Books Written by Indigenous Women to Read this Summer

Tragically, the remains of 215 Indigenous children have recently been found buried in an unmarked, mass grave at a residential school in Canada.

It is now more important than ever for non-Indigenous allies to educate themselves on North America’s colonial history. In an era of online disinformation, reading Indigenous authors’ work is a productive way to educate oneself on ongoing cultural, educational, geographical and political inequities Indigenous communities still face today.

The following nonfiction works are written by Indigenous North American women. 

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliot is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River based in Brantford, Ontario. She is an Associate Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction and a Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead. She has notably been published by CBC, Maclean’s, Reader’s Digest, The New Quarterly, Room, and The Globe and Mail. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the 2017 National Magazine Awards. Her essay “On Seeing and Being Seen: Writing With Empathy” was nominated for a 2018 National Magazine Award. She was UBC’s 2017-2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow, and Tanya Talaga selected her to be awarded the 2018 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize. Roxane Gay also selected Elliot’s short story “Unearth” to be featured in Best American Short Stories 2018. Elliot’s essay collection A Mind Spread Out on the Ground won the 2020 Evergreen Award.

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a collection of insightful essays that meditate on heritage, intergenerational trauma, racism, and oppression while drawing from Elliott’s personal life. Elliot asks poignant questions about the way North American Indigenous folks are treated. She explores colonialism’s legacy, diet, gentrification, health problems in Indigenous communities, the loss of language, love, and mental illness. She also addresses parenthood, poverty, race, sexual assault, the treatment of Indigenous writers within the Canadian literary industry, and white privilege. Elliott intermingles the past, present, personal and political in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.

My Conversations with Canadians by Lee Maracle

Lee Maracle is a First Nations writer, critic, and activist from Vancouver, BC. Maracle is an essayist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. She explores identity, female sexuality, patriarchy, politics, post-colonialism, and tradition in her works. Her autobiographical novel Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1975, 1990) was one of the first published Canadian Indigenous works. She is also the author of the autobiographical I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (1988, 1996), and of thirteen other published works.

Maracle was awarded the 2000 J.T. Stewart Voices of Change Award, and the 2000 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 2009, she obtained an Honorary Doctor of Letters from St. Thomas University. In 2019, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo. She was awarded the 2018 Order of Canada. Maracle was also shortlisted for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She has held various academic positions in the GTA and Washington. Maracle is a co-founder of the En’owkin International School of Writing.

My Conversations with Canadians is an anthology of personal essays that focus on the conversations Maracle has had throughout her life as a Canadian, a First Nations leader, a grandmother, a mother and a woman. Questions regarding citizenship, labour, prejudice, reconciliation and segregation are featured in My Conversations with Canadians. Instead of finding answers, Maracle reflects on her experiences in Canada while reimagining Canada’s future.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

Tanya Talaga is an award-winning journalist, a Toronto Star columnist and the bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers (2017) and All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward (2018). She is of Polish and Indigenous descent. Seven Fallen Feathers won the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize.

Seven Fallen Feathers was also named CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year, and it was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. It was also a finalist for the BC National Award for Nonfiction and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. Talaga was the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy through The Canadian Journalism Foundation. She was also nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. Talaga is the First Ojibway woman to deliver the CBC Massey Lectures, and she has spoken to various audiences. In her work, Talaga shares global Indigenous stories addressing colonization and her aspiration for a more equitable and inclusive future.

Seven Fallen Feathers is a cautionary tale of sorts. It addresses education, Indigenous rights, systemic racism and the ways in which policing and the justice systems in Canada fall short. The book features the seven Indigenous high school students who died in Thunder Bay over an eleven-year span. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, having left home to study home due to their lack of adequate high school on their reserves. Five of them are found under a sacred Indigenous site in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior. Talaga explores Thunder Bay’s history, shedding light on Canada’s repeated human rights violations against Indigenous communities.

The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is an Inuit author, environmental and human rights activist, educator, global leader, and an Order of Canada Officer. She is the recipient of the Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Jack P. Blaney Award, the Norwegian Sophie Prize, the Right Livelihood Award and the UN Champion of the Earth Award. Watt-Cloutier was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy work in demonstrating climate change’s impact on human rights, namely in the Arctic.

Watt-Cloutier was elected the Canadian President of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) from 1995-2002. She was elected in 2002 to become the International Chair of the ICC where she represented 155,000 Inuit from Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia until 2006. She gave a 2016 TEDx Talk called “Human Trauma and Climate Trauma as One”. The Right to Be Cold was nominated for the 2016 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. It was also shortlisted in 2017 for CBC Canada Reads. Watt-Cloutier has been on the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize shortlist. 

Sheila Watt-Cloutier addresses the “global threat of climate change” from her humble Arctic childhood perspective in The Right to Be Cold. She explores both the safeguarding of Arctic ice and of Inuit culture. Watt-Cloutier’s “regional, national and international work over the last twenty-five years” as an Indigenous environmental activist, politician and speaker informs The Right to Be Cold. This story stems from her undying commitment to interwoven causes, her resilience, and the Indigenous struggle to survive.

Indigenous Toronto: Stories that Carry this Place edited by Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, Brian Wright-McLeod, and Denise Bolduc 

Indigenous Toronto is an anthology full of diverse stories of Indigenous Toronto (Tkaronto), written by 35 Indigenous artists, Elders, historians, and scholars. The writers delve into the culture and the settler colonialism that define the city we know today. Indigenous folks were in Toronto for twelve thousand years before colonization. Namely, the city was previously recognized as a Meeting Place. Toronto is presently recognized as “the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples […] now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.” Toronto is only one of multiple North American cities with a rich Indigenous history that has been progressively silenced by colonialism.

Among the contributors, there are artist Duke Redbird, educator Kerry Potts, former Mississaugas of the New Credit chief Carolyn King, and historian Alan Corbiere. There is also musician Elaine Bomberry, playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, political scientist Hayden King, and writer/journalist Paul Seesequasis.

As Hayden King states in the introduction, this anthology “offers the space for [Indigenous folks] to reclaim [their] ancestors’ language and legacy, rewriting [themselves] back into a landscape from which non-Indigenous historians have worked hard to erase [them].” As Hayden says, Indigenous communities are “in the [Toronto] skyline and throughout the GTA, along the coast and in all directions.”