Best First Nations Canadian History Books
Here you will get Best First Nations Canadian History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
Author: by Colin Woodard
Published at: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 25, 2012)
ISBN: 978-0143122029
A New Republic Best Book of the Year The Globalist Top Books of the Year Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who in this presidential election year, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven nations that continue to shape North AmericaAccording to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots.
In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future.
From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S.
2. We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy
Author: by Kliph Nesteroff
Published at: Simon & Schuster (February 16, 2021)
ISBN: 978-1982103033
From Kliph Nesteroff, the human encyclopedia of comedy (VICE), comes the important and underappreciated story of Native Americans and comedy. It was one of the most reliable jokes in Charlie Hill’s stand-up routine: My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York.
We had a little real estate problem. In We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, acclaimed comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff focuses on one of comedy’s most significant and little-known stories: how, despite having been denied representation in the entertainment industry, Native Americans have influenced and advanced the art form.
The account begins in the late 1880s, when Native Americans were forced to tour in wild west shows as an alternative to prison. (One modern comedian said it was as if a Guantanamo detainee suddenly had to appear on X-Factor.
This is followed by a detailed look at the life and work of seminal figures such as Cherokee humorist Will Rogers and Hill, who in the 1970s was the first Native American comedian to appear The Tonight Show. Also profiled are several contemporary comedians, including Jonny Roberts, a social worker from the Red Lake Nation who drives five hours to the closest comedy club to pursue his stand-up dreams; Kiowa-Apache comic Adrianne Chalepah, who formed the touring group the Native Ladies of Comedy; and the 1491s, a sketch troupe whose satire is smashing stereotypes to critical acclaim.
3. Native American Ethnobotany
Author: by Daniel E. Moerman
Published at: Timber Press, Incorporated; 1st edition (August 1, 1998)
ISBN: 978-0881924534
An extraordinary compilation of the plants used by North American native peoples for medicine, food, fiber, dye, and a host of other things. Anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman has devoted 25 years to the task of gathering together the accumulated ethnobotanical knowledge on more than 4000 plants.
More than 44,000 uses for these plants by various tribes are documented here. This is undoubtedly the most massive ethnobotanical survey ever undertaken, preserving an enormous store of information for the future.
4
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (RANDOM HOUSE)
Author: by Margaret MacMillan
Published at: Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 1, 2003)
ISBN: 978-0375760525
National BestsellerNew York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper PrizeSilver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign RelationsFinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book AwardFor six months in 1919, after the end of the war to end all wars, the Big ThreePresident Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceaumet in Paris to shape a lasting peace.
In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entitiesIraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among themborn out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.
5. Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old
Author: by Jean L. Briggs
Published at: Yale University Press (January 1, 1998)
ISBN: 978-0300080643
“Is your mother good?” “Are you good?” “Do you want to come live with me?” Inuit adults often playfully present small children with difficult, even dangerous, choices and then dramatize the consequences of the child’s answers. They are enacting in larger-than-life form the plots that drive Inuit social lifetesting, acting out problems, entertaining themselves, and, most of all, bringing up their children.
In a riveting narrative, psychological anthropologist Jean L. Briggs takes us through six months of dramatic interactions in the life of Chubby Maata, a three-year-old girl growing up in a Baffin Island hunting camp. The book examines the issues that engaged the childbelonging, possession, loveand shows the process of her growing.
Briggs questions the nature of “sharedness” in culture and assumptions about how culture is transmitted. She suggests that both cultural meanings and strong personal commitment to one’s world can be (and perhaps must be) acquired not by straightforwardly learning attitudes, rules, and habits in a dependent mode but by experiencing oneself as an agent engaged in productive conflict in emotionally problematic situations.
6. Fatty Legs (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: by Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton
Published at: Annick Press; New edition (March 10, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1773213507
The beloved story of an Inuvialuit girl standing up to the bullies of residential school, updated for a new generation of readers. Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton’s powerful story of residential school in the far North has been reissued to commemorate the memoir’s 10th anniversary with updates to the text, reflections on the book’s impact, and a bonus chapter from the acclaimed follow-up, A Stranger at Home.
New content includes a foreword from Dr. Debbie Reese, noted Indigenous scholar and founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature, while Christy Jordan-Fenton, mother of Margaret’s grandchildren and a key player in helping Margaret share her stories, discusses the impact of the book in a new preface.
With important updates since it first hit the shelves a decade ago, this new edition of Fatty Legs will continue to resonate with readers young and old.
7. Testimony: A Memoir
Author: by Robbie Robertson
Published at: Crown; Reprint edition (October 3, 2017)
ISBN: 978-0307889799
New York Times Bestseller On the 40th anniversary of The Band’s legendary The Last Waltz concert, Robbie Robertson finally tells his own spellbinding story of the band that changed music history, his extraordinary personal journey, and his creative friendships with some of the greatest artists of the last half-century.
Robbie Robertson’s singular contributions to popular music have made him one of the most beloved songwriters and guitarists of his time. With songs like “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” he and his partners in The Band fashioned a music that has endured for decades, influencing countless musicians.
In this captivating memoir, written over five years of reflection, Robbie Robertson employs his unique storyteller’s voice to weave together the journey that led him to some of the most pivotal events in music history. He recounts the adventures of his half-Jewish, half-Mohawk upbringing on the Six Nations Indian Reserve and on the gritty streets of Toronto; his odyssey at sixteen to the Mississippi Delta, the fountainhead of American music; the wild early years on the road with rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks; his unexpected ties to the Cosa Nostra underworld; the gripping trial-by-fire going electric with Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour, and their ensuing celebrated collaborations; the formation of the Band and the forging of their unique sound, culminating with history’s most famous farewell concert, brought to life for all time in Martin Scorsese’s great movie The Last Waltz.
8. The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas
Author: by Robert M. Utley
Published at: BISON BOOKS; Illustrated edition (October 1, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1496220226
2021 Spur Award Winner for Best Historical Nonfiction from the Western Writers of America True West Magazine’s 2020 Best Author and Historical Nonfiction Book of the YearThe Last Sovereigns is the story of how Sioux chief Sitting Bull resisted the white man’s ways as a last best hope for the survival of an indigenous way of life on the Great Plainsa nomadic life based on buffalo and indigenous plants scattered across the Sioux’s historical territories that were sacred to him and his people.Robert M.
Utley explores the final four years of Sitting Bull’s life of freedom, from 1877 to 1881. To escape American vengeance for his assumed role in the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa following into Canada.
There he and his people interacted with the North-West Mounted Police, in particular Maj. James M.Walsh. The Mounties welcomed the Lakota and permitted them to remain if they promised to abide by the laws and rules of Queen Victoria, the White Mother.
9. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas)
Author: by Glen Sean Coulthard
Published at: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1st edition (September 7, 2014)
ISBN: 978-0816679652
WINNER OF:Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical AssociationCanadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson PrizeStudies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America.
The term recognition shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment.
Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politicsone that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a place-based modification of Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation throws light on Indigenousstate relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time.
10. Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America
Author: by Craig Childs
Published at: Vintage; Illustrated edition (April 9, 2019)
ISBN: 978-0345806314
The first people in the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. On a side of the planet no human had ever seen, different groups arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The land they reached was fully inhabited by megafaunamastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall.
These Ice Age explorers, hunters, and families were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals. In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs blends science and personal narrative to upend our notions of where these people came from and who they were.
How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era, and reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Through it, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.
11. Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys: A Native American Expression of the Jesus Way
Author: by Richard Twiss
Published at: IVP Books; First Edition (June 9, 2015)
ISBN: 978-0830844234
Missio Alliance Essential Reading List of 2015One of Seedbed’s 10 Notable Books from 2015The gospel of Jesus has not always been good news for Native Americans. The history of North America is marred by atrocities committed against Native peoples. Indigenous cultures were erased in the name of Christianity.
As a result, to this day few Native Americans are followers of Jesus. However, despite the far-reaching effects of colonialism, some Natives have forged culturally authentic ways to follow the way of Jesus. In his final work, Richard Twiss provides a contextualized Indigenous expression of the Christian faith among the Native communities of North America.
He surveys the painful, complicated history of Christian missions among Indigenous peoples and chronicles more hopeful visions of culturally contextual Native Christian faith. For Twiss, contextualization is not merely a formula or evangelistic strategy, but rather a relational process of theological and cultural reflection within a local community.
12. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Indigenous Americas)
Author: by Thomas King
Published at: Univ Of Minnesota Press; First edition (June 13, 2008)
ISBN: 978-0816646272
“Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous.” In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture’s deep ties to storytelling.
With wry humor, King deftly weaves events from his own life as a child in California, an academic in Canada, and a Native North American with a wide-ranging discussion of stories told by and about Indians. So many stories have been told about Indians, King comments, that “there is no reason for the Indian to be real.
The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations.” That imaginative Indian that North Americans hold dear has been challenged by Native writers – N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Robert Alexie, and others – who provide alternative narratives of the Native experience that question, create a present, and imagine a future.
13. The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America
Author: by Walter R. Borneman
Published at: Harper Perennial; Illustrated edition (October 30, 2007)
ISBN: 978-0060761851
In the summer of 1754, deep in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, a very young George Washington suffered his first military defeat, and a centuries-old feud between Great Britain and France was rekindled. The war that followed would be fought across virgin territories, from Nova Scotia to the forks of the Ohio River, and it would ultimately decide the fate of the entire North American continentnot just for Great Britain and France but also for the Spanish and Native American populations.
Noted historian Walter R. Borneman brings to life an epic struggle for a continentwhat Samuel Eliot Morison called “truly the first world war”and emphasizes how the seeds of discord sown in its aftermath would take root and blossom into the American Revolution.
14. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
Author: by Alicia Elliott
Published at: Melville House (August 4, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1612198668
“In her raw, unflinching memoir … She tells the impassioned, wrenching story of the mental health crisis within her own family and community … A searing cry.” New York Times Book ReviewThe Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to “a mind spread out on the ground.” In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced.
Elliott’s deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes thrilling connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political.
A national bestseller in Canada, this updated and expanded American edition helps us better understand legacy, oppression, and racism throughout North America, and offers us a profound new way to decolonize our minds.
15. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 96)
Author: by David Stasavage
Published at: Princeton University Press; Illustrated edition (June 2, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0691177465
“One of the most important books on political regimes written in a generation.”Steven Levitsky, New York Timesbestselling author of How Democracies DieA new understanding of how and why early democracy took hold, how modern democracy evolved, and what this teaches us about the futureHistorical accounts of democracy’s rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe.
The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richerdemocratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa.
Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourishedand when and why they declinedcan provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.
16. Yamoria the Lawmaker: Stories of the Dene (Northwest Passage Series, No. 1)
Author: by George Blondin
Published at: NeWest Press; 1st edition (October 16, 1997)
ISBN: 978-1896300207
Dene Elder George Blondin creates a spiritual guidebook that weaves together oral stories with the recounting of how the northern Canadian Dene came to depend on the European fur traders. The result is a magical journey for readers of any heritage.
