Library & Learning Commons: Indigenous Studies: Find books

How to find books

These orientation videos on our Library YouTube channel will walk you through the steps of using the Start your research box. These may also be helpful Library Quick Facts Orientation 2022 and Learning Centre - Tutoring

Indigenous Peoples and their countries ie. Canada and North America including land claims, self-government, treaties. This term is often used in an international context.

Native Peoples, First Peoples and Native Canadians include Anishnaabe, Inuit, and Oji-Cree, Ojibwa/Ojibway/Ojibwe, languages. First Nations, Inuit and Métis (Michef) are legal designations for separate, distinct Indigenous groups within Canada

Cambrian's Library & Learning Commons also holds a separate collection of children's and fiction books, both arranged alphabetically by the author's last name.

Recommended books

A Short History of the Blockade : giant beavers, diplomacy, and regeneration in Nishnaabewin
Call Number: PM853.5 .S56 2021
Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, Amik – the beaver. Amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance, as both a negation and an affirmation.
Di-Bayn-di-zi-win (to Own Ourselves): embodying Ojibway-Anishinabe ways
Call Number: E99.C6 F66 2022
Explore the importance of the Ojibway-Anishinabe worldview, use of ceremony, and language in living a good life, attaining true reconciliation, and resisting the notions of indigenization and colonialization inherent in Western institutions. Di-bah-ji-mo-wi-nan (stories of personal experience) provide insight into the cultural, political, social, and academic events of the past fifty years of Ojibway-Anishinabe resistance in Canada.
Kaandossiwin: how we come to know : Indigenous re-search methodologies
Call Number: E76.7 .A26 2022
ISBN: 9781773635170
Indigenous methodologies have been silenced and obscured by the Western scientific means of knowledge production. Includes how Indigenous re-searchers re-theorize and re-create methodologies. Understanding Indigenous methodologies as guided by Indigenous paradigms, worldviews, principles, processes and contexts, and how they are wholistic, relational, inter-relational and interdependent with Indigenous philosophies, beliefs and ways of life.
True Reconciliation : how to be a force for change
Call Number: E78.C2 W737 2022
There is one question Canadians have asked Jody Wilson-Raybould more than any other: What can I do to help advance reconciliation? This has been true from her time as a leader of British Columbia's First Nations, as a Member of Parliament, as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, within the business communities she interacts with, and when having conversations with people around their kitchen tables. Whether speaking as individuals, communities, organizations, or governments, people want to take concrete and tangible action that will make real change. They just need to know how to get started, or how to take the next step. For Wilson-Raybould, what individuals and organizations need to do to advance true reconciliation is self-evident, accessible, and achievable. True Reconciliation is broken down into three core practices - Learn, Understand, and Act - that can be applied by individuals, communities, organizations, and governments. They are based on the historical and contemporar
Indigenous Toronto: stories that carry this place
Call Number: E78.O5 I53 2021
Narratives of Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians tell the story of Indigenous Toronto, past and present. Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day. Toronto was known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived. Winner of the Heritage Toronto Book Award, 2022.

Becoming Kin: an indigenous call to unforgetting the past and reimagining our future
Call Number: E98.K48 K74 2022
We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." See settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis with a forceful call to "unforget" our history.
Fighting for a Hand to Hold: confronting medical colonialism against indigenous children in Canada
Call Number: RA450.4 .I53 S53 2020
This text exposes the medical establishment's role in the displacement, colonization, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Includes government documentation, historical scholarship, media reports, public inquiries, and personal testimonies, to connect the draconian medevac practice with often-disregarded crimes and medical violence inflicted specifically on Indigenous children.
Highway of Tears : a true story of racism, indifference and the pursuit of justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls
Call Number: HV6250.4 .W65 M33 2020
An explosive examination of the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Highway 16 - the Highway of Tears - and a searing indictment of the society that failed them. For decades, women--overwhelmingly from Indigenous backgrounds--have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern B.C. Systemic racism and indifference towards Indigenous lives have created a culture of "over-policing and under-protection," simultaneously hampering justice while endangering young Indigenous women.
Intimate integration : a history of the Sixties Scoop and the colonization of Indigenous kinship
Call Number: HV875.7.C2 S74 2020
Documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the Adopt Indian and Métis Project and the Indian Adoption Project mirrored the new direction in post-war Indian policy and welfare services. This removal of Indigenous children from family took on increasing political and social urgency
A mind spread out on the ground
Call Number: E78.C2 E487 2020
Describes the intergenerational trauma, legacy, oppression and racism in North America, the ongoing legacy of colonialism and its links to depression, and loss of language--both figurative and literal? How does white privilege operate in different contexts? Discusses race, parenthood, sexuality, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing and representation.

Fragments of Truth: residential schools and the challenge of reconciliation in Canada
Call Number: E96.5 .A54 2022
The TRC reviewed the history of the residential school system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children and left a legacy of trauma and pain. Analysis of the visual culture of reconciliation and memory using archival photographs from the residential school system, representations of the schools in popular media and literature, and testimonies from TRC proceedings
Standoff: why reconciliation fails Indigenous people and how to fix it
Call Number: E78.C2 M35 2021
Explanation of why reconciliation with Indigenous peoples is failing and what needs to be done to fix it. From Wet'suwet'en opposition to a pipeline in northern British Columbia, to Mi'kmaw exercising their fishing rights in Nova Scotia with the historical and social forces that underpin the development of Indigenous law. Covers many of the most important issues that have become part of a national dialogue, including systemic racism, treaty rights, violence against Indigenous people, Métis identity, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and the duty to consult
Doodem and council fire : Anishinaabe governance through alliance
Call Number: E99 .C6 B64 2020
Combining socio-legal and ethnohistorical studies, this book presents the history of doodem, or clan identification markings, left by Anishinaabe on treaties and other legal documents from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. These doodems reflected fundamental principles behind Anishinaabe governance that were often ignored by Europeans, who referred to Indigenous polities in terms of tribe, nation, band, or village - classifications that failed to fully encompass longstanding cultural traditions of political authority within Anishinaabe society.
Braiding Legal Orders: implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Call Number: KE7709 .B73 2019
Implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is a pivotal opportunity to explore the relationship between international law, Indigenous peoples' own laws and Canada's constitutional narratives and is 'a way forward' on the path to genuine nation-to-nation relationships with Indigenous peoples.
Our War Paint Is Writers' Ink: Anishinaabe literary transnationalism
Call Number: PM853.5 .S67 2018
For the Anishinaabeg--the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes--literary writing has long been an important means of asserting their continued existence as a nation, with its own culture, history, and sovereignty. At the same time, literature has also offered American writers a way to make the Anishinaabe Nation disappear, often by relegating it to a distant past. These two traditions in conversation with one another, show how novels, poetry, and drama have been the ground upon which Anishinaabeg and Americans have clashed as representatives of two nations contentiously occupying the same land.

Kâ-Pî-isi-kiskisiyân = The Way I Remember
Call Number: E99.C88 R38 2023
A residential school survivor finds his way back to his language and culture through his family's traditional stories. When reflecting on forces that have shaped his life, Ratt says his Cree education was interrupted by his schooling at the age of six. Reflects on memories and the life-long challenges endured through his telling of âcimisowin (autobiographical stories) and also âcathôhkîwina, (sacred stories).
Otter's Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law
Call Number: PM231 .B67 2018
Told in contemporary Anishinaabe storytelling style, Otter's Journey takes us across the globe to explore how the work in Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization.
Anishinaabe ABC : Mazina'igan
Call Number: PM851 .B25 2017
This book uses the Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) Double Vowel writing system. Teachers and students can use the book to learn the alphabet and words associated with each letter symbol. Teachers may wish to discuss the cultural relevancy of the word associated with each letter. Students can look at the illustrations for help with translating the word to English. A glossary is provided at the back of the book.

Daughters of the Deer by Danielle Daniel
Call Number: PR9199.4.D3557 D38 2022
In this haunting, groundbreaking, historical novel, Danielle Daniel from Sudbury, imagines the lives of her ancestors in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s, a story inspired by her family link to a girl murdered near Trois-Rivières in the early days of French settlement.
Permanent astonishment by Tomson Highway
Call Number: PS8565.I433 Z46 2022
An epic memoir from one of Canada’s most acclaimed Indigenous writers and performers Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the 11th of 12 children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family who traversed the tundra by dogsled and lived off the land. His parents, Balazee and Joe, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was 6, he and Rene were flown south by float plan to attend a residential school and begin the rest of their education.
Sugar Falls : a residential school story by David A. Robertson
Call Number: E96.5 .R63 2021
Inspired by true events, Elder Betty Ross from Cross Lake First Nation, abandoned as a young child, is adopted into a loving family. At the age of 8 she is taken away to a residential school and endures abuse and indignity. But Betsy recalls the words her father who spoke to her at Sugar Falls--words that give her the resilience, strength, and determination to survive.
From the Ashes : my story of being Métis, homeless, and finding my way
Call Number: FC 109.1 .T45 A3 2019
Once a high school dropout and now a rising Indigenous scholar, this book chronicles a life on the streets and overcoming trauma and addiction. An eloquent exploration of the impact of prejudice and racism, about love and support and finding happiness despite the odds.
Beyond the Orange Shirt Story
Call Number: E96.5 .W43 2021
This is a collection of Survivors and Intergenerational Survivors truths who share a look at what life was like before, during, and after their Residential School experiences.
Autumn Peltier, Water Warrior
Call Number: Children's L (Lindstrom)
Telling the story of real-life water protectors, Autumn and her great-aunt Josephine Mandamin, inspire a tidal wave of change. The seventh generation is creating a sea of change. It was a soft voice, at first. Like a ripple. But with practice it grew louder
Treaty Words : for as long as the rivers flow
Call Number: Children's C (Craft)
The first treaty that was made was between the earth and the sky. It was an agreement to work together. We build all of our treaties on that original treaty. On the banks of the river that have been Mishomis's home his whole life, he teaches his granddaughter to listen--to hear both the sounds and the silences, and so to learn her place in Creation. Most importantly, he teaches her about treaties--the bonds of reciprocity and renewal that endure for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the rivers flow.
Mii Maanda Ezhi-Gkendmaanh / This Is How I Know
Call Number: Children's L (Luby)
An Anishinaabe child and her grandmother explore the natural wonders of each season in this lyrical, bilingual story-poem. In this lyrical story-poem, written in Anishinaabemowin and English, a child and grandmother explore their surroundings, taking pleasure in the familiar sights that each new season brings.
Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox
Call Number: Children's D (Daniel)
In this introduction to the Anishinaabe tradition of totem animals, young children explain why they identify with different creatures such as a deer, beaver, or moose. Delightful illustrations show the children wearing masks representing their chosen animal, while the few lines of text on each page work as a series of simple poems throughout the book.

Spirit Bear - Honouring Memories ... Planting Dreams
Children's B
Spirit Bear is on his way home from a sacred ceremony when he meets Jake, a friendly dog, with a bag full of paper hearts attached to wood stakes. Jake tells Spirit Bear that school children and residential school survivors will plant the hearts when a big report on residential schools called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is released
Honouring Memories ... Planting Dreams - Learning Guide