Fifth House Books
In these two plays, Drew Hayden Taylor delves into the past and speculates about the future as he examines the dilemmas facing young Native Canadians. Toronto at Dreamer's Rock is a moving portrayal of a teenage boy who is torn between the traditions of his people, which he only vaguely understands, and the lure of modern life. His magical encounters with two members of his tribe - one from 400 years in the past and one from the future - make him aware of how little he has thought about what it means to be an Indian. Education is Our Right borrows from the familiar story of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but in this version the spirits of Education Past, Present and Future attempt to show the Minister of Indian Affairs the error of his ways. Drew Hayden Taylor combines humour, passion, spirituality, and tough realism to create a hopeful vision of the future. Both plays have toured extensively to schools in Ontario and Quebec.
Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award when first published in 1988, The Rez Sisters has gone on to become an internationally critically acclaimed play, included in all major anthologies of Canadian literature world-wide. Now, in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, the play is being published in its original language: Cree. Included is a Note on Dialect" by the author. The play tells the story of seven reserve women who decide to go to the "Biggest Bingo in the World," in Toronto, a night's drive from their Manitoulin Island home. Of the many works that Tomson Highway has written to date, his best known are the plays The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Rose, and Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. He is also the author of the best-selling novel The Fur Queen. For many years, he ran Canada's premiere Native Theatre Company, Native Earth Performing Arts, in Toronto, out of which has emerged a generation of professional Native Theatre artists. He divides his time equally between a cottage on northern Ontario and an apartment in the south of France."
This poetic story has universal appeal and spans time and distance with eloquent simplicity. In fourteen gentle stanzas, sleepy-eyed children throughout history draw comfort from bedtime tales and tender lullabies. Here, their innate curiosity about the world around them is satisfied by timeless music that drifts through centuries on the wind. Loving parents sing of white polar bears, northern lights, sea creatures, and woodland animals that dance under the stars and visit each child on the edge of sleep. Evocative rhyming text and vivid images will call little ones back time and again to hear the song that drifts into their own special dreams and links them to past and future generations.
Will and Tom speak in a whisper. "Uncle, tell us the story of the Windigo." The boys look behind them for something they can't see.When Uncle shares the story of the Windigo, the cousins get more than they expect. That night something strange scratches at the frost on their bedroom window. In the morning they find huge tracks in the snow. The Wandering Night Spirit of Winter!Tom and Will know what good Trackers would do, so they follow the trail deep into the forest. Then a strange cry slices the air."Remember," Will whispers as they move forward. "Don't look into its eyes."Can you be a tracker too? Find the tracks hidden in the pictures.
This long-awaited first collection by playwright and director Alanis King presents three exciting plays interconnected by themes of hope: spiritual (If Jesus Met Nanabush), personal (The Tommy Prince Story) and cultural (Born Buffalo).When Jesus turns up at the Champion of Champions Pow-Wow, the first person he meets is Nanabush. Together they form an odd pair. Nanabush is earthy, irascible, fun-loving. Jesus is formal, introverted, a fish out of water. However, as they venture across the back roads, bars and bus depots of Turtle Island, the two will discover that they are not so different after all.Merging Native and Western traditions, If Jesus Met Nanabush is a thought-provoking and often hilarious cosmological First Contact story.The Tommy Prince Story an emotionally charged drama that brings to light the incredible life and times of the great Saulteaux warrior. As Drew Hayden Taylor concluded: "This is Alanis at her finest."The final play is the lively Born Buffalo which will take the reader back into the mystical age of the buffalo alongside fraternal twins magically transformed into bison.
Someday is a powerful new play by award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. The story in Someday, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor's distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families.Anne Wabung's daughter was taken away by children's aid workers when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne's yearning to see her now-grown daughter is stronger than ever.When the family is finally reunited, however, the dreams of neither women are fulfilled.The setting for the play is a fictional Ojibway community, but could be any reserve in Canada, where thousands of Native children were removed from their families in what is known among Native people as the "scoop-up" of the 1950s and 1960s. Somedayis an entertaining, humourous, and spirited play that packs an intense emotional wallop.
Grace loves being with her gramps, but there are things she is not so sure of: the dark; scary movies; trying new things she has never tried before. So when Gramps takes her fishing on a dark, foggy morning, she has her doubts - lots of them. How can she tell Gramps she's not as keen on adventure as he is without spoiling their time together? Some bemused assurance from Gramps and a timely flash of creativity from Grace solve the problem and prove once and for all that no one is too young to go fishing or to face new challenges. Fire Pie Trout brings the warmth of a special family relationship and the excitement of growing just a little bigger to the darkest, foggiest of mornings.
Don't Name the Ducks and Other Truths About Life in the Country is Wendy Dudley's heartwarming journal about reconnecting with her mother through living close to the land. It is a story about following your heart to a home where old memories are lived and where new memories are made.
For several months, Quebec illustrator Rogé prepared a series of portraits of Haitian children. Students of Camp Perrin wrote the accompanying poems, which create, with flowing consistency, Haiti, my Country. These teenaged poets use the Haitian landscape as their easel. The nature that envelops them is quite clearly their main subject. While misery often storms through Haiti in the form of earthquakes, cyclones, or floods, these young men and women see their surrounding nature as assurance for a joyful, confident future.
This comedy by the author of Toronto at Dreamer's Rock and Education Is Our Right is about love, family, and what to do with too much beer. Set on a reserve, it follows the plight of Martha, a church-going, teetotaling woman who finds herself stuck with 143 cases of beer after a church fundraiser fails. She decides to bootleg the beer, to the horror of her son Andrew, nicknamed Blue, who is a special constable on the reserve. Meanwhile, Andrew has fallen for a young woman he thinks is his cousin, and his sister Marianne is bored with her "Indian Yuppie" husband and finds herself attracted to a handsome dancer at the powwow. The pace is fast and vigorous in this romantic situation comedy.
Abby is having trouble fitting in at Bear Creek Reserve. After having lived most of her life with her grandparents in town, it's definitely a transition moving back to the reserve. When Choom, her grandfather, falls ill, Abby must leave her best friends at school, her supportive grandparents, and her perfect pink bedroom, and adjust to living with her mom. But it's not only being back with Mom that is hard - there's a new father, John, a pesky half-brother, Blink, a schoolroom full of kids who don't know her (and don't seem to want to, either), not to mention a completely different way of life that seems so traditional, so puzzling and complicated.
From the trips to the general store to battles with bedbugs and falling cows, Five Pennies brings to life the experiences of a boy growing up in the early west. Filled with details about pioneer life, each story gives insight into the difficulties, challenges, and joys faced by families building a new home on a rugged, new land. Young Archie's observations offer a different perspective on that life, one tinged by a child's wonder and sense of adventure. These heartwarming stories about Christmas pageants, starting school, summer jobs, and the exciting potential of owning five pennies were told to author Irene Morck by her father. She has captured the spirit and humour of his memories and brought them together in this entertaining collection.
Life on a farm at the edge of the wilderness was filled with hard work and danger, but there was also laughter, adventure, and the love of family and friends. In The Edge of the Wilderness, Lee Updike tells of growing up in northern Saskatchewan in the 1930s and 1940s. From the heartwarming story of his beloved dog, Shorty, to the tale of a terrifying forest fire, Updike chronicles life in the north with insight and gentle humour.
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought drought, unemployment, and poverty to the West, and the token wages from the government's "make work" projects only fanned the flames of unrest. In 1935, this unrest took on a purpose: to march on Ottawa and demand a solution from Prime Minister R. B. Bennett. Thus was born the On-to-Ottawa trek, which culminated in the Regina Riot, where the protesters and RCMP clashed in one of Canada's most significant historic events.
In Finding My Talk, fourteen aboriginal women who attend residential schools, or were affected by them, reflect on their experiences.
After retiring from HBC to Yellowknife, Seagrave decided to write down his tales of northern adventure. It was time to record what he witnessed as the fur trade collapsed, as electricity and television found their way into the remotest of communities, and as a revolution in transportation was occurring.
"Weinstein has given us a beautiful history of the M?tis nationà.Quiet Revolution West is a vivid tale of constant struggle and sacrifice. It is a gripping account of political intrigue and brinksmanship that will raise eyebrows in many quarters."-- From the Foreword by the Right Honourable Paul MartinWhen the Manitoba Act of 1870 created the new Province of Manitoba within the Dominion of Canada, it was predominantly a M?tis province, yet within a matter of years, the M?tis were a dispossessed, displaced, and dispersed people. Weinstein traces M?tis aspirations for political autonomy as a unique nation with its own land base in the Canadian federation from the time of Louis Riel until the Kelowna Accord of 2005. He concentrates - in great detail and with deft accounts - on the political maneuvering and constitutional wrangling of the last three decades, cataloguing the contributions and disappointments of colourful M?tis leaders. And he provides detailed reviews of legal cases relevant to long-standing M?tis claims to land and other rights.Such rights he places within the context of the world-wide movement among indigenous peoples for greater political autonomy, such as in Central America, and he ends his account with the prospects for self government among the M?tis and the forms that such a government might take, given the dispersal of the M?tis across Canada. Although the M?tis have been recognized in the Constitution as one of the three groups of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, they remain the landless subjects of the Canadian government, and for this reason Quiet Revolution West is a timely account of resistance."
Short listed for 3 Saskatchewan Book Awards:Non-Fiction Award, Saskatoon Award, Book of the Year Award. On the morning of 5 December 1933, a young RCMP constable discovered a grisly scene in the Avalon schoolyard in rural Saskatchewan. A young boy lay dead in a rented car, an apparent victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the car with him were his parents, who would survive both the effects of the gas and self-inflicted knife wounds only to face murder charges in their son's death. The subsequent trial of Ted and Rose Bates ranks as one of the most hotly debated in Saskatchewan history.Historian Bill Waiser examines an incident long held up as an example of the sheer despair and bureaucratic heartlessness of the Depression and shows that the truth is much more complex. Through meticulous research, including letters, police and trial documents, contemporary accounts, and interviews with people who knew Ted, Rose, and Jackie, the author recreates the troubled lives and desperate times of Ted and Rose Bates in order to explain what led them to that isolated schoolyard on a cold December night. Waiser traces the Bates' story from Ted and Rose's arrival in Canada as immigrants searching for a better life to the final outcome of their dramatic trial. The story is written with an immediacy that goes beyond a more traditional narrative approach in order to provide a better understanding and appreciation of the circumstances behind the sorry incident. The words spoken throughout the book are taken verbatim from the sources and serve to reinforce that the Bates were not simply helpless victims of the Depression, but flawed people with complex personalities.Who Killed Jackie Bates? superbly recreates the Depression ethos to provide insight into a time and place that seem light years away from the Canada of today."
The Final Agreement of Canada's Nisga'a Treaty is a major milestone in the history of aboriginal and government negotiations. This ground-breaking treaty recognizes the right of the Nisga'a people to live where they have always lived, and to own and control the land they live on. The World Is Our Witness traces the history of the Nisga'a and their claim, details the elements of the treaty, and offers an analysis of the characters, political intrigue, and opposition to this historic deal. It provides an essential foundation for understanding the future of Native American land claims and battles for recognition.