First Nations

Prairie Edge, Conor Kerr

wadholloway Literature , , , ,

Conor Kerr is a Canadian writer of Métis and Ukrainian descent from Edmonton, Alberta. For non-Canadians, Alberta, the next province over from British Columbia, is on the Great Plains east of the Rockies. Edmonton (pop. 1.4 mil) is about 600 km north of the US border (map).

The Métis are one of three legally recognized Indigenous peoples under the Canadian Constitution Act, 1982, along with the First Nations and Inuit. They arose originally I think from French and English fur traders, from the 1600s through to the mid 1800s, taking and usually abandoning First Nations, mostly Cree, wives, and of course, their children. Alberta is the only Canadian province with a recognized Métis land base.

The beast on the cover is a bison, called colloquially ‘buffalo’ in N America, but only distantly related (bison are closer genetically to yaks than to buffalo). An adult bison is around 2m at the shoulder and can weigh more than a tonne. At the beginning of the 1800s, tens of millions of bison roamed North America. Colonists slaughtered an estimated 50 million, in part motivated by the U.S. government’s desire to limit the range and power of plains Indians whose diets and cultures depended on the buffalo herds; so that by 1889 the estimated population was just 1,091 animals (both wild and captive). Repopulation attempts via enforced protection of government herds and extensive ranching began in 1910 and numbers are now back up around 150,000.

The subject of Prairie Edge (2024) is the relationship between two Métis – Grey, country girl, student activist, her degree in Native Studies done, but not enthused by post-grad; and Ezzy, her deadbeat (remote) cousin, a city boy bought up in poverty, the foster system and juvie – when Grey comes up with a scheme for kidnapping bison and releasing them into downtown Edmonton parks.

The novel begins with a prologue, an Indian community travelling in wagons, presumably before the turn of the last century, to observe what they believe will be the last bison migration south of the ‘medicine line’, the Canada/US border.

Elders talked about America’s war against the bison. They finished killing each other out east and switched their focus to the bison and the Sioux. The Sioux fought hard. But the bison just moved as they had always done, and it took them right into the paths of America’s guns.

For the remainder, Ezzy and Grey take turns narrating.

Late one summer they are sharing a trailer (caravan) on an unused rural block outside Edmonton, where they live cheaply, lazing all day, playing cards, drinking. There is no sexual tension, which, frankly, I do not understand. Later in the novel, when they’re in trouble, Ezzy moves to his Aunty May’s, where he begins to understand that he was not abandoned by his family, but was taken; and Grey moves back to her parents’ farm on a reservation. Later still, Ezzy is mentored by an Indian elder who knew his grandfather and belatedly begins his journey towards mainstream life.

The story is that Grey persuades Ezzy to help her ‘kidnap’ some bison from a nearby national park. With her father’s Dodge pickup truck and trailer she transports them, in three loads, into town and releases them to run free in the (North Saskatchewan) River Valley park which runs right though the city. Ten head of cows and calves Ezzy counts in one load, say seven tonne. A lot for a Dodge pickup! (In Australia a Dodge Ram has a towing capacity of 3500 kg).

The bison are happy with their relocation. Whites over 50 are enraged. Students proclaiming BISON RECLAMATION and LAND BACK mount protests in support. City fathers are unable to act. Grey and Ezzie carry out a second bison-napping, from a farm this time, which doesn’t go as well.

A former boyfriend of Grey’s, Tyler, assumes leadership of the protesters, and also resumes giving Grey excellent sex. I feel for Ezzy, but I’m not sure he notices.

The action in Ezzy and Grey’s story progresses from there, first downhill, then, very slowly, back up. It’s not something a reviewer can talk about without giving away too much. I could say I hope the bison are there in Edmonton still, smelling the flowers, but as I live my working life on unfenced roads in cattle country, I can’t imagine they would be left in any city a day past the first car wreck.

The author uses Tyler to make points about ‘professional Indians’ whose main employment, it seems, is to make whites feel good about themselves. You could say that Ezzy is a familiar character in grunge literature, born into society’s underclass and never likely to escape the standard path – foster homes, juvie, petty theft, prison, drugs and alcohol, lifetime welfare dependence – but Kerr shows that being Indian can also mean having support.

The story is good and the messages, which are not intrusive are nevertheless worth reflecting on, in Australia as much as in Canada.

“Statistics tell us [Australian] Indigenous children are 11 times more likely to be removed by child protection systems than non-Indigenous children”. Sam Burrow, Renna Gayde, ‘Removing babies is still harming First Nations families, almost two decades after the apology to Stolen Generations’, The Conversation, 13 Feb., 2025 (here).

Today, 30 Sept., is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (also T&R Day, Orange Shirt Day). “The day honours the children who never returned home and Survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities.” (here). Later today Marcie/Buried in Print will post on Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing, a comprehensive and personal account of the consequences of Canada’s genocidal Residential Schools system. (Marcie’s post)

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Conor Kerr, Prairie Edge, Strange Light (Penguin Random House, Canada), 2024. 253pp.

The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King

wadholloway Non-Fiction, USA , ,

Newcastle University’s map of Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930 was recently updated and now includes over 200 massacres – defined as “the deliberate killing of six or more relatively undefended people in one operation”.

The official death toll of Palestinians killed in Gaza by the IDF since 7 Oct 2023 has passed 50,000. In the same period, at least three times that number have died of illness, starvation and the destruction of all medical facilities (Lancet).

The uprising against British settler colonists in 1952-60, leading directly to independence, by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army – derisively characterized by the British as the ‘Mau Mau’, a savage, violent, and depraved tribal cult – saw the deaths of 95 British soldiers and 3,000 ‘native’ troops; and tens of thousands of Black Kenyans killed, disappeared, or indefinitely detained in concentration camps (I’m currently reading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memoir Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016)).

What I’m saying is that white settler colonial societies, remnants of the British Empire – which in my school days (the 1950s) it was still a matter of pride to have belonged to – were and are maintained by violence and the seizure of land, often in defiance of treaties and of the colonizers’ own laws.

And so we get to The Inconvenient Indian (2012).

Thomas King’s thesis is that the various colonising powers in North America, from the British and French administrations in the seventeenth century through to the State/Provincial and Federal governments of the USA and Canada in the twentieth, have continually killed and displaced the ‘inconvenient’ original inhabitants.

King, who identifies as Cherokee from California and is a long-time resident of Canada, has an idiosyncratic style which occasionally and probably unnecessarily has his wife reading and commenting over his shoulder. He begins by discussing the stereotypes which whites use to depict ‘Indians’ and which they can then use to justify their actions.

He develops the categories ‘Dead Indians’, ‘Live Indians’ and ‘Legal Indians’, later adding ‘Status Indians’. As best I can gather, Dead Indians are the stereotype we know from cowboy and Indian movies. In this context King points out there are totally white clubs for preserving ‘Indian’ values (and we all know the only good Indian is …). Live Indians are people living with Indian blood and the prejudice that entails. Legal Indians have some rights under various laws and Status Indians are people who are acknowledged as members of one of the Tribes recognized by law.

King goes into some detail of tribes who signed treaties, surrendering land ‘needed’ by settlers in return for guaranteed occupation of some part of their own land (or of some other tribe’s land west of the Mississippi), only to have that land usurped in turn as white settlers advanced across the continent. In this context, by some coincidence in the mid twentieth century the US Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly found that the best location for dams providing water and power for white settlers was on Indian land.

In the US, Indian land is Federal land, so not subject to local and state taxes, which causes resentment (among whites) and famously, has given rise to Indian casinos. But it can also lead to the Federal government acting unilaterally in disposing of the land.

In the final chapter King discusses the Inuit of Alaska and Canada who have, separately, negotiated significant agreements which give some hope for the future.

Under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 1971 the Inuit chose to secure their land with a type of freehold, with corporations holding the land for each community. This overcomes the problems that all previous Indian lands were held in ‘trust’ by the Federal government, or were broken up into individual freeholds soon sold to whites; but has created new problems with regards to who inherits a share of ownership, and how may the land be used as security for loans for development.

The Canadian agreement appears even more significant in that, as I understand, an area of the far north was declared a Territory (think Australia’s NT and ACT) with majority Inuit population and self government (Nunavut. See also this Canadian Government site).

I don’t suppose the bottom half of the NT, centred on Alice Springs and Uluru, and maybe including adjacent parts of WA and SA, will ever be declared a self-governed Aboriginal Territory, but we can hope. I certainly believe that the Mabo judgement is clear that all unappropriated land is Aboriginal land, and that the subsequent Native Title Act which purportedly gives effect to the judgement illegally minimizes the rights of Aboriginal people unable to demonstrate ‘continuing occupation.’

I listened to a reading of this work, so have no text to fall back on. The style of King’s writing, the presence of King (and Helen – Mrs King) throughout, made listening easy, but I wouldn’t mind a hard copy as a reference, particularly for writing up later North American and Australian accounts of Indigenous ‘dispersion’ and displacement.

Canadian blogger Naomi/Consumed by Ink also recommends Michelle Good, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada (2023)

Later in the year, say Sep-Nov, Marcie/Buried in Print and I will be reading Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing (2024), a comprehensive account of Canada’s residential schools scandal. It’s a big book, 480pp and we may break it into sections for discussions along the way between ourselves, including any of you who might like to read along.

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Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, first pub. 2012. Audible version read by Lorne Cardinal

Earlier reviews:
Tanya Talaga, Seven Fallen Feathers (2018) wadh, Buried in Print
Mini Aodla Freeman, Life among the Qallunaat, (re-pub. 2015) wadh
Maria Campbell, Half Breed (Métis memoir, 1973) Consumed by Ink
Some Canadian FN reading recommendations (from a decade ago) Buried in Print
Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2000) wadh

Seven Fallen Feathers, Tanya Talaga

wadholloway Non-Fiction , , , ,

North America Project 2022

Seven Fallen Feathers documents the deaths of seven Indigenous high school students living away – a long way in most cases – from home to attend Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School (DFC) in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Canada) in the years 2000-2011.

I listened to it a few weeks ago and then again for a few hours yesterday. I can’t pretend to have retained enough for a proper review, but this is a moving and important story and I will attempt to reconstruct it from the considerable resources of the internet.

Tanya Talaga is an experienced journalist and an Ojibwe woman “with roots in Fort William First Nation… Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor. Her great-grandfather, Russell Bowen, was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation, and her mother was raised in Raith and Graham, Ontario.” (About Tanya)

The book is divided into seven sections, one for each ‘fallen feather’ plus a couple of chapters to wind up. But throughout Talaga winds in background material. Northern Ontario sounds bleak, forests, snow and innumerable lakes, with small remote First Nations communities accessible only by seaplanes, or by long drives when the roads are open.

I gather most communities have schools up to Year 8, but beyond that it’s either correspondence or living away from home – boarding with families, not residential colleges – to attend DFC. Sadly, it is (or was) a condition of attending DFC that the kids come from a remote community. Hence if a parent set up home in Thunder Bay to support their child then they no longer met the condition for attending the school.

Indigenous education fell, and maybe still falls, under Federal Native Affairs (however it is now named) while the education of settler children was a function of Provincial governments. As is the way with Native Affairs bureaucracies everywhere, even if the spending per student was nominally the same, most of it went on (white) administration, and Indigenous schools were woefully underfunded compared with settler schools.

Talaga’s thesis is that the Canadian government engaged in the systematic elimination of First Nations culture – cultural genocide – and for all their good words/good intentions now, that is ongoing. Treaties, which First Nations leaders entered into under duress, were not honoured; the 1876 Indian Act restricted First Nations people to mostly remote reservations and enforced the attendance of of all children up to 16 years at one of 137 residential schools, run by churches, and now notorious for physical and sexual violence, inadequate food and clothing, and rampant disease, especially TB which might easily have been controlled; even with the closure of the residential schools, Indigenous education has been inadequately funded.

To date, according to conservative estimates from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, approximately 4,100 to 6,000 children died amid abuse and neglect while in the residential school system, which ran until 1996.

CTV News, 1 June 2021 (here)

DFC, with 150 students over Years 9-12, was opened by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council on the site of an old residential school in Thunder Bay in 2000. Within weeks of the opening the first of the seven, Jethro Anderson, was reported missing. His body was subsequently found in the Kam River, bruised and with what appeared to be cigarette burns to his face. In what became an unvarying trend, Thunder Bay police reported, prior to any possibility of investigation, that there was no suspicion of foul play.

The other six are –
Curran Strang, 2005, found in the McIntyre River
Paul Panacheese, 2006, collapsed and died at home
Robyn Harper, 2006, died of acute alcohol poisoning
Reggie Bushie, 2007, found in the McIntyre River. He had been drinking on the banks of the river with his brother Ricki, who came to, in the river, with no memory of how he got there
Kyle Morrisseau, 2009, found in the McIntyre River
Jordan Wabasse, 2011, found in the Kam River

Talaga writes sympathetic accounts of each of the seven and their families. She provides instances of Indigenous kids reporting being beaten up by white kids and of being tossed into waterways. She documents ongoing racist harassment; taunts and rubbish thrown from passing cars; one Indigenous woman dying of injuries from a lump of metal thrown at her stomach. Over and over we run into indifferent police and coroners inquiries with all white juries.

There is clearly a problem with children 14-18, too far from parental love and supervision, with too many opportunities for drinking and smoking. As in Australia, concerned elders patrol the streets at night and do what they can. As in Australia, Indigenous kids out after dark are treated by the police with suspicion rather than compassion or understanding.

Provincial police were brought in to redo the investigations. To no effect. An inquest into the seven deaths made open findings about the causes of the deaths and 145 recommendations. Children are now brought home for a week mid-term; and new, more local schools are opening. I was left unsure about whether there were local Provincial high schools that Indigenous kids might attend.

In 2017, two more dead teenagers—Tammy Keeash and Josiah Begg—were pulled from different parts of the McIntyre River within two weeks of each other.

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Tanya Talaga, Seven Fallen Feathers, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 2017. Audible, 2018, Read by Michaela Washburn. 9 hours.

Christian Morrisseau, an Ojibwa ‘woodland’ artist, painted Seven Fallen Feathers in about 2016, after the inquest into the deaths of his son Kyle and six other First Nations students in Thunder Bay in the years 2000-2011 (Tanya Talaga, Ojibwa artist paints Seven Fallen Feathers to ease pain, remember seven young lives, Toronto Star)

see also:
Marcie/Buried in Print’s review (here)
Lisa/ANZLL’s Indigenous Lit page/Canada and the Americas (here)

I don’t get the impression anyone is attempting to read along with my North America Project. Just as well! Next month (June) my review will be of James Baldwin’s Just Above my Head (1979) which I happened on in the library and have already listened to (yes Emma, it was excellent). July WILL be Their Eyes were watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston. I already have Life Among the Qallunaat, Mini Aodla Freeman, so that leaves me four more to find (I also have Dhalgren, Samuel R Delany, but I think that’s a project for another day).

Also in June, for Naomi’s Literary Wives Club, I have The Sentence (2021) by Louise Erdrich to read – I know! What a waste to read a book for only one challenge when it might easily cover two or three.

Dragan’s Back

wadholloway Literature, Writers , , , ,

Journal: 078

There are still wildflowers out in the desert, the last remnants of Spring in amongst the usual grey green scrub and red dirt. But as I never stop to take photos (of flowers, trucks are another matter) you must make do with the kangaroo paw on my balcony which is doing well for a change.

And I’ve been seeing lots of desert. After a blue with the last company I worked for – they booked me for a three day job then ‘forgot’ to tell me it was cancelled – I had a few weeks at home, and in desperation called … Dragan. Sam and Dragan and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the lunchroom swapping war stories and the upshot is Dragan will keep me going with work within WA (and yes, he’s already pressuring me to cross the border to do changeovers. But no way, Jose).

Last weekend I went up to Wiluna, 600 km north of Kalgoorlie and literally the last town on the edge of the dead centre – the Little Sandy Desert or the Gibson Desert – and then 50 km past the end of the bitumen. That was a warm up. As soon as I got home I was off to a mine 100 km past the end of the wheatbelt, past Wave Rock, and then follow the dirt road towards Norseman 80 km, turn north maybe 30 km, and locate the turnoff to a new mine – and if you miss it you’ll be back in phone range in only two or three hours.

This weekend, for a different carrier, I’m going 450 km on a corrugated dirt track out from Kalgoorlie. If I miss that mine … well, I’ll be carrying a satellite phone so hopefully someone will come and find me. (The view from my office window is a bit different from your facebook pic of footprints in the snow in suburban Birmingham. Hey Liz.)

Not driving put a damper on my audio reading, so once I was back on the road I was listening to books without a break in between. There’s some in the list below that I really should have reviewed. Margaret Atwood’s On Writers and Writing was of course for MARM, but I couldn’t get anything from it without notes. She’s a lovely speaker but spent a chapter on ‘my childhood’, then six chapters, from a series of talks she gave somewhere, seemingly on the relationship of writing to religion. Lost me!

I re-listened to Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance so I could comment at least a little bit knowledgeably on Liz Dexter’s review (here) and thoroughly enjoyed it. BIP recommended Cory Doctorow to me some time during MARM. Little Brother is a YA novel of 17 year olds in San Francisco fighting back against the surveillance state and the ridiculous powers awarded in panic to Homeland Security. We have done and continue to do the same thing here (award obscene powers to the security apparatus, that is. No one’s fighting back that I can see). Worth reading. But the best was from the late master, Peter Temple. White Dog is a murder mystery, a tragedy, a tour through Melbourne and Victoria, and a romp around country racecourses.

Of the ‘Currently readings’, ie. books made the old fashioned way with words on paper, These Old Shades was a just a few hours with an old friend. The Young Fur Traders, a very old friend, I have already reviewed; and the other three will be written up sooner rather than later.

My North American Project

I admit I did not use that three weeks off the road to advance this project as far as I should. But, I own Their Eyes Were Watching God, so that will be my January read. I’ll put up a review after AWW Gen 4 Week, probably on Mon 31 Jan. My February read is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. There’ll be a review (from me) and also a guest post from Melanie (Grab the Lapels), at the end of the month, of her experience reading and teaching it.

For March and April I had better see what Canadians I can obtain, through the library system, or from Audible. See the list of books I’m working from (here). I’ve just been re-reading your comments, we might have to make it a two year project!

Let’s say I go with Nalo Hopkinson – BIP, Naomi – help! – which one? Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids. And then perhaps both of Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse and Eden Robinson, Son of a Trickster. One of them later in the year.

Back in the US I have on my shelves Octavia Butler’s Kindred, so that’s in, but for the sake of balance I can probably only squeeze in one of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, The Color Purple and Maya Angelou, before we get Louise Erdrich and US First Nations. That gets us to 8 reads, so four to go. Maybe Esi Edugyan (Can), but I’m struggling – I’d really like both an older and a leading edge US First Nations. There is more to do. And more arm-twisting from you, probably.

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Recent audiobooks 

Louis de Bernieres (M, Eng), So Much Life Left Over (2018)
Kate Atkinson (F, Eng), Transcription (2018) – Hist.Fic (WWII)
Anne Tyler (F, USA), Clock Dance (2018)
Margaret Atwood (F, Can), On Writers and Writing (2015) – NF
Peter Temple (M, Aust/Vic), White Dog (2003) – Crime
Cory Doctorow (M, Can), Little Brother (2008) – SF
Janet Evanovich (F, USA), Curious Minds (2016) – Crime
Richard Flanagan (M, Aust/Tas), Death of a River Guide (1994)
JM Coetzee (M, Aust/SA), Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Currently reading

Georgette Heyer (F, Eng), These Old Shades
RM Ballantyne (M, Scot), The Young Fur Traders
Simone de Beauvoir (F, Fra), The Inseparables
Tsitsi Dangarembga (F, Zim), This Mournable Body
John Kinsella (M, Aust/WA), Pushing Back (short stories)

Project 2022

wadholloway Literature, Writers , , ,

My project for next year is to read twelve US/Canadian Black and First Nations fiction or memoir, with a review in the last week of each month. I’m starting planning now because a) it’s on my mind; and b) I need time to assemble a list of books which I can access and which I will need to be mostly audiobooks. This is your cue to start making suggestions.

Towards the end of this year I will publish the finalized list for anyone who might feel like joining in. In the meanwhile I might keep updating this post with your (and my) suggestions.

Off the top of my head, I think I would like to read another Toni Morrison (after Beloved), maybe another Zora Neale Thurston (after Jonah’s Gourd Vine) and if I can access it, the autobiography of Malcolm X, highly recommended by Melanie/GTL. Then there’s Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin which I failed to read during my matriculation year. I may even still have a copy. That would no doubt please Emma/Book Around the Corner who has written some terrific Baldwin reviews (here).

Canadians Naomi/Consumed by Ink and BIP/BIP have written and recommended too many Canadian First Nations writers to list (ie. I have failed to note them) but, for example, see Naomi’s two most recent posts (here and here).

I did follow up BIP’s review of Butter Honey Pig Bread by Nigerian Canadian Francesca Ekwuyasi – which inter alia contains some interesting stuff about Black history in Canada – and a review is in the works. May even be my next post if I can get away with not working this weekend. And then there’s her recent post on Black slavery in the Americas (here).

I look at my shelves. I think I may deal with Octavia Butler separately (see Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Sower). I have Kindred waiting which I will get to ‘soon’ like the many other, though mostly Australian, new books I have purchased and am yet to read. In the more formal shelves of my lounge room I see quite a few boys own type books of my own, my father’s and my grandfathers’ – ES Ellis’s Lost Among the Redskins for instance – for the reading of which this project may gave me some context. This is important to me, although to no one else probably, as the noble frontiersman of the US and Canada was the precursor of Australia’s ‘Lone Hand’ bushman (How many years is it now? and I still haven’t reviewed Russell Ward’s The Australian Legend).

It occurred to me at this point in this post that I had read many years ago the memoir of a Black New York science fiction writer, a guy, a gay, not Butler. It was someone well known to me (as an author) and whom I normally did not think of as Black. Searches… Turns out it was Samuel R Delaney of Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand fame, and the memoir was The Motion of Light in Water (1988) which name I do not remember at all, and which I must have read quite soon after publication, not realising because it deals with events a couple of decades earlier – including meeting a young Bob Dylan.

Ok, the next little bit is up to you

Reminder: Lisa/ANZLL’s Indigenous Lit. Week, 4-11 July 2021. Her Indigenous Lit. Reading List includes a section for Canada and the Americas (here).

Suggestions for Project 2022

AuthorWorkYearRec.
Sherman AlexieThe Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian2007USTPe
Andre AlexisFifteen Dogs (2 of 5)2015CanCBI
Maya AngelouI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings1969USLiz
James BaldwinGo Tell it on the Mountain 1953US
If Beale Street Could Talk1974USGTL
Just Above My Head1979US
Joseph BoydenThe Orenda2013CanRM
Octavia ButlerKindred1979USBB
David ChariandySoucouyant2007CanCBI
Samuel R Delaney Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand 1984US
The Motion of Light in Water 1988US
Cherie DimalineRed Rooms2011USCBI
Esi EdugyanHalf-Blood Blues2011CanCBI
Louise ErdrichThe Bingo Palace (4 of 8)1994USWG
The Plague of Doves (1 of 3)2008US
La Rose (3 of 3)2016USBB
The Night Watchman2020USTPe
Mini Aodla FreemanLife Among the Qallunaat1978CanBIP
Lawrence HillThe Book of Negroes2007CanCBI
Nalo HopkinsonMidnight Robber2000CanCBI
Thomas KingThe Inconvenient Indian2012CanCBI
Nella LarsenPassing1929USBIP
Audre LordeZami: A New Spelling of my Name1982USWG
Terese Marie MailhotHeart Berries2018CanKW
N Scott MomadayHouse Made of Dawn1968USBB
Toni MorrisonSula1973USBB
Paradise1998US
Eden RobinsonSon of a Trickster (1of 3)2017CanRM
Tanya TalgaSeven Fallen Feathers2017CanBIP
Zora Neale Thurston Their Eyes Were Watching God1937USTPi
Richard WagameseIndian Horse2012CanCBI
Alice WalkerThe Color Purple1982USGTL
Elissa WashutaWhite Magic2021USBIP
Jacqueline WoodsonIf You come Softly1998USLL
Richard WrightNative Son1940USTPe
Malcolm X (and Alex Haley)Autobiography of Malcolm X1965USGTL