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CUE Library invites you to borrow one or more of the IKRC book kits listed below. Thank you to the CUE’s Indigenous Knowledge and Research Centre and Danielle Powder for selecting, purchasing, and providing CUE Library with these books. CUE students, staff, and faculty can borrow these IKRC book kits to facilitate book club and/or other group discussions. 

The books in these kits follow different themes, including: Indigeneity, reconciliation, and racism. Each kit has five copies of the book in a container and are available on the bottom shelf of the CD collection on the library’s main floor.   

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field by Billy-Ray Belcourt 

“In his follow-up to This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field is a provocative, powerful, and genre-bending new work that uses the modes of accusation and interrogation. He aims an anthropological eye at the realities of everyday life to show how they house the violence that continues to reverberate from the long twentieth century. In a genre-bending constellation of poetry, photography, redaction, and poetics, Belcourt ultimately argues that if signifiers of Indigenous suffering are everywhere, so too is evidence of Indigenous peoples’ rogue possibility, their utopian drive.” – House of Anansi Press

Embers by Richard Wagamese 

“Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on–and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It’s a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end.” – Richard Wagamese, Embers

Indigenous Writes by Chelsea Vowel 

“In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel initiates myriad conversations about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. An advocate for Indigenous worldviews, the author discusses the fundamental issues–the terminology of relationships; culture and identity; myth-busting; state violence; and land, learning, law and treaties–along with wider social beliefs about these issues. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community.” – Portage & Main Press

Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land Rebuilding the Economy  by Arthur Manuel & Ronald Derrickson

“In this book Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson challenge virtually everything that non-Indigenous Canadians believe about their relationship with Indigenous Peoples and the steps that are needed to place this relationship on a healthy and honourable footing. Manuel and Derrickson show how governments are attempting to reconcile with Indigenous Peoples without touching the basic colonial structures that dominate and distort the relationship. They review the current state of land claims. They tackle the persistence of racism among non-Indigenous people and institutions. They celebrate Indigenous Rights Movements while decrying the role of government-funded organizations like the Assembly of First Nations. They document the federal government’s disregard for the substance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples while claiming to implement it. These circumstances amount to what they see as a false reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. Instead, Manuel and Derrickson offer an illuminating vision of what Canada and Canadians need for true reconciliation. In this book, which Arthur Manuel and Ron Derrickson completed in the months before Manuel’s death in January 2017, readers will recognize their profound understanding of the country, of its past, present, and potential future. Expressed with quiet but firm resolve, humour, and piercing intellect The Reconciliation Manifesto will appeal to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are open and willing to look at the real problems and find real solutions.” – James Lorimer and Company

There’s Something in the Water by Ingrid Waldron 

“Ingrid R.G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities. Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova Scotia and Canada, Waldron opens a space for a more critical dialogue on how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context. Waldron also illustrates the ways in which the effects of environmental racism are compounded by other forms of oppression to further dehumanize and harm communities already dealing with pre-existing vulnerabilities, such as long-standing social and economic inequality. Finally, Waldron documents the long history of struggle, resistance, and mobilizing in Indigenous and Black communities to address environmental racism.” – Fernwood Publishing

The Skin We’re in: A Year of Black Resistance and Power by Desmond Cole

” Puncturing once and for all the bubble of Canadian smugness and naïve assumptions of a post-racial nation, Cole chronicles just one year–2017–in the struggle against racism in this country. It was a year that saw calls for tighter borders when African refugees braved frigid temperatures to cross into Manitoba from the States, racial epithets used by a school board trustee, a six-year-old girl handcuffed at school. The year also witnessed the profound personal and professional ramifications of Desmond Cole’s unwavering determination to combat injustice. Urgent, controversial and unsparingly honest, The Skin We’re In is destined to become a vital text for anti-racist and social justice movements in Canada, as well as a potent antidote to the all-too-present complacency of many white Canadians.” – Doubleday Canada