NCW Libraries

With the art of a practiced storyteller, Ignatia Broker recounts the life of her great-great-grandmother, Night Flying Woman, who was born in the mid-19th century and lived during a chaotic time of enormous change, uprootings, and loss for the Minnesota Ojibway. But this story also tells of her people's great strength and continuity.

A language carries a people's memories, whether they are recounted as individual reminiscences, as communal history, or as humorous tales. This collection of stories from Anishinaabe elders offers a history of a people at the same time that it seeks to preserve the language of that people.>As fluent speakers of Ojibwe grow older, the community questions whether younger speakers know the language well enough to pass it on to the next generation. Young...

Canadian Born (1895) is a collection of poems by E. Pauline Johnson. Revered as one the foremost indigenous Canadian poets of her time, Johnson was a prolific writer whose works explored her Mohawk heritage while shedding light on the racism and persecution faced by indigenous peoples across North America. Canadian Born captures Johnson's range as a poet in tune with the Romantic tradition without erasing her dualistic sense of identity as a woman...

"We who lived the days of tribal life before our destruction began remember with gratefulness our storytellers and the delight and joy and richness which they imparted to our lives. We never tired of their tales, though told countless times. They will, forsooth, never grow old, for they have within them the essence of things that cannot grow old. These legends are of America, as are its mountains, rivers, and forests, and as are its people. They belong!" In...

"The practical necessity of being preserved and handed on by word of mouth only, must be constantly borne in mind in considering the development of Indian verse forms. It operated to keep poetry tied to its twin-born melody, which assisted in memory, and was constantly at work modifying the native tendency to adjust the rhythm to every changing movement of the story." Bringing together the chants, songs and oral legends of Native American tribes from...

"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one. ... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness." Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield-more rural, more country than the landscape...