
8 books to read if you loved A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby
Social Sharing
Podcaster and wellness advocate Shayla Stonechild championed A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby, which was written with Mary Louisa Plummer, to victory on Canada Reads 2025!
In A Two-Spirit Journey, Ma-Nee Chacaby, an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian who grew up in a remote northern Ontario community, tells the story of how she overcame experiences with abuse and alcohol addiction to become a counsellor and lead Thunder Bay's first gay pride parade.
Here are eight other Canadian books to read if you loved A Two-Spirit Journey.
Becoming a Matriarch by Helen Knott
Becoming a Matriarch tells the story of Helen Knott's experience losing both her mother and grandmother in just over six months. The book explores themes of mourning, sobriety through loss and generational dreaming and redefines what it means to truly be a matriarch.
Knott is a poet, social worker and writer of Dane Zaa, Cree, Métis and mixed European descent from the Prophet River First Nation. She is also the author of the memoir In My Own Moccasins, which won the 2020 Saskatchewan Book Award for Indigenous Peoples' Publishing.
Mamaskatch by Darrel J. McLeod
Mamaskatch tells the story of Darrel J. McLeod's upbringing on Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta, raised by his fierce Cree mother, Bertha. In describing memories of moose stew and wild peppermint tea, surrounded by siblings and cousins, he outlines his mother's experiences as a residential school survivor and how she taught him to be proud of his heritage.
McLeod was the writer of two memoirs, Mamaskatch and Peyakow, and one novel, . He became a writer after retiring from a career as a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. He died in 2024 at the age of 67.
The Power of Story by Harold R. Johnson
The Power of Story reflects on the power of storytelling — from personal narratives to historical sagas — as they relate to humanity and even how humans structure societies. Harold R. Johnson makes a case for how stories can shape and change our lives for the better in this posthumous nonfiction work.
Johnson was a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation. He was a lawyer and writer whose groundbreaking book Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours) was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. His other books include Peace and Good Order and Cry Wolf. He died in 2022 at the age of 64.
Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
In Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot traces her life story. She recalls her dysfunctional upbringing on Seabird Island in B.C., with an activist mother and abusive father, and achieving an acceptance into the Masters of Fine Art program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico. Heart Berries is a memorial for her mother, a story of reconciliation with her father and a way to write her way out of trauma.
Mailhot is a writer who was born and raised on Seabird Island, B.C. and now lives in Indiana. Her work has appeared in Time, Mother Jones, The Guardian and Best American Essays 2019.
Alicia Elliott explores the systemic oppression faced by Indigenous peoples across Canada through the lens of her own experiences as a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Elliott examines how colonial violence, including the loss of language, seeps into the present day lives of Indigenous people, often in the form of mental illness.
Elliott is based in Brantford, Ont. Her writing has been published most recently in Room, Grain and The New Quarterly. She is also the author of the novel And Then She Fell, which won the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award. Elliott is 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.
Our Voice of Fire by Brandi Morin
In Our Voice of Fire, journalist and writer Brandi Morin recounts her experience as a foster kid, runaway and survivor of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis. It follows her journey overcoming adversity to pursue justice and find her power though journalism.
Morin is a writer of Cree, Iroquois and French origin from Treaty 6 territories in Alberta. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, CBC and The New York Times.
Thunder Through My Veins by Gregory Scofield
Gregory Scofield is a poet who has helped shape contemporary Indigenous writing. But the path to becoming an accomplished writer wasn't easy. Scofield's father left him when he was five years old and he grew up surrounded by violence and poverty. But he had the love of his mother, the support of a kind neighbour and a desire to figure out who he was and what he wanted. Thunder Through My Veins is a memoir that recounts Scofield's early life and his experiences defining his identity and place in the world.
Thunder Through My Veins was originally published in 1999, when Scofield was 33, and was re-released with a new foreword in 2020.
Scofield is a Red River Métis of Cree, Scottish and European descent. He was the 2016 recipient of the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize, a $25,000 award given to an accomplished mid-career poet. His poetry collections include The Gathering and Witness, I Am.
From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle
Jesse Thistle is a Métis-Cree academic specializing in Indigenous homelessness, addiction and intergenerational trauma. For Thistle, these issues are more than just subjects on the page. After a difficult childhood, Thistle spent much of his early adulthood struggling with addiction while living on the streets of Toronto. Told in short chapters interspersed with poetry, his memoir From the Ashes details how his issues with abandonment and addiction led to homelessness, incarceration and his eventual journey through higher education.
From the Ashes was the top-selling Canadian book in 2020, the winner of the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Nonfiction, Indigenous Voices Award and the High Plains Book Award. It was also a finalist for Canada Reads 2020, when it was championed by George Canyon.
Jesse Thistle is Métis-Cree, from Prince Albert, Sask., and an assistant professor in Humanities at York University in Toronto. Thistle won a Governor General's Academic Medal in 2016. He is a 2016 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a 2016 Vanier Scholar. He is also the author of the poetry collection Scars and Stars.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Animated documentary bite-sized chunk of family life
At the close of the Hot Docs Festival in May, in a field of dozens of live-action films, it was the animated feature Endless Cookie that took home the $50,000 Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary, a prize determined by audience poll. Endless Cookie • Directed by Seth Scriver and Peter Scriver • Dave Barber Cinematheque • 97 minutes • Opens Friday, runs to June 22 It was no small achievement for co-directing brothers Seth Scriver, 47, a seasoned artist and animator, and Peter Scriver, 62, a man of many talents, including carver, trapper and poet. Peter, who is of white/Cree lineage, lives in Shamattawa First Nation in Northern Manitoba, 744 kilometres north of Winnipeg. Seth, who is white, is based in the city of his birth, Toronto. The urban/wilderness dynamic between them yields material that is powerful and relevant. But still … a documentary? The film is, after all, a cartoon, and one that is flagrantly impressionistic when it comes to hard-nosed reality. Peter's daughter Cookie, for example, is drawn as an actual chocolate-chip cookie; his dog Nutty is portrayed as Mr. Peanut. The overall look of the film suggests an underground comic come to life. Seth Scriver admits, when the film — which debuted at Sundance 2025 and opened imagineNATIVE 2025 — was presented at Hot Docs, the brothers were surprised it was so fervently embraced by the documentary realm. 'It was funny. We weren't trying to make a (documentary) genre film. It was more like … What is this?' he says. But he and his brother grew to accept the classification. 'It's a documentary because it's real stories. It's like a real family portrait, even though it seems unbelievable. Most of it is based in some reality,' Seth says. Most of the action is set in Shamattawa, where Seth interviews Peter about his life, including their lives together, stemming from a shared coming-of-age in Toronto, where their white father ran a vintage clothing shop in Kensington Market. In contrast to the crazy streets of '80s-era urban Toronto, the scenes in Shamattawa are linked into a familial community, especially Peter's sizable brood of nine children. And therein lies the film's distinction. Supplied It took Seth Scriver nine years to animate the movie. Supplied It took Seth Scriver nine years to animate the movie. When Seth originally discussed the movie with his brother, the idea was to make a film that would just take a couple of years to finish. It ended up being nine years in the making. Part of the reason is that Seth animated the film almost entirely by himself. But also, the project transformed when Seth realized he couldn't make a conventional animation with typically pristine audio. 'Originally, when we started, it was going to be straight-up good recording with no interruption, but Pete lives in a four-bedroom house with nine kids and 16 dogs, so it's insane to try to record anything,' says Seth. Supplied Peter Scriver is a trapper, carver and poet. Supplied Peter Scriver is a trapper, carver and poet. 'So eventually, we gave into the insanity and let it go.' Endless Cookie presents a picture of Indigenous life that veers away from the sombre, serious depictions prevalent in most films that take on the subject. The kids are funny and, cartoon distortion notwithstanding, real. They even contribute their own creativity to the mix with both animation and music. 'It's not for everyone, but we've been really lucky that it's been embraced so much, and people can relate to it,' Seth says. 'Because everyone has crazy families.' Randall KingReporter In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Montreal Gazette
01-06-2025
- Montreal Gazette
Dunlevy: Montreal documentary hunts for stolen indigenous masks that inspired surrealists
The repatriation and restitution of art and cultural materials is a hot topic these days. A prime example is estates trying to reclaim objects taken by the Nazis or sold by Jews under duress as they fled Germany. But there's another example closer to home. Montrealer Joanna Robertson and Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond's absorbing new documentary So Surreal: Behind the Masks explores what happened to Yup'ik and Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonial masks taken from these indigenous tribes in Alaska and British Columbia's northwest coast more than a century ago by traders, government officials and collectors. The masks were brought as far as New York, where they inspired some of the great European surrealist artists, who were living in exile mid-century, and eventually made their way to auction houses, world-famous museums and private collections. Leading us on an investigative journey to learn the significance of these masks, the circumstances of their removal and where they ended up is Diamond. He appears on camera throughout the film as an unassuming, intrepid protagonist, pushing the narrative forward with playful determination. He has done the same in his other films, including 2009's Reel Injun, which examined the problematic portrayals of Native Americans in Hollywood westerns, earning him and co-directors Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes three Gemini Awards and a Peabody Award. 'I've gotten quite comfortable (on screen),' Diamond said recently, over coffee with Robertson at Outremont's Croissanterie Le Figaro. 'Sometimes I forget the camera's rolling and I just act real goofy.' 'I think people appreciate it,' Robertson said. 'You bring a lot of humour to these (potentially) doom and gloom situations.' One amazing shot in the documentary shows Diamond puffing on a cigarette as he rides a bicycle down the middle of the road in the bustling Champs Élysées, with the Eiffel Tower behind him, and ponders his next move. Inspired by their subjects, the filmmakers take a surrealist approach to the storytelling as they weave together disparate clues and different ways of seeing the situation. On the one hand are Yup'ik tribe members who are happy to see their masks being preserved and showcased under the same roof as the Mona Lisa: One magical moment finds Yup'ik artist and storyteller Chuna McIntyre singing and dancing joyously as he approaches one of his tribe's masks on display at the Louvre, during an after-hours visit. On the other are members the Kwakwaka'wakw and their allies, who are in a continuing fight to see their masks — including many stolen during Canada's Potlach ban in 1921 — come home. At the heart of the intrigue is a quest to locate a mystical Raven Transformation Mask and possibly converse with its current owner about its eventual return. Somewhere in the middle are the wild surrealists — Max Ernst, André Breton, Roberto Matta, Enrico Donati and Joan Miró — and their friends, including famed French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who were endlessly stimulated by the otherworldly dreamscapes evoked by these masks. The extent to which they were aware of how these artifacts were obtained is unclear. 'I'm grateful we're able to shine a light on these stories, which are so fundamental to our understanding of who we are — of colonization and also the importance of Indigenous storytelling and culture,' Robertson said. 'The surrealists saw something — they lived through war after war after war — and they saw something in these masks, however problematic, as a reminder there's another way of being, and of seeing the world.' She expressed hope their film can foster empathy toward indigenous communities and all that they have lost. 'Yeah,' Diamond agreed, 'because if you lose your culture, you have nothing else.'


Vancouver Sun
29-05-2025
- Vancouver Sun
5 top shows to watch as APTN celebrates 25 years of Indigenous stories
The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The Canadian broadcaster is the first national public television station for Indigenous peoples, and holds the same status as CBC TV, Radio-Canada and TVA. The station is found on regular cable services, in high definition on APTN HD and streaming on APTN Lumi. In celebration of its quarter-century milestone, a new channel called APTN Languages is launching with programming in at least 15 Indigenous languages from across Canada. Programs range from the cross-cultural cooking show Moosemeat and Marmalade to the hit comedy DJ Burnt Bannock about a struggling Cree DJ. Monika Ille is the APTN CEO and a member of the Abenaki First Nation of Odanak. A recipient of the King Charles III Coronation medal in recognition of her contributions to Indigenous storytelling in Canadian media, Ille oversees a broadcast operation that produces shows ranging from mystery-thrillers and cooking shows, to documentaries and sports, all delivered from an Indigenous viewpoint. Get top headlines and gossip from the world of celebrity and entertainment. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sun Spots will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Even such venerable shows as Hockey Night in Canada get an Indigenous spin, broadcast in both Cree and Inuktitut. Ille says that when APTN applied to the CRTC 25 years ago, it was a dream to have a national Indigenous network. The broadcaster's impact on Indigenous identity, inside and out of communities, has been profound. 'It was something completely new at the time with only a handful of Indigenous producers and creators to work with,' said Ille. 'Now, we work with hundreds, making sure that our Indigenous stories and languages are more present than ever before with us in control of not only our image, but how we want to say it. I think that makes a very big difference in our relationship with non-Indigenous people.' She sees the launch of APTN Languages as one more development in ongoing reconciliation, noting that restoring native languages is key to reclaiming culture. 'In the 21 years that I have been at APTN, I always felt that we needed to do more to make Indigenous language be accessible to all people across the country who want to hear the beauty of these languages,' she said. 'Most of the shows are also subtitled in English and French, so they are accessible. More and more Indigenous peoples are reclaiming their languages, which is essential to their identity.' APTN is based in Winnipeg, but its programs are created all across the country. B.C.'s busy Hollywood North industry is no stranger to APTN productions, with many of the broadcaster's biggest hits coming out of the province. Staff at the network provided a list of the five most popular made-in-B.C. APTN programs. 1491 — Untold Stories of the America's Before Columbus : 'An older program, but still one of our most popular series,' said Ille. 'It tells the story of many people's histories pre-European contact.' (English and French) Moosemeat and Marmalade : 'This cooking show is an all-time fan favourite,' said Ille. 'You can learn so much about people through their food and the relationship between Art Napoleon and Dan Hayes has really built a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.' The show has drawn over 16 million international viewers. (English) Nations at War : This history program dives into the many wars Indigenous peoples have fought between one another and with settlers over the centuries. (English/French/ and Hul'Q'umi'num') Ocean Warriors : A docuseries about the Ahousaht's Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary team and its ongoing mission to carry out marine rescues, find missing divers, address environmental disasters and more. (English/French/ Nuučaan̓uɫ) Yukon Harvest/Dän K'eht'e : Filmed mostly in the Yukon, but also in Kamloops, Fort St. John and Stewart in B.C., this show focuses on Indigenous hunters across Canada and their culture. Nominated for a trio of Canadian Screen Awards in 2022. (English/Dän K'i) sderdeyn@