Indigenous Book Club

Fall 2021

Lee Maracle

Remembering Lee Maracle: revolutionary author, poet, mentor and activist

(1950-2021)

KPU was honoured to welcome Lee Maracle as a new faculty member teaching in Indigenous Studies. Lee is the author of many award winning and critically acclaimed literary works and has published in some of the most prestigious anthologies and scholarly journals worldwide. Her works include: the novels, Ravensong, Bobbi Lee, Sundogs, short story collection, Sojourner’s Truth, poetry collection, Bentbox, and non-fiction work I Am Woman. A recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal and the Order of Canada, Maracle has served as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at four universities. She holds three teaching awards and seven writing awards, including the Premier’s award for Excellence in the arts.

Memory Serves Cover Memory Serves gathers together the oratories award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the in Stó:lō particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle shares her knowledge of Stó:lō history, memory, philosophy, law, spirituality, feminism and the colonial condition of her people.

Powerful and inspiring, Memory Serves offers Canadians, in Maracle’s own words, “another way to be, to think, to know,” a way that holds the promise of a “journey toward a common consciousness.”

Open to all KPU students, faculty and staff

Free e-book through the Library for KPU Employees and Students as well as a guided dialogue at the end. For more details email IndigenousServices@kpu.ca. Space is limited!

χʷəχʷéy̓əm (storytelling in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ dialect)

e-wicihtayahk nitacimowinana (sharing our stories in Cree)

An initiative of Indigenous Services for Students in collaboration with KPU Library.

Past Books

Spring 2021

Meet the Author,
Dr. Kim Anderson

Wednesday, February 24 - 3:00 PM

Dr. Kim Anderson, an Indigenous (Métis) scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Relations & Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph and a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Relationships.

In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings of fourteen Elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario to illustrate how different life stages were experienced by Métis, Cree, and Anishinaabe girls and women during the mid-twentieth century. Through these teachings, rich in oral history, we learn how evolving responsibilities from infancy to adulthood shaped women’s identities and place within Indigenous society, and were integral to the health and well-being of their communities. By understanding how healthy communities were created in the past, Anderson explains how this traditional knowledge can be applied toward rebuilding healthy Indigenous communities today.

The process of “digging up medicines” - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. Foreward by Maria Campbell, distinguished Métis author, playwright, filmmaker and Elder.

Fall 2020

Meet the Author,
Sara Davidson

In 1884, the Canadian government enacted a ban on the potlatch, the foundational ceremony of the Haida people. The tradition, which determined social structure, transmitted cultural knowledge, and redistributed wealth, was seen as a cultural impediment to the government’s aim of assimilation. The tradition did not die, however; the knowledge of the ceremony was kept alive by the Elders through other events until the ban was lifted. The tradition did not die. In 1969, a potlatch was held and a totem pole carved by renowned Haida artist Robert Davidson, was raised; the first the community had seen enclose to 80 years. Sara Florence Davidson, Robert’s daughter, would become an educator. Over the course of her own education, she came to see how the traditions of the Haida practiced by her father—holistic, built on relationships, practical, and continuous—could be integrated into contemporary educational practices. From this realization came the roots for this book.