Atik^u

Annie Muktuk and other stories

In this notorious novel, Norma Dunning portrays the unvarnished realities of northern life through gritty characters who find themselves in difficult situations. Her stories challenge southern perceptions of the north and Inuit life through evocative, nuanced voices accented with Inuktitut words and symbolism.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Inuit

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Bleuets et abricots

In Bleuets et apricots, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s poems bring to the fore the voices of indigenous women who stand up against the wounds of colonization. With the blueberry, native fruit of the Nordic territory, and the large apricots of Haiti, she invites dialogue, reconciliation and links that enrich peoples. This work earned her a nomination as a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

Subjects: Côte-Nord, Indigenous authors, Indigenous communities, Indigenous literature, Innu, Innu-aitun

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Chasseur au harpon : un long récit de Markoosie

En pleine tempête de neige, un ours blanc attaque un campement inuit et éviscère de nombreux chiens. Convaincus que l’animal est malade et qu’il s’en prendra de nouveau aux leurs, des chasseurs se lancent à sa poursuite au péril de leur vie.

Subjects: Hunting and fishing, Indigenous authors, Indigenous communities, Inuit

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Comment je perçois la vie, Grand-Mère : Eshi uapataman Nukum

This collection by Rita Mestokosho, Innu woman from the community of Ekuanitshit (Mingan), offers eight Innu-French bilingual texts, then twelve written directly in French.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Poetry

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Croc fendu

Novel mixing myth and reality, poetry and prose, telling the childhood in the 1970s of a pregnant girl in Nunavut. The beauty of the place rubs shoulders with the ravages caused by alcohol and violence. Spirits and animals are also present. The author, Tanya Tagaq Gillis, is an internationally renowned Inuit artist who incorporates, among other things, throat singing into her musical pieces.

Subjects: Culture, Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Inuit

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Do not enter my soul in your shoes : poems

This first collection of poems by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Innu native of Pessamit on the North Shore of Quebec, is a dive into the female body, accompanied by a poetic reflection on exile and the feeling of love. It has received critical acclaim and won the 2013 Société des Ecrivains Francophones d’Amérique Award of Excellence

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Innu, Poetry

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Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu : Je suis une maudite sauvagesse

In this novel, Antane Kapesh wrote to preserve and share her culture, experience, and knowledge, all of which, she felt, were disappearing at an alarming rate because many Elders – like herself – were aged or dying. She wanted to publicly denounce the conditions in which she and the Innu were made to live, and to address the changes she was witnessing due to land dispossession and loss of hunting territory, police brutality, and the effects of the residential school system.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous communities, Indigenous literature, Innu-aimun, Innu-aitun

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Hunter with Harpoon (BAnQ)

Published fifty years ago under the title Harpoon of the Hunter, Markoosie Patsauq’s novel helped establish the genre of Indigenous fiction in Canada. This new English translation unfolds the story of Kamik, a young hero who comes to manhood while on a perilous hunt for a wounded polar bear. In this astonishing tale of a people struggling for survival in a brutal environment, Patsauq describes a life in the Canadian Arctic as one that is reliant on cooperation and vigilance.

Subjects: Canadian arctic, Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Inuit

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Jardin de givre collection

The literary works in this collection, published by the International Laboratory for Research on the Imaginary of the North, Winter and the Arctic, aim to document, study and interpret the northern Quebecois and circumpolar imagination from a multicultural perspective, comparative and multidisciplinary. They particularly value comparisons between the cultures of Quebec, Scandinavia, Finland and the Inuit world.

Subjects: Inuit

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Je te veux vivant

This collection of poetry by Virginia Pésémapéo-Bordeleau, a Cree Métis born in Rapides-des-Cèdres, inspires hope and life, despite the suffering of mourning and loneliness. The author takes us on two trajectories of pain which, upon leaving, defeat death.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Poetry

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Kuessipan

This novel by Naomi Fontaine is presented as a series of prose poems which introduces the reader to the daily life on an Innu reserve and which tenderly displays, but without any concession, the character, customs, feelings, and passions of a young Innu who courageously negotiates the comings and goings between the reserve and the city, so common for the people of Uashat-Maliotenan.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Innu, Innu-aitun

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Kukum

This novel by Innu author and journalist Michel Jean, from the Mashteuiatsh community, tells the story of the brutal sedentarization of the Innu through the unique story of his great-grandmother. This work, which won the France-Quebec Literary Prize, immerses the reader in the life of Almanda Siméon, a white woman who will choose a nomadic life by marrying an Innu from Mashteuiatsh.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Innu, Innu territory, Sedentarization

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La saga des Béothuks

Historical, mythological, ethnographic, this novel is a masterful work by Bernard Assiniwi, of Cree origin, which won him the France-Quebec Jean-Hamelin Prize in 1997. It makes a fascinating contribution to the rediscovery of indigenous societies, at the same time. time it sheds light on a particularly dramatic episode in the white conquest of America.

Subjects: Colonization, Ethnology, Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Mythology

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Ma peau aime le Nord

First collection of poetry by the young Innu of Ekuanitshit (Mingan) Manon Nolin, Ma peau aime le Nord reveals the boundless attachment that the Innu poet has for her culture, for the traditions of her ancestors, for her territory. Her writing takes an intimate look at the fragility of a disappearing Innu culture, whose strength we can still feel in the thousand-year-old teachings of nature.

Subjects: Côte-Nord, Indigenous authors, Indigenous communities, Indigenous literature, Innu

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Manikanetish : Petite Marguerite

This novel by Naomie Fontaine, Innu from Uashat, depicts the universe of a French teacher posted on an Indian reserve on the North Shore, that of her students who seek to take charge of themselves. Native, she will do everything to save them from despair, even go into the theater with them. The author was a finalist for the 2019 Radio-Canada National Book Combat, a finalist for the 2018 Geneva Book Fair Audience Award and many others.

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Nipimanitu : l’esprit de l’eau

This philosophical poetry collection by sociologist Pierrot Ross-Tremblay, Innu of the Essipit community, proposes a change of course in our relationship with the environment and nature, a reorientation for the future, otherwise we would head straight into a reef. Rather, the author lets nature speak for itself and recalls the urgency to act and get back to basics.

Subjects: Cosmogonic narratives, Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Innu-aitun, Poetry

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S’agripper aux fleurs : collectif de femmes innues

Three Innu women (Louise Canapé, Louve Mathieu and Shan dak/Jeanne’Arc Vollant), natives of the North Shore (Quebec), sign this collection imbued with a typically Aboriginal flavor. Their haikus reveal the naked truth of a people of the great outdoors confined to the “reserve”, a reserve which perhaps has the merit of protecting the identity, but which nevertheless cuts wings.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Innu, Innu-aitun, Poetry

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Sanaaq : an Inuit novel

This novel by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (transliterated and translated from Inuktitut to English) recounts the fortunes and misfortunes of Sanaaq before and after the arrival of the first whites in Inuit country. Mitiarjuk allows the reader to discover, as no Westerner anthropologist has yet been able to do it, the life and psychology of the Inuit confronted with extreme nature, the need for sharing and the invasion of their territory by white people and their civilization.

Subjects: Colonialism, Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Inuit

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Uashtessiu : lumière d’automne

Jean Désy, Rita Mestokosho

In this book, two nomads, poets, healers, one Innu, the other from Quebec, share a love for the same territory: the North Shore and, beyond, the North. Rita Mestokosho is the first Innu poet to have published a collection in Quebec, while Jean Désy is a traveling poet who sails between the South and the North and the worlds of autochthony. Two sensibilities intersect in the space of this poetic exchange which will have lasted four seasons.

Subjects: Indigenous authors, Indigenous literature, Innu, Innu-aimun, Innu-aitun, Poetry

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