The Yield by Tara June Winch

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We thought of It:

After a long absence, August is returning to her home in Massacre Plains, a remote part of central Australia, to attend the funeral of her grandfather, Poppy Albert. But when she gets there, she finds that even her families last fragile hold on what used to be their ancestral land is threatened by the development of a tin mine.

The Yield weaves together three narratives. There is August’s story, of reconnecting with her family, of coming to terms with the loss of Poppy Albert, and of her growing conviction that they could fight the incursion of the mine.

The second is an extended letter, written by the white pastor who set up the original mission on Massacre Plains to protect the local Aboriginal people. His letter both documents the extent and brutality of the atrocities committed by white settlers and reveals the some of the damage caused through his own good intentions.

Finally, there are Poppy Albert’s own writings – his attempt to create a dictionary of his people’s original language. Each word that he captures has a story to go with it – and those stories tell something of the traditions of the original inhabitants of Massacre Plains, of their custodianship of the land and of the environmental degradation brought about through ignoring that deep knowledge.  But fragment by fragment they also reveal the devastating truth behind the family tragedy that led to August leaving Massacre Plains.

Poppy’s dictionary underlines the importance of reclaiming language, because a language reveals a whole different way of thinking. As Poppy says, it sings mountains into existence.

Like this year’s Jhalak Prize winner The First Woman, The Yield explores the intergenerational impact of colonialism – but this time through the lens of an Indigenous people who were all but wiped out by white settlers in the course of their insatiable land grab. It also reflects on how ignorance and the wilful rejection of traditional knowledge and practice has led to the destruction of a delicate ecological balance.

Achingly beautiful. A devastating tally of the cost paid by the relentless drive to expand European ‘civilisation,’ yet containing within it a small flame of hope that some of what has been lost can still reclaimed.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, The Break by Katherena Vermette

Avoid If You Dislike: Confronting the devastating impact of colonialism on a land and its people.

Perfect Accompaniment: Freshwater fish, grilled and flavoured with herbs.

Genre: Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Indigenous Writing, Literary Fiction

Buy This Book Here

From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We thought of It:

From the Ashes is a painful and poignant memoir from Canadian author, Jesse Thistle. Thistle is Michif, or Métis – descended from the offspring of Cree women and French and Scottish fur traders.

Owing to family breakup, Thistle grew up divorced from his heritage, knowing nothing about the history or language of his people. His father, a drug addict, took him and his two brothers away from his mother and her people and then abandoned them. The boys were brought up by their paternal grandparents who, though they loved them, gave them little understanding or affection.

Thistle ended up homeless and drug addicted, living on the streets and moving in and out of prison. That he survived at all is something of a miracle. But survive he did, and as he hit rock bottom and began to claw his way back up again, he began to ask himself why it is that so many young Indigenous men, like him, can be found in Canada’s prisons and homeless shelters.

The answer, for Thistle at least, lay in reclaiming his Métis heritage – understanding how they came to live as they did, forced to squat on narrow strips Crown lands alongside roads and railway lines, the so-called ‘road-allowances’. As he writes in the dedication:

“The pages of this book speak to the damage colonialism can do to Indigenous families, and how, when one’s Indigeneity is stripped away, people can make poor choices informed by pain, loneliness and heartbreak, choices that see them eventually case upon the streets, in jail or wandering the no place to be.”

From the Ashes is not an easy read. Thistle’s path down into his own personal hell was long and tortuous. He doesn’t spare the reader any of the horror of what the dark extremes of drug addiction do to either the body or the mind.

Some of the most arresting moments in the book come in the poems that are dotted between its chapters. Thistle distils his experiences into instants of time captured in free verse.

I had this tiny bag
It had my old life inside
When I finally got the courage to get rid of it, I left it on the bed
Then I jumped out of the window
Down two stories
But the grass broke my fall.

A troubling, necessary and ultimately inspiring book.

Jesse Thistle is now assistant professor in Métis Studies at York University, Toronto. From the Ashes was the top-selling book in Canada in 2020.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Stuart, A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters, Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, Birdie by Tracie Lindberg, The Break by Katherena Vermette

Avoid If You Dislike: Grim details of the physical and mental impacts of extreme drug addiction

Perfect Accompaniment: Bannock and Saskatoon berries

Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Indigenous Writing


Buy This Book Here

The White Girl by Tony Birch

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

“Welfare? Oh, you’ve looked after the welfare of our young girls for a long time now. Most of them are dead, disappeared, or were sent mad by what you did to them in institutions. That’s not welfare, Sergeant. I think your own law would call that murder.”

For the last few years, I have made a point of searching out and reading books by Canadian indigenous authors. But to the best of my recollection, the only book by an Australian indigenous author I had read before this was the memoir, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara.

The White Girl is a novel, set in the 1960s, thirty years after the events in Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence. But it was still a time when State police and ‘Welfare Boards’ had extraordinary powers of Australian Aboriginal people, who were not considered citizens and did not have voting rights.

Odette Brown is an Aboriginal woman living in Deane, a fictional mining town in a remote part of Australia, with her granddaughter Sissy. Thanks to her unknown white father, Sissy is blonde and fair-skinned, which makes her of particular interest to the Welfare Board. The local police control where they can travel and can, on the smallest excuse, take Sissy into their custody.

The only escape from this control is a so-called ‘exemption certificate,’ which can be issued by the Welfare Board if character references a provided by two white people of good standing. But it comes at a heavy price – the bearer must promise not to associate with other Aboriginal people, essentially forcing them to renounce their own families.

When the thirteen-year-old Sissy starts to receive unwanted attentions from the local White Trash, Odette is forced take desperate measures to protect her.

The White Girl is a story of love, resilience and family. The relationship between Odette and Sissy, though tinged with sadness, is brimming with warmth and humour. As readers, we are sucked along on the dangerous tightrope Odette must walk in order to live with dignity in a country where she is denied basic human rights.

By the 1960s, Australia might have moved beyond the brutal cruelty that leads Odette to say “Deane carried the blood or so many Aboriginal people on his hands it could never be scrubbed away, not from the man himself or the town that carried his name.” Yet the white settler community could still convince itself that the Aboriginal people were like children, incapable of looking after themselves or making decisions about their own welfare. As with indigenous communities around the world, things have moved on, but there is still a long way to go.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara, The Break by Katherena Vermette

Avoid If You Dislike: Being reminded of the shameful attitude of settle communities towards indigenous peoples

Perfect Accompaniment: A long soak in the bath

Genre: Indigenous Literature, Recent Historical Fiction, Australian Fiction

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The Empire of the Wild by Cherie Dimaline

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

“Joan had been searching for her lost husband for eleven months and six days, since last October, when they’d fought about selling the land she’d inherited from her father and he’d put on his grey jacket and walked out, then screen door banging behind him.”

Earlier this year I reviewed Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves, her brilliant dystopia for Young Adults. The Empire of the Wild, by contrast, is definitely a book for adults. Nevertheless, it retains a strong element of magic realism.

Hungover and on the edge of despair, Joan stumbles on a tent set up in the supermarket car park. It belongs to a revival group doing the rounds of Métis communities. And the charismatic preacher leading the service is her husband Victor. Except that he insists that he isn’t. He is the Rev Eugene Wolff and there isn’t so much as a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

But Joan refuses to give up. She believes that Victor has become a victim of the Rogarou – a werewolf-like beasts that, in Metis tradition, haunts roads and woods.

“He was a wolf, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig. He was whatever made you shiver, but was always there, standing by the road, whistling to the stars ... as close and distant as ancestors.”

And no matter what it costs, Joan is determined to get her husband back.

Dimaline has woven a powerful tale from the warp of daily life in Métis communities and the weft of traditions that reach back deep into history. She captures the visceral longing for a missing partner, for the touch of their hands, the smell of their skin. She shows up, too, the cynical use of religion as a tool to manipulate Indigenous and Métis communities.

Joan is tough, funny, resilient – maybe a little bit crazy but you’d definitely want her on your side. And you wouldn’t bet against her.

The Empire of the Wild is the book you get when a writer takes control of their own stories, their own traditions. It embodies the struggle for survival of Indigenous and Metis cultures against the unstoppable march of Western settler society. It’s hilarious, scary, fascinating and unputtdownable.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Son of the Trickster by Eden Robinson, Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, Augustown by Kei Miller, American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Avoid If You Dislike: Magic Realism

Perfect Accompaniment: Labatts beer and a Johnny Cash soundtrack

Genre: Literary Fiction, Indigenous Authors, Magic Realism

Buy This Book Here

My Conversations with Canadians by Lee Maracle

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

“The question of why settler Canadians get a better life off my continent does not pop into white men’s heads, nor into the heads of other nice white women either.”

Like Why I Am Not Talking to White People About Race, and Between the World and Me, My Conversations with Canadians is a challenge to the dominant social group – most especially those who consider themselves to be liberal and enlightened – to wake up and realise the harm they are unwittingly doing.

Maracle is a member of the Stó:lō Nation, part of the Coastal Salish Confederacy, from the Fraser Valley region of British Colombia; the daughter of a Métis mother and Salish father. As well as being an author and a poet, Maracle is an Instructor in Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Toronto and a Traditional Teacher at First Nations House

To being with, she quietly demolishes the illusions of Canadians like me of being the ‘nice’ settlers.

“In line with having no clue about their world, Canadians continue to insist that they are ‘better then America.”

Yet American reservations are on average 300 times the size of Canadian reserves. Canada’s residential school programme has been recognised as an act of cultural genocide. Indigenous women continue to be murdered at a rate of four times that of any other ethnic group. Indigenous children are still taken into care at a disproportionate rate.

The chapter that spoke particularly strongly to me was the one about Cultural Appropriation. This is a term that has been treated with undisguised contempt by some in the literary and art worlds. Maracle explains how, among her people, land and physical objects were not considered that property of individuals but something over which they shared stewardship. Knowledge, on the other hand, was personal. You passed it on the members of your family – but you traded for it with those outside your family. And knowledge was not written down but passed on orally, often in the form of story. People were trained in the art of remembering to ensure accuracy.

“Colonial white society assigned itself some crazy Knower’s Chair and handed white people the authority to sit in it They alone get to sit in this chair and decide what is true knowledge and what is false.”

When the white settlers came along, they took what knowledge it suited them and wrote it down. They packaged it up in books and university courses that had to be paid for. At the same time, they separated indigenous children from their parents and grandparents through the residential schools system, thus destroying the natural flow of knowledge down through families, forcing them to buy it back from the settlers who had appropriated it.

Small wonder then, that now First Nations people have the opportunity to revive their traditional skills, knowledge and languages, they are wary of settlers who once again want to repackage these things for commercial gain.

Since 2008, Canada has been going through a process of Truth and Reconciliation. When asked what reconciliation means to her, Maracle answers acerbically – “Well, stop killing us would be a good place to begin. Then maybe stop plundering our resources, stop robbing us of our children, end colonial domination – return our lands, and then maybe we can talk about being friends.”

And yet, it is clear that, despite everything, Maracle does want to find a route to that friendship.

“Some of our people wish Canadians would move back to their original homelands. Not me – I hope they fall in love with the land the way I have – fully, responsibly and committed for life.”

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Why I Am Not Talking To White People About Race by Renni Eddo Lodge, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Avoid If You Dislike: Checking Your Privilege

Perfect Accompaniment: A willingness to give up the Knower’s Chair.

Genre: Non-fiction, Essays, Indigenous Writings

Available on Amazon

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.”

It’s the mid 21st Century and the world’s freshwater supplies have been polluted beyond repair. The icecaps have melted, swallowing both the coastal cities and much of traditional lands of indigenous people. And now people have stopped dreaming – all that is except indigenous people. Not being able to dream has induced a kind of madness – and the world has turned to indigenous people to try to find a cure. To begin with, they come with curiosity, seeking to learn. But then scientists discover that the secret may lie in bone marrow. And they will take it, by any means necessary.

Settlers turn back to the infamous system of residential schools, where children were snatched from their parents and housed far away, with the aim of stripping them of their Indian identity. Only now, what the revived ‘schools’ want to strip is bone marrow.

French and his brother have already lost their parents. They are running for their lives, using everything they have ever learnt to stay ahead of the terrifying Recruiters.

“It probably started with the first pop of air against metallic plastic, no louder than a champagne cork. I imagined the school truancy officers – Recruiters, we called them – coming for us, noses to the wind, sunglasses reflecting the row of house behind which we were nestled.”

French will lose more, and gain more, than he can possibly imagine before a reckoning becomes possible.

Cherie Dimaline is from the Georgian Bay Metis community in Canada. I suspect if a non-indigenous author had written about Ceremony (for example), they would have felt they had to describe and explain. Dimaline, by contrast, treats it as part of the fabric of life. She doesn’t need to spell it out; she concentrates instead on how her characters relate to it – emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Dark as the central theme is, The Marrow Thieves is also about family – the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves – about loyalty and sacrifice in extreme circumstances, and about the agonies and ecstasies of young love.

“How could anything be as bad as it was when this moment existed in the span of eternity? How could I have fear when this girl would allow me this close? How could anything matter but this small miracle of having someone I could love?”

The Marrow Thieves a truly terrifying dystopia that is also an indictment of the on-going exploitation of indigenous people by settler communities. It demonstrates how voices that have traditionally been ignored have entirely new stories to tell. And how important it is that those stories are told by those to whom they belong.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Technologies of the Self by Haris A Durrani, Shadow Shaper by Daniel Jose Older, Rats by JW Hicks, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese.

Avoid If You Dislike: Post-apocalyptic dystopias

Perfect Accompaniment: A glass of fresh, clean water – while we still can!

Genre: Young Adult, SciFi


Available on Amazon

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese

Review by: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

I read once that there are holes in the universe that swallow all light, all bodies. St Jerome’s took all the light from my world.

Saul Indian Horse is from the Fish Clan of the Northern Ojibway – the Anishinabeg.

As the opening of the book shows, in the late fifties and early sixties, there were still pockets of land, even in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, where the indigenous people could live traditional lives. But the rot that would destroy that way of life had long since set in. The church-run, government sponsored system of residential schools had ripped through communities, stealing away generations of children.

If you haven’t already read the damning reports, this book can leave you in no doubt that those who ran these schools were not ‘well meaning but misguided’. The systematic cruelty Wagamese describes beggars belief. Sexual assaults and deaths from brutality and neglect did not just happen, they were routine. It left generations of survivors suffering from PTSD and vulnerable to alcoholism and domestic abuse.

When your innocence is stripped from you, when your people are denigrated, when the family you came from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backward, primitive, savage, you come to see yourself as less than human.

For a while, Saul escapes from the horrors into the world of ice hockey. The instincts that once allowed his great-grandfather to anticipate the movements of the animals he hunted allow Saul to ‘read’ the ice, to place himself where the puck will be a split-seconds before it arrives, to find the gap in the players through which to score. Wagamese brings a captivating poetry to his descriptions of these hockey games.

As Saul moves up from the Indian ‘Rez’ teams and starts to compete with white players, he faces racist aggressions – micro and macro – that suck the joy out of the game. He will have to hit rock bottom before he can finally confront what happened to him at the school and begin the slow process of healing.

A powerful book that everyone should read to understand the long-reaching impact of childhood trauma.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara, My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal.

Avoid If You Dislike: Frank depiction of institutional child abuse

Perfect Accompaniment: Rabbit stew on a cold, cold night.

Genre: Literary Fiction, Indigenous Authors

Available on Amazon

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

Review by: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs, it’s because they are applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.

Jonny Appleseed is an urban NDN - young, Two Spirit / Indigiqueer and a glitter princess. He has left the rez in northern Manitoba and made a life for himself in Winnepeg, earning his living creating sexual fantasies on camera for other gay men.

I’m like an Etch-a-Sketch – every cell in my body is yours to define.

Homophobia was rampant on the rez, especially among the men. And Winnepeg is known as ‘the most racist city in Canada.’ Jonny has spent his life playing straight on the rez in order to be an NDN and playing white in the city in order to be queer. There are perhaps only three people in the world who accept him as himself – his mother, his Kokum (grandmother) and his childhood friend and sometime lover, Thias.

Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like “I’m in pain with you.”

But Kokum is dead and Thias is in love with a girl called Jordan. Then his mother calls to say that his stepdad, Roger – ‘a pig-headed, alcoholic, homophobic sonuva’ – has died, and she wants him home for the funeral. So now he has a couple of days to earn enough money for his rent AND to pay for the journey home.

As the story flips between Jonny’s memories of growing up on the Rez and his present life in Winnepeg, Whitehead plays with language as if he’s inventing it afresh. He references January Jones, The Revenant or Elle from Stranger Things as lightly as he references the elements of Oji-Cree beliefs and traditions salvaged from the wreckage of the past.

This is two generations on from the residential school system that ripped through indigenous communities throughout Canada, but the wounds are still open. Jonny ‘s life is a desperate, clinging-to-the-edge existence. And yet there is a joy and a tenderness and a depth of love that emerges from the hurt and sorrow.

A powerful, utterly modern story that will take you by the scruff of the neck and shake your preconceptions. Long-listed for the 2018 Giller Prize.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Break by Katherena Vermette, Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, When We Speak of Nothing by Olumide Popoola

Avoid If You Dislike: Unflinching descriptions of gay sex

Perfect Accompaniment: Soup and bannock (or something with hamburger helper!)

Genre: Literary Fiction, LGBTQ Fiction, Indigenous Fiction

Available on Amazon

Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

I have been travelling back and forth to Canada quite a bit these past few years, and every time I do, I try to come back with a book by an indigenous author – books that are often difficult or impossible to obtain on this side of the Atlantic.

My latest acquisition is the Giller shortlisted Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson. Robinson is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations of British Columbia, and this is the first of a planned trilogy of books about the Trickster, Wee’git, the shape-shifting Raven of Haisla stories, the bad example who teaches children the rules by breaking every one of them.

This is no traditional folk tale, though. Robinson places Wee’git firmly in the modern world. Kitimat, where the author lives and the book is set, was a town dominated by the Eurocan pulp and paper mill – a company that was at once a big employer and a big polluter. So when the mill closed, despite the harm it had done to the land, it sent a seismic shock through the community.

It is in this world that Jared is growing up. His parents have split up. His father is unemployed. His mother is on drugs and his dog has just died. Jared wants to get through Grade 10 and keep his family safe, but nothing is ever quite that simple. Especially when (as one of his grandmothers insists) your father just might be Wee’git.

Just because this book has a teenage protagonist and deals in magic, don’t imagine this is a YA novel, or that it bears any resemblance to Harry Potter. The book explodes into swear words (including the c-word) within the first couple of pages. Drugs, alcohol and violence fuel a good part of the action. And the magic it deals in (from talking ravens to eco-warrior otters) is neither good nor evil, but dark and unquestionably dangerous.

For a good part of the book it is unclear – to Jared or to the reader - whether the strange things that keep happening are the result of magic or the product of too many drugs. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with it, the novel twists and turns and throws up more surprises. What is clear – despite what appears to be his wildly dysfunctional upbringing – is both Jared’s kindness and his intelligence. You care about what happens to him because he cares so much about those around him (even when it hardly seems to be reciprocated).

This is a wild trip of a novel, and not for the faint-hearted. I look forward to getting my hands on the next part of the trilogy when it comes out!

This excellent interview with Eden Robinson from Prism Magazine explains at lot of the background to the novel – the Haisla stories that shape it, and the social and ecological conditions in the troubled communities it describes.

The interview also finishes with a fabulous list of Canadian indigenous women authors I shall be adding to my wish list for my next visit.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Augustown by Kei Miller, Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, The Break by Katherena Vermette, Disposable People by Ezekel Alan

Avoid If You Dislike: Swearing, drugs, alcohol and violence mixed with magic

Perfect Accompaniment: Spaghetti and moose meatballs

Genre: Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age Novel

Available on Amazon

The Break by Katherena Vermette

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Once again, the annual Canada Reads event from CBC Books has connected me with a brilliant indigenous author I might otherwise have missed from this side of the Atlantic.

The Break is an area of rough ground on the edge of an unnamed city between the Canadian Shield at the Prairies. It abuts a neighbourhood home to many Métis and ‘status Indians,’ written off by the local police as ‘nates’ or ‘May-tee’.

When one Métis woman witnesses a brutal attack – a rape, she says – on the Break, the police are reluctant to believe her. Sexual attacks just don’t happen in snow drifts in the middle of winter. But then a young girl shows up at hospital with a story that matches her account.

The novel unfolds in a series of overlapping points of view – most of them women across three generations of the same family - the matriarch, Kookum (grandmother), her daughters and granddaughters.

They have a strength forged by a lifetime of tough experience, and the bonds of love between them are warm and tangible. They have made their lives and homes in the city, supporting their families while their men, for the most part, have retreated to the bush. Between them, their voices draw us, not just into the tragic events on the Break but into a family history that encapsulates the experience of Métis women.

A tender exploration of the impact of sexual assault on an extended family, and of the resilience of indigenous women. A story that will stay with you long after you have closed the final page.

Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer from Manitoba, the heart of the Métis nation. Her book, North End Love Songs previously won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. The Break, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak, Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Avoid if You Dislike: Stories centred around sexual assault

Perfect Accompaniment: Tomato soup with bannock bread

Genre: Literary Fiction, Fiction from Indigenous Authors

Available on Amazon

Birdie by Tracey Lindberg

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought: I am always on the lookout for books written by indigenous authors – not always an easy task when you are based in the UK – so I was particularly pleased when this year’s CBC Canada Reads programme introduced me to Birdie – a book by and about a present-day Cree woman.

Tracey Lindberg is a citizen of As’in’i’wa’chi Ni’yaw Nation Rocky Mountain Cree and comes from the Kelly Lake Cree Nation community. She is a lawyer teaching Indigenous studies and Indigenous law at two Canadian universities, and describes herself as “next in a long line of argumentative Cree women.” Birdie is her first novel.

Birdie is the nickname for Bernice, a ‘big, beautiful Cree woman’ with a deeply troubled past. She has grown up an outsider, living beyond the boundaries a reserve in northern Alberta because her family are not recognised as ‘status Indians.’ She has been fostered, homeless, incarcerated in a sanitorium. She has been called many other names, too – little brown dolly, fat cow, buffalo.  

We first meet her in Gibsons, British Columbia, where the long-running television series, Beachcombers was filmed. As a child, Birdie loved Beachcombers, because one of its lead characters was a First Nations man – a rare positive male role model. The men in her real life, the ‘uncles’, are shadowy figures, one of the many things in Birdie’s life that no one talks about.

“No one ever talked about a lot of things. What happened to Freda’s mom ... Why Maggie stopped talking to anyone. When the electricity would come back on. Why no one stayed with the uncles. The silence about what was happening around then seeped into the kitchen, first. Permeating the curtains. Eating into the linoleum. Eventually settling into the fridge.”

In Gibsons, Birdie takes a job in a bakery run by Lola, an elderly white woman. But she can’t escape from the ghosts of her past. She retires to bed, and her spirit seems to leave her body, taking her on a dreamquest. Alarmed, Lola manages to contact Birdie’s Auntie Val and her cousin, skinny Freda, and as the three women gather around Bernice, she finds the strength travel back along the path that led her to Gibsons, and to emerge the other side, stronger and healthier.

Birdie is permeated with many aspects of Cree culture. In particular, pimatisewin, a word which Lindberg uses for the tree of life. In the book, the tree itself it sick, like Bernice, something which seems to represent the damage inflicted on the Cree nation. But when Bernice is at last able to reach out beyond her own suffering, she makes an offering to the tree which is healing for them both.

I must put in a word for the gorgeous cover. The more you study the central image, the more you find hidden depths in what appears, at first, to be a traditional image.

Birdie celebrates the strength, unity and wisdom of Cree women. Lindberg calls this book a ‘love letter to her mom and her aunties.’But at the same time it does not shirk from showing the lasting harm done to indigenous communities by colonisation, resulting in deeply dysfunctional families.


You’ll enjoy this if you loved: A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards, The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich,

Avoid if you dislike: stories dealing with sexual abuse.

Perfect Accompaniment: Home-baked sweet rolls with tea

Genre: Literary Fiction, Indigenous authors

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

A few months ago, Ann Morgan (from A Year of Reading the World) and I asked Native American book blogger, Debbie Reese, what adult book by an indigenous writer she would recommend. Her answer, unhesitating, was The Round House by Louise Erdrich.

Set in 1988, The Round House is the story of the unravelling consequences of the rape of an Anishinaabe woman in North Dakota, as seen through the eyes of her 13 year old son.

The novel opens on a moment of normality – a boy and his father working quietly together to pull up saplings that threaten the foundations of their house. When Joe’s mother does not return in time for dinner, they drive round looking for her, thinking perhaps that her car has broken down. Then they find her sitting in the car, “her hands were clenched on the wheel and she was staring blindly ahead.”

At first, Joe’s mother, desperate to protect another young woman and her child, will not speak about what happened. But bit by bit, the story reveals itself. She was raped in a place where the boundaries of different lands meet, making it almost impossible to determine who is responsible for prosecuting the case.

The novel was inspired in part by the Amnesty report from 2009 – the Maze of Injustice – which revealed that at least one in three Native women will be raped in their lifetime. Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than other women in the US. 86% of those rapes are committed by non-Native men, often with additional violence. Prosecution is further complicated by such a tangle of jurisdictions – federal, state and tribal –that frequently no action is taken at all.

Seeing the case through Joe’s eyes allows us to understand, at the most intimate level, how rape effects the family and the whole community. But at the same time, Erdrich finds ways of showing us a bigger picture – one that tells of the rape of Indian lands by the white settlers.

Joe’s father is a judge in the native courts. When Joe starts to realise how limited his father’s jurisdiction is, he shows him how the legal precedents he and his fellow Native judges set are built above a rotten foundation of case law, going back to the early 1800s, that stripped Indian tribes of their right of self determination.

“Everything we do, no matter how trivial must be crafted keenly,” he tells Joe. “We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty.”

Threaded through the novel, too, are the stories told by Mooshum, Joe’s Métis grandfather, who is old enough to remember a time when the Anishinaabe people starved because of the loss of traditional hunting grounds, as the buffalo were slaughtered and they were driven onto ever-shrinking reservation lands.

Mooshum also tells him about the wiindigoo – a person possessed by a spirit that would make them "become an animal and see fellow humans as prey meat". "The thing to do," his grandfather explains, "was you had to kill that person right away."

Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Anishinaabe (also called Chippewa in the US and Ojibwe in Canada), so her portrait of life on the reservation is rooted in reality. These are not the romanticised Indians of the Great American West, but flesh and blood people struggling to survive.

The book is full of wonderful, unexpected, characters, like Grandma Thunder, one of those "Indian grandmas where the church doesn't take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young". Joe and his friends help out at ceremonies, like the sweat lodge, that barely ten years earlier, were still illegal to practice. The book explores the tensions that still exist between the Catholic Church and traditional religion.

Above all, however, this is a story of the end of childhood, the loss of innocence, and the intense friendships of early adolescence. Joe and his best mate, Cappy, hover on the edge of boyhood – in one breath imagining themselves as characters in Star Trek, the next falling in love with his aunt’s “full, delicate, resolute and round” breasts. But the events of that summer will force them to grow up in the most painful way possible. Joe, faced with the probability that his mother’s attacker will never face prosecution, will have to make choices that no one, let alone a boy of his age, should ever have to make.

You'll Enjoy This If You Loved: If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth, Peace Like a River by Lief Enger

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories that centre around violence against women

Perfect Accompaniment: Frybread with meat and beans, topped with grated cheese.

Genre: Literary Fiction, Fiction by Indigenous Writers

Available from Amazon

My Name is Not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What we thought:

“My name is hard, like ocean ice grinding at the shore or wind pounding the tundra or sun so bright ion the snow it hurts your eyes.”

It is the start of the school year and three brothers are about to travel hundreds of miles away from home to start a new life at a boarding school. But this is no Hogwarts. It’s a fictional example of a very real phenomenon – residential schools where Native Canadian and American children were sent to be ‘re-educated’ as model citizens.

It is only recently, through processes such as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that the harm caused by these policies has been acknowledged. But in My Name is Not Easy, Edwardson captures, at times with exquisite poetry, the experience of a handful of Alaskan Iñupiaq and Athabaskan children.

In the background of the story are real events of the early 1960s – including the forced adoption of native children, the testing of Inuit children with radioactive Iodine-131 to determine how they were able to adapt to living in Arctic conditions, and an abortive plan to create a new harbour in traditional hunting areas by detonating hundreds of nuclear bombs. But the power of the book lies in the way that Edwardson allows us to see the world through the eyes of those children.

We follow them over four years, from the first shock of their dislocation in a new environment:

“You’re supposed to be able to see things when you’re outside. You’re supposed to be able to look out across the tundra and see caribou ... the edge of the sun running around you like the rim of a bowl ... How can you even tell where you’re going in a place like this? How can you see the weather far enough to tell what’s coming?”

...through the dawning of complicated adolescent feelings:

“All I cared about was Bunna’s hand holding mine, our fingers lacing together, learning a new language all the way to Fairbanks. It was a language of love – holding on and letting go, holding on and letting go.”

...to an understanding of the power they can wield through working together and standing up for what is right.

“Legal name? He puts the pen right there on that line and signs his name, his real Iñupiaq name, the one he left behind... Aamaugak, Luke thinks. What’s so hard about that?”

Children at the residential school were taken from their families, stripped of their names, forbidden to speak their own languages and expected to leave their tradition cultures and ways of life behind. But as Edwardson acknowledges, the long years at school also forged alliances that lasted into adulthood, and have helped native peoples join forces and fight for their rights and land titles to be recognised.

Based on the experiences of the author’s husband and his brothers, this is a heart-breaking, beautiful and inspiring book.

You’ll enjoy this if you liked: If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Nation by Terry Pratchett

Avoid if you dislike: School stories, teenage heroes, having your preconception of native people challenged

Perfect accompaniment: Milk and cookies

Genre: Young Adult

Available from Amazon

If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

It’s September 1975 and Lewis is about to start his second year of junior high. As the only Indian kid from his reservation who made it into the top stream, his first year was lonely, to say the least, and he has no great expectation that this year will be any better.

But then he meets George, who is almost as lonely as he is. In many ways, the two are opposites. George, the son of a military officer, rarely gets to stay in one place long enough to make friends. Lewis expects to spend the rest of his life on the reservation. But somehow a shared love of music draws them together.

For a few months, Lewis’s life takes a turn for the better. Then he stumbles across the path of Ewan, school bully and Indian hater. What follows will put an even greater pressure on Lewis and George’s friendship. It will take the blizzard of the century to finally bring their families together and break down the last barriers between the boys.

Gansworth’s portrait of a boy on edge of puberty is one any teenager could relate to. But he also gives a revealing glimpse of life ‘on the res’ – from the joyous (the Summer Picnic and the ‘Nu Yah’ celebrations) to the grim (Lewis’s decaying home, with its outdoor latrine and no running water).

Lewis is from the Tuscarora tribe*, part of the Iroquois Six Nations, living in northern New York State. The tribe, originally from North Carolina, was driven north in the 18th Century, when their land was taken from them and their numbers depleted by disease. As Lewis explains, their culture was further eroded in his grandparents’ generation, when children were taken from their homes and placed in residential schools where they were physically abused and forbidden to speak their language or practice traditional customs. All this has left a legacy of almost equal parts pride, suffering and mistrust.

If I Ever Get Out of Here is about negotiating friendship and trust from across a chasm of cultural differences, from the subtleties of telephone etiquette to the logistics of using a two-hole privy in sub-zero temperatures. It also brims over with a love of music – especially the Beatles, Wings and Queen.

With Canada and the US finally facing up to the legacy of the residential school system through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, this book has a contemporary resonance, despite the forty year old setting.

(*You can read more about Gansworth’s background here. )

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Finding Violet Park by Jenny Valentine, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, My Name is not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson

Avoid if you don’t like: Teenage heroes, school bullies

Ideal accompaniments: Indian corn soup with home-made bread

Genre: Young Adult

Available from Amazon