Indigenizing Columbia College: Indigenous Authors

Baker's deep appreciation for nature takes a lot of these stories out of Vancouver and into the wild. Salmon and bees play re-occuring roles in these tales, as do rivers.

In this genre-bending work, Belcourt employs poetry, poetics, prose, and textual art to illuminate the rogue possibility bubbling up everywhere NDNs are.

Blending memoir and essay, and with a poet's delight in language, A History of My Brief Body is both a grappling with a legacy of trauma and a record of the joy that flourishes in spite of it.

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.

A young, Indigenous woman enters a colonizer-run dragon academy after bonding with a hatchling-and quickly finds herself at odds with the "approved" way of doing things.

Keera is a killer. As the king's Blade and his most gifted assassin, she is called upon to hunt down a mysterious figure called the Shadow who is moving against the Crown. She tracks the Shadow into the magical lands of the Fae, but the Faeland is not what it seems, and neither is the Shadow.

When Daunis Fontaine witnesses a shocking murder, she reluctantly agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source of a new drug.

With the rising number of missing Indigenous women, her family's involvement in a murder investigation, and grave robbers profiting off her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry takes matters into her own hands to solve the mystery and reclaim her people's inheritance.

In a future world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's indigenous population - and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world.

Lucky St. James, orphaned daughter of a bad-ass Métis good-times girl, is barely hanging on to her nowhere life when she finds out that she and her grandmother, Stella, are about to be evicted from their apartment. Bad to worse in a heartbeat. Then one night, doing laundry in the building's dank basement, Lucky feels an irresistible something calling to her.

Funeral Songs For Dying Girls is a young adult novel about an Indigenous girl who lives on the grounds of a cemetery with her widowed father.

These stories interconnect the friendships of four First Nations people spanning over two decades against the cultural, political, and historical backdrop of the 1990s and early 2000s.

A residential school survivor's complicated path toward healing and love. Genocidal Love delves into the long-term effects of childhood trauma on those who attended residential school and demonstrates the power of story to help in recovery and healing.

Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention. Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver.

From resistance and reconciliation to the resurgence and reclamation of Indigenous power, Michelle Good explores the issues through a series of personal essays.

Loosely based on author Monique Gray Smith’s own life, this revealing, important work of creative non-fiction tells the story of a young Indigenous woman coming of age in Canada in the 1980s.

When Tilly receives an invitation to help drive eight elders on their ultimate bucket list road trip to Albuquerque for the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow, she impulsively says yes. Before she knows it, Tilly has said goodbye to her family and is behind the wheel--ready to embark on an adventure that will transform her in ways she could not predict.

A play featuring seven "Wasy" men and the game of hockey. It is a fast-paced story of tragedy, comedy, and hope.

Addresses the ways that Canadian culture today is shaped by the mixture of Aboriginal and Western mythologies

In Permanent Astonishment, one of the greatest writers of our time animates the magical world of his northern childhood, paying tribute to a way of life that few have experienced and fewer still have chronicled.

A young Cree woman is tormented by vivid dreams from before her sister's untimely death and wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands before returning to her rural hometown in Alberta seeking answers.

When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who'd raised him

Using rhyming lyrics from a previously written rap song, Midewin author, Manitoba politician, and creator Kinew tells the stories of diverse Indigenous heroes both historical and contemporary from the U.S. and Canada

Bugz is caught between two worlds. In the real world, she's a shy and self-conscious Indigenous teen who faces the stresses of teenage angst and reserve life. But in the virtual world, her alter ego is not just confident but dominant in a massive multiplayer video game universe.

Two tales, set in a time when animals and human beings still talked to each other.

A deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact.

Gabriel Quinn is a scientist working for a company called Domidion, a hybrid between Monsanto and ExxonMobile. He disappears from the company's Toronto headquarters only to reappear on the other side of the country, on a beach in British Columbia, on the verge of committing suicide.

Born at the turn of the 21st century, The Storyteller, also known as Ishkwegaabawiikwe (Last Standing Woman), carries her people's past within her memories.

A thoughtful story of a Native teen navigating the complicated, confusing waters of high school — and first love.

This collection of intersecting stories by both new and veteran Native writers bursts with hope, joy, resilience, the strength of community, and Native pride.

Halloween is near, and Hughie Wolfe is volunteering at a new rural attraction: Harvest House. But unusual things have been happening. A creepy man is stalking teenage girls and young women, particularly Indigenous women; dogs are fretful and on edge; and wild animals are behaving strangely.

Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, seeking to understand the messages from The Frugal Gourmet (one of the only television shows available on CBC North) that come to her in her dreams

Celia is a seer who - despite being convinced she’s a little "off" - must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews

Using a form of generative refusal towards western writing practices, the text works with the idea of kinship that derives from the author's Plains Cree and other kinship teachings. It also examines how queer kin were some of their first experiences of reciprocal relationality and care.

Bouncing in the middle of two cultures, Apple meets her Indian relatives, shatters Indian stereotypes, and learns what it means to find her place in a world divided by color

As Lisamarie travels by speedboat, five hundred miles north of Vancouver, searching for her drowned brother's body, she recounts her life which has included visits by ghosts and shapeshifters and tormenting premonitions.

Jared is only 16 but feels like he is the one who must stabilize his family's life, even look out for his elderly neighbors. But he struggles to keep everything afloat...and sometimes he blacks out. And he puzzles over why his maternal grandmother has never liked him, why she says he's the son of a trickster, that he isn't human.

An intimate, biographical look into the intricacies of family, culture, and place.

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.

Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens - until a mysterious and handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle and turns the place upside down.

Nothing ever happens on the Otter Lake reservation. But when 16-year-old Tiffany discovers her father is renting out her room, she's deeply upset. Sure, their guest is polite and keeps to himself. But he's also a little creepy. Little does Tiffany, her father or even her astute Granny Ruth suspect the truth. The mysterious Pierre L'Errant is actually a vampire, returning to his tribal home after centuries spent in Europe.

Upon learning his great-uncle Alfred has suffered a stroke, Richard sets out for Ste. Anne, in southeastern Manitoba, to find his father and tell him the news.

An eye-opening depiction of what it is to be a young Northern Native man in the age of AIDS, disillusionment with Catholicism and a growing world consciousness.

Explores the power and grace of restorative justice in one Northern community and the cultural legacy that can empower future generations.

Two honest and memorable middle-grade novellas on residential schools and reconciliation.

Winnipeg’s North End neighbourhood serves as both the setting for a terrible crime and a symbol of the fractured lives of the characters, four generations of a Métis family headed by Flora (the grandmother, or Kookom in Cree).

During a lecture at her new school, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place--a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie--and back again to the present. In the following weeks, Echo slips back and forth in time.

Discusses the fundamental issues of the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Canada--the terminology of relationships; culture and identity; myth-busting; state violence; and land, learning, law and treaties--along with wider social beliefs about these issues.

Powerful stories of "Metis futurism" that envision a world without violence, capitalism, or colonization.

Saul Indian Horse, who is dying in a big city hospice, embarks on a journey of imagination back through his life.

While trying to make it in the music business, blues musician Cree Thunderboy discovers that in life and in gambling there is never really the next sure thing.

Richard Wagamese finds lessons in both the mundane and sublime as he muses on the universe, drawing inspiration from working in the bush--sawing and cutting and stacking wood for winter as well as the smudge ceremony to bring him closer to the Creator.

This poetry collection focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer trickster character named Zoa who brings togehter the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity.

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living.

Making Love With the Land is a startling, heartwrenching look at what it means to live as a queer Indigenous person "in the rupture" between identities.