirement, he was chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. He's the author of the memoirs Mamaskatch and Peyakow. Mamaskatch won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction and Peyakow was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
Isidore "Ezzy" Desjarlais and Grey Ginther live together in Grey's uncle's trailer, passing their time with cribbage and cheap beer. Grey is cynical of what she feels is a lazy and performative activist culture, while Ezzy is simply devoted to his distant cousin. So when Grey concocts a scheme to set a herd of bison loose in downtown Edmonton, Ezzy is along for the ride — one that has devastating, fatal consequences.
Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer who hails from many prairie towns and cities, including Saskatoon. He now lives in Edmonton. A 2022 CBC Books writer to watch, his previous works include the novels Old Gods and Avenue of Champions, which was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the ReLit award the same year. Kerr currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.
Kerr was announced as a juror for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize alongside Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie. Prairie Edge is on the longlist for the 2024 Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
LISTEN | Conor Kerr discusses Prairie Edge:
real ones by katherena vermette
Following two Michif sisters, lyn and June, real ones examines what happens when their estranged and white mother gets called out as a pretendian. Going by the name Raven Bearclaw, she's seen success for her art that draws on Indigenous style. As the media hones in on the story, the sisters, whose childhood trauma manifests in different ways, are pulled into their mother's web of lies and the painful past resurfaces.
katherena vermette is a Métis writer from Winnipeg. Her books include the poetry collections North End Love Songs and river woman and the four-book graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo. Her novels are The Break, The Strangers, The Circle. North End Love Songs won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. The Break was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. It was defended by Candy Palmater on Canada Reads 2017. The Strangers won the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
real ones is on the longlist for the 2024 Giller Prize.
The Flesh of Ice by Garry Gottfriedson
Dedicated to survivors of Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) and all residential schools in Canada, The Flesh of Ice is a collection of poems and personal narratives of writer Garry Gottfriedson of the Secwépemc (Shuswap) First Nation. Where Gottfriedson's last collection Bent Back Tongue discussed the history of Indigenous people in Canada as affected by the government of Canada and the Catholic Church, this book describes the lived realities of those who attended KIRS, citing their pain, their resilience and their necessary voices.
Gottfriedson is from Kamloops, B.C. He is strongly rooted in his Secwépemc (Shuswap) cultural teachings. In the late 1980s, Gottfriedson studied under Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Faithfull and others at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. He is the author of 13 books, including Skin Like Mine and Clinging to Bone. Gottfriedson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in 2023.
Gottfriedson is a juror for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize.
When the Pine Needles Fall by Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, with Sean Carleton
When the Pine Needles Fall tells the story of Canada's violent siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke in 1990 from the perspective of Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel who was the Kanien'kehá:ka spokesperson during that time. The book covers her experiences leading up to the siege and her work as an activist for her community since.
Gabriel is a Kanien'kehá:ka, Wakeniáhton, artist, documentarian and Indigenous human rights and environmental rights activist. She lives in Kanehsatà:ke Kanien'kehá:ka Homelands.
Sean Carleton is a historian and professor in Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. He is also the author of Lessons in Legitimacy.
Who We Are by Murray Sinclair, with Sara Sinclair and Niigaan Sinclair
Murray Sinclair made his mark on Canadian society as a judge, activist, senator, the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry — and now he writes all about it in his memoir Who We Are. The book answers the four guiding questions of Sinclair's life — Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I? — through stories about his remarkable career and trailblazing advocacy for Indigenous peoples' rights and freedoms.
Murray Sinclair is a former judge and senator. Anishinaabe and a member of the Peguis First Nation, Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and the second appointed in Canada. He served as Co-Chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba and as Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He has won awards including the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Manitoba Bar Association's Equality Award and its Distinguished Service Award (2016) and has received Honorary Doctorates from 14 Canadian universities.
Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa and mixed settler descent. She teaches at Columbia University and is currently co-editing two anthologies of Indigenous letters.
Niigaan Sinclair is a writer, editor, activist and the head of the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the co-editor of Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water and Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories. He won the Peace Educator of the Year award in 2019. He is also the author of the book Wînipêk.
The Knowing by Tanya Talaga
In The Knowing, Tanya Talaga retells her family story to explore Canada's history with an Indigenous lens. The Knowing starts with the life of Talaga's great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and charts the violence she and her family experienced for decades at the hands of the Church and the government.
Talaga is a writer and journalist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. Her book All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward was the basis for the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures.
LISTEN | Tanya Talaga on what Canada can learn from the stories of Indigenous peoples:
South Side of a Kinless River by Marilyn Dumont
Tackling the way Métis identity has been ignored and suppressed by the nation through poetry, South Side of a Kinless River is a collection focused on the voice of Marilyn Dumont. Closely looking at history, topics such as land loss, midwifery of Indigenous women and the relationships between Indigenous women and European men, the poems of this collection give voice to Métis women, the violence they are subjected to and the knowledge they hold.
Marilyn Dumont is an Edmonton-based poet of Cree Métis descent. Dumont's other works include Green Girl Dreams Mountains, The Pemmican Eaters and A Really Good Brown Girl, is about Dumont coming to understand and embrace her Métis heritage. A Really Good Brown Girl won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Teeth by Dallas Hunt
Teeth is a poetry collection that explores the consequences of colonization and why it continues to repeat itself in today's society. The book also celebrates the successes of Indigenous peoples and looks into the realities they face.
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta who now lives in Vancouver. His children's book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, illustrated by Amanda Strong, was nominated for several awards and was one of the 2024 CBC Kids Reads contenders. Hunt was a reader for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize.
Beautiful Beautiful by Brandon Reid
Beautiful Beautiful is a debut coming-of-age novel that tells the story of 12-year-old Derik Mormin who's travelling with his father to Bella Bella, B.C., for his grandfather's funeral. The book explores the beauty of rural and urban landscapes, his relationship with masculinity and the task of reconciling an Indigenous and Western way of life.
Brandon Reid is a writer whose work has been published in the Barely South Review, the Richmond Review and The Province. He is a member of Heiltsuk First Nation, with a mix of Indigenous and English ancestry. He lives in Richmond, B.C. Beautiful Beautiful is his first book and is also a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
LISTEN | Brandon Reid on The Next Chapter:
Wînipêk by Niigaan Sinclair
Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre is the story of Winnipeg, told in a series of essays through the lens of Indigenous resilience and reconciliation.
From the Indian Act and atrocities of colonialism to the creativity and ferocity of the Indigenous peoples preserving their heritage, Sinclair illustrates the way a place — how we love, lose, and fight for it — can help pave the way for the future of an entire country.
Niigaan Sinclair is an Anishinaabe (St. Peter's/Little Peguis) thinker and assistant professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. He has written for The Exile Edition of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama, The Guardian and CBC Books and is a regular contributor on APTN, CTV and CBC News. Sinclair is also the editor of The Debwe Series and the author and co-editor of award-winning Manitowapow and Centering Anishinaabeg Studies.
LISTEN | Niigaan Sinclair on The Sunday Magazine:
Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Complex Indigenous lives intersect in the stories that make up Coexistence. Stretching across Canadian prairies and the west coast, we travel to reserves, university campuses and lodgings of old residential schools to meet characters learning to live with and love one another and accept the realities of the past, present and future happening together all at once.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta. His first novel is A Minor Chorus. His debut collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, is unapologetically Indigenous and queer at the same time. Belcourt won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for This Wound is a World. The collection also won the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award for most significant work of poetry in English and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
LISTEN | Billy-Ray Belcourt on Q with Tom Power:
Into the Bright Open by Cherie Dimaline
Into the Bright Open is a queer YA reimagining of The Secret Garden. When Mary Lennox becomes an orphan at 15 years old, she is sent from her home in Toronto to the wilderness of the Georgian Bay to live with her uncle. Mary is settling into her new life when one night she finds her cousin Olive, who has been medicated and hidden away in an attic room. Mary and Olive become instant friends and, along with a Métis girl named Sophie, set out to try and free Olive. Then one day, they stumble upon a long-forgotten and overgrown garden.
Into the Bright Open is for ages 13 and up.
Cherie Dimaline is a Métis author best known for her YA novel The Marrow Thieves, which was named one of Time magazine's top 100 YA novels of all time and was championed by Jully Black on Canada Reads 2018. Her other books include VenCo, Red Rooms, The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, A Gentle Habit, Empire of Wild and Funeral Songs for Dying Girls.
LISTEN | Cherie Dimaline on queer and Indigenous reimaginings in latest book:
Those Pink Mountain Nights by Jen Ferguson
Those Pink Mountain Nights is a YA novel set in Alberta that follows three teenagers — Berlin, Cameron and Jessie — who are brought together by working at Pink Mountain Pizza. A possible sighting of Kiki, Cameron's cousin who disappeared five months earlier, sets off a course of events over one week in their small, snowy town that will alter all their lives. Those Pink Mountain Nights explores topics such as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, mental health and sexuality.
Those Pink Mountain Nights is for ages 13 and up.
Jen Ferguson is a YA author, activist and academic of Michif/Métis and Canadian settler heritage, based in Los Angeles. Ferguson has a PhD in English and creative writing. Her debut novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, won the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — text.
LISTEN | Jen Ferguson discusses her latest book with Ryan B. Patrick:
Empty Spaces by Jordan Abel
Empty Spaces is a reimagining of James Fenimore Cooper's 19th-century text The Last of the Mohicans from a modern urban perspective. Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling.
Abel is a Nisga'a writer from British Columbia. He is also the author of the poetry collections The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited and Injun. In 2017, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Injun.
LISTEN | Jordan Abel on his debut novel Empty Spaces:
And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
And Then She Fell follows a young woman named Alice who is struggling to navigate the early days of motherhood and live up to the unrealistic expectations of those around her.
Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer living in Brantford, Ont. Her writing has been published most recently in Room, Grain and The New Quarterly. She is the author of the nonfiction book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, a columnist for CBC Arts and CBC Books named her a writer to watch in 2019. She was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. And Then She Fell won the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award.
The Liturgy of Savage No. 82 by Maya Cousineau Mollen, translated by Adam Haiun
As an Innu woman, Maya Cousineau-Mollen grew up outside of the Ekuanitshit (Mingan) community she was born in. In her poetry collection The Liturgy of Savage No. 82, Cousineau-Mollen reflects on connecting with her biological family and culture after being adopted into another family as part of the Sixties Scoop. From childhood and onwards, Cousineau-Mollen's poems bring attention to the complex realities of Indigenous women in Canada and the Indigenous homeless population in Montreal as she draws on her own relationships to identity and systemic racism.
Cousineau-Mollen is an Innu poet based in Quebec. Her poetry collection Bréviaire du matricule 082 won the Indigenous Voices Award for French Poetry. Cousineau-Mollen also served as an executive assistant to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Adam Haiun is a Montreal-based writer and poet. His work has been published in Filling Station, Carte Blanche, The Headlight Anthology and Bad Nudes. No-Place Grid, his first poetry book, will be published in 2025.
She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild
She Falls Again follows the voice of a poet attempting to survive as an Indigenous person in Winnipeg when so many are disappearing. Riddled with uncertainties, like if the crow she speaks to is a trickster, the poet hears the message of the Sky Woman who is set on dismantling the patriarchy. Through short poems and prose this collection calls for reclamation and matriarchal power.
Rosanna Deerchild has been storytelling for more than 20 years, currently as host of CBC's Unreserved. Deerchild also developed and hosted This Place, a podcast series for CBC Books around the Indigenous anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold. Her book, calling down the sky, is her mother's residential school survivor story. Deerchild is currently based in Winnipeg.
The Art of Making by Jared Tailfeathers
The Art of Making follows Jared Tailfeathers' land-based journey to explore and understand his cultural and historical identity as a Blackfoot man. It goes into detail about the evolution of the Blackfoot Confederacy and all that came after it.
When you can read it: Oct. 1, 2024
Tailfeathers is an Indigenous artist whose work explores the art, history and future of the Blackfoot and other Treaty 7 Nations.
Clarifications:- This post has been updated to reflect that a book has been removed from this list at an author's request. October 2, 2024 7:46 PM