A couple of weeks ago, I attended Wordstock, a literary festival in Northern Ontario (they presented all their events in-person and online), and one of my favourite discussions was between three northern Indigenous authors, which reminded me that I had intended to share some other recent Indigenous reads.

The Wordstock panel included Waubgeshig Rice (many will be glad to know that the sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow will be published next year) from Wasauksing First Nation, Missanabie Cree author Ernie Louttit (new to me, he mostly writes non-fiction), and David Robertson from Norway House Cree Nation.

Robertson read from The Theory of Crows, which I just finished reading last night, his new novel about a death in the family. The story focuses on Matthew and Holly, a father and teenage daughter, whose everyday stresses are suddenly intensified when Matthew’s father dies (Holly’s grandfather). I’ll admit that, although I have read his illustrated books about residential school and Indigenous history, I added this book to my list earlier this year solely because of the crows, but I found it quite a touching story overall.

“The trees whisper answers to any question you could think to ask, by the rustling of their leaves. Your moshom said the land remembered every foot that pressed down on its surface, every set of eyes that gazed upon its ancient beauty, every fingertip that touched its skin, every face the sun warmed. Every living thing—the fish, the four-legged creatures, the birds—was an extension of the land, and when you walked onto it, you became an extension of it, too.
You became the land.”

I have been reading other books by Indigenous writers too, some for young readers and others for crime-fiction lovers.

I borrowed If You’re Happy and You Know It with bilingual verses in Inuktitut and English, because I’ve never seen a storybook in this Indigenous language. If you’re curious, you can hear it performed (and read the lyrics) on Ananna’s Tent, based on the book published by Arvaaq, part of Inhabit Media, although you’ll miss the cute and colourful illustrations. (There are other great resources on the show’s page, too, for basic vocabulary.)

When I looked up the new Tomson Highway memoir in the library catalogue, I found several illustrated children’s stories, and then remembered that he had spoken in an interview about telling these stories from his boyhood. Originally published in English, they’re now available from a northern Ontario press in translations by Mishka Lavigne; each bilingual edition in French and Cree has a different illustrator.

You can see the artists’ distinct styles from the covers, and each time I picked up a volume, I was convinced that I enjoyed that illustrator’s style more: the contrasting artistic styles feel appropriate. All the stories are gently measured and tenderly told, the brothers Joe and Cody—with Cody’s dog Ootsie—spending days and nights together in the ordinary activities of their childhoods.

Having the text in contrasting colours (the French in black, the Cree in a colour that complements the art alongside) was useful for me too, because neither is my mother tongue, so it was a challenge to read; I can rarely distinguish between nouns and verbs in Cree (only when I recognise a word I’ve learned from another book, probably another of Highway’s!) so the parallel structure was interesting but not instructive for me. I would need something like the Inuktitut board book to actually learn vocabulary other than the words in the titles.

In Les libellules cerfes-volants/Pimithaagansa (illustrated by Julie Flett), the boys play out of doors, mostly far from their parents, particularly with dragonflies. (Up here, I see dragonflies in the summer as often as I used to see birds in Toronto.) In Un renard sur la glace/Maageesees Maskwameek Kaapit (illustrated by Brian Deines), their parents play a more important role, as the family travels by sled with the dogs. Winter nears its end in La chant des caribous/Ateek Oonagamoon (illustrated by John Rombough), and the sled dogs are barking but the boys are having something of an adventure away from their parents.

The first two in Marcie Rendon’s series, featuring Cash Blackburn, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman in the 1970s were republished just before the third volume, Sinister Graves, was released by Soho Press (the image to the left links to the series’ author’s page). These remind me of mysteries by Nevada Barr and Thomas King; they read quickly and easily, despite the fact that there are serious issues lurking beneath the surface. (More on these here via The Chicago Review of Books.)

“Sometimes the darkness is our own fears. The best thing we can do it face our fears head on. You just have to keep your mind and heart on what you’re here for.”

David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts is a character-driven pageturner, a thriller rather than a mystery. The action scenes remind me of the battles in Eden Robinson’s Trickster series, and the ensemble cast brings Richard van Camp’s writing to mind. There’s much to learn about the Sicangu Lakota Nation here, but the characterization is nuanced enough to avoid any sense of the narrative being instructive.

“People here always talked about going to Rapid City or Sioux Falls or Denver, getting a job and making a clean break. Putting aside Native ways and assimilating, adapting to suburban life. But I thought about the sound of the drummers at a pow-wow, the smell of wild sage, the way little Native kids looked dressed up in their first regalia, the flash of the sun coming up over the hills. I wondered if I could ever really leave the reservation, because the rez was in my mind, a virtual rez, one that I was seemingly stuck with.”

Dennis E. Staples’ This Town Sleeps (2020) is more thriller than mystery, too, but what I most enjoyed it was the slow-burn of a romance plot throughout. This slim volume, like Marcie Rendon’s series, is also set on and around an Ojibwe reservation in present-day northern Minnesota.

The community is haunted by the murder of a high-school basketball player, and there is another haunting, too, which also reaches back into Marion’s childhood. Both plotlines are affecting, but what I yearned to know was how/whether Marion’s hookup with a popular guy (who also attended the same high school) would develop into something serious and whether that would be enough for Marion to feel more connected to his life in Geshig.

“The first chance I had to move out of Geshig and off the Languille Lake reservation, I took it. I moved to the Twin Cities for college. And then as a few years passed, and after a disastrous relationship or two, I found myself back in Half Lake, and spending a lot of time in my hometown. It pulls me back here like the door at the end of a dream that you don’t want to go through, but you can’t control your feet.”

Ramona Emerson’s debut mystery, Shutter, has an additional literary layer to it; for most of the novel, however, I was simply caught up in Rita Todacheene’s life as a crime-scene photographer. (This is also via Soho Press, one of my favourite sources of mystery writing.)

Two-thirds of the way into the story, details emerge which connect two ends of a circle for readers, revolving around her Navajo ancestry and her decision to pursue this line of work. It’s immensely satisfying. It’s more about how Rita will handle the knowledge of an individual’s culpability, rather than being a whodunnit, but nonetheless this leads to a satisfying resolution.

“I took the picture. I had taken 1,015 pictures of over a hundred separate pieces of a human being and her belongings. I had five scrapes on my own hands and knees and one filthy white paper suit.
I sat in my car for fifteen minutes and labeled three photo cards and five pages of notes.”

Which of these do you think you’d be most likely to read? Or, is there a book or author you’d like to add to this conversation?