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By Wild, Roland1958., General, Ryerson Press Call No: Bio D296w Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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By Knott, Helen2023., Alfred .A. Knopf Canada Call No: NEW IND Bio K72b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: When matriarchs begin to disappear, there is a choice to either step into the places they left behind, or to craft a new space. Helen Knott's debut memoir, In My Own Moccasins, wowed reviewers, award-juries, and readers alike with its profoundly honest and moving account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and survival. Now, with her highly anticipated second book, Knott exceeds the highest of expectations with a chronicle of grief, love, and legacy. Having lost both her mom and grandma in just over six months, forced to navigate the fine lines between matriarchy, martyrdom, and codependency, Knott realizes she must let go, not just of them, but let go of who she thought she was. Woven into the pages are themes that touch on mourning, staying sober through loss, and generational dreaming. Charted with poetic insights, a sprinkle of sass, humour, and heart, crossing the rivers and mountains of Dane Zaa Territory in Northeastern British Columbia and the cobbled streets of Antigua, Guatemala, this is a journey through pain on the way to becoming.
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By Teed, Josie2023., Dundurn Press Call No: NEW QWF Bio T258b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A job as a heritage interpreter at a remote gold rush site propels an insecure and anxious twenty-four-year-old to find what she truly desires from life. Unsure of her next steps after graduation, twenty-something Josie Teed accepts a position at Barkerville, a remote heritage site in British Columbia showcasing the nineteenth-century gold rush. She lives in the adjacent village of Wells, population 250. There is no cell reception and the grocery store is an hour away by car. Once a thriving gold mining community in the 1930s, Wells has become a haven for white Gen-X artists and flower children, struggling actors-turned-heritage-interpreters, and transient miners. Eager for respite from her competitive and lonely city life, Josie dives headlong into the slow and steady pace of the town. Faced with the prospect of remaining long-term, she must decide if she will fight to carve a place for herself in Wells's idiosyncratic community. What follows is the story of a young woman trying to find her purpose in the twenty-first century while living in a village seemingly frozen in the past.
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2001., Adult, Anvil Press Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver's downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country's "very poorest forward sortation area of all 7,000 postal prefixes". Bart Campbell dismantles our hard-held notions about poverty, the disenfranchised, substance abuse, and the nature of charity.The Door Is Open is one man's story of a transformative journey into the complicated and complex world of poverty.
![The door is open [eBook] : memoir of a soup kitchen volunteer](/Library/images/~imageCT77274.JPG "The door is open [eBook] : memoir of a soup kitchen volunteer")
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2008., General, Penguin Group Call No: Bio C257d Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Extraordinary Canadians
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2021., Walnut Tree Press Call No: NEW QWF Bio O66e Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Expedition to Mystery Mountain is a come-along adventure of a city-dwelling woman who, with five fellow climbers, re-enacts the 1926 exploits of fearless trailblazers and pioneering Canadian mountaineers Don and Phyllis Munday. The team’s ambitious mission: to recreate the Mundays’ route to Mount Waddington, the highest peak of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, outfitted with vintage hobnail boots, fifty-pound wood-frame packs, and only antique ice axes for safety. Is the one woman in the crew prepared to endure the hordes of mosquitoes, the grizzly bears, the thickets of devil’s club, and the other dangers on the List of Doom? The way forward is uncertain. Fear is not. Her mantra: “Just keep going.” Far from civilization the gear and the team start falling apart, and the fate of the expedition hangs in the balance. At every turn, another stumbling block—yet her biggest obstacle may not be the impenetrable bush, the punishing weight of the pack frame, or her aching muscles. What is holding her back? To push on, she’ll need to find inspiration in Phyllis Munday, a badass woman of courage, good humour, and old-fashioned grit. She’ll have to come to terms with her fear of not being good enough—even when the path ahead is only more arduous. She’ll be strong if she can remain centred, moment by moment, and take yet another step. She’ll be unstoppable if she can trust herself in the face of uncertainty and unleash her inner wild woman. This unique, off-the-beaten-path adventure will enthrall the armchair traveller or seasoned hiker who enjoys reading about courage, resilience, and rebel women who dare to live by their own rules.
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-- Life in and after residential school2023., Purich Books Call No: NEW IND Bio G347f Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: My name is Sam George. In spite of everything that happened to me, by the grace of the Creator, I have lived to be an Elder.' The crimes carried out at St. Paul's Indian Residential School in North Vancouver scarred untold numbers of Indigenous children and families across generations. Sam George was one of these children. This candid account follows Sam from his idyllic childhood growing up on the Eslhá7an (Mission) reserve to St. Paul's, where he weathered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. He spent much of his life navigating the effects of this trauma - prison, addiction, and challenging relationships - until he found the strength to face his past. Now an Elder and educator with the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, this is Sam's harrowing story, in his own words. An ember of Sam's spirit always burned within him, and even in the darkest of places he retained his humour and dignity. The Fire Still Burns is an unflinching look at the horrors of a childhood in the Indian Residential School system and the long-term effects on survivors. It illustrates the healing power of one's culture and the resilience that allows an individual to rebuild a life and a future.
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2018., General, Doubleday Canada Call No: IND Bio M217h Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryView an interview with Terese Mailhot on YouTube. Summary Note: "Guileless and refreshingly honest, Terese Mailhot's debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation. A powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bipolar II, Terese Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father - an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist - who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot "trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain and what we can bring ourselves to accept." Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people and to her place in the world. Terese Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in fiction and is the Saturday Editor at The Rumpus and a columnist for Indian Country Today"--Provided by publisher.
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By Maracle, Lee1996., General, Press Gang Publishers Call No: IND 305.89 M298i Edition: Revised 2nd ed. Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A revised edition of Lee Maracle's visionary book which links teaching of her First Nations heritage with feminism. "I Am Woman represents my personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty, written during a time when that struggle was not over. My original intention was to empower Native women to take to heart their own personal struggle for Native feminist being. The changes made in this second edition of the text do not alter my original intention. It remains my attempt to present a Native woman's sociological perspective on the impacts of colonialism on us, as women, and on my self personally."--From the author.
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-- Memoir of resilience.2019., Adult, University of Regina Press Call No: IND Bio K72i Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Regina collection.Summary Note: Helen Knott, a highly accomplished Indigenous woman, seems to have it all. But in her memoir, she offers a different perspective. In My Own Moccasins is an unflinching account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, and the wounds brought on by sexual violence. It is also the story of sisterhood, the power of ceremony, the love of family, and the possibility of redemption. With gripping moments of withdrawal, times of spiritual awareness, and historical insights going back to the signing of Treaty 8 by her great-great grandfather, Chief Bigfoot, her journey exposes the legacy of colonialism, while reclaiming her spirit. Helen Knott is a Dane Zaa, Nehiyaw, and mixed Euro-descent woman living in Fort St. John, British Columbia. In 2016 Helen was one of sixteen global change makers featured by the Nobel Women's Initiative for being committed to end gender-based violence. Helen was selected as a 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Author. This is her first book. Eden Robinson is the award-winning author of Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster, and other novels. She is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations.
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2022., Adult, Patrick Crean Editions Call No: NEW BLK Bio M818i Edition: First Canadian edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A memoir from a BC Vancouver Sun journalist who was born to a West African mother, and then adopted as a small boy and raised by a white evangelical family. This is his account of being raised by fundamentalists. He grows up as a black kid who had his racial identity mocked and derided all the while being made to participate in the religious fervor of his mother's holy roller church. The religious brainwashing is of course dislocating and crushing for the boy as he grows into a teenager and is consistently abused for being black. He must navigate and survive zealotry, paranoia and prejudice. This is a narrative that amplifies a voice rarely heard: the child at the centre of an interracial adoption. This memoir invites readers to de-centre whiteness as its narrator learns to do the same and considers the controversial adoption practice from the perspective of the families being ripped apart, and the children being stripped of their culture, in order to fill demand for babies in evangelical households. As Harry grows up after a lifetime of internalized anti-blackness, he begins to redefine his terms and reconsider his history. His journey from white cult to black consciousness culminates in a happy reunion with his biological mother, who waited 25 years to tell him the truth: she wanted to keep him. Harrison Mooney's style brings accessibility and levity to a deeply personal tale of identity: a black coming-of-age narrative set in a world with little love for black boys.
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-- Standing up for our lands, our waters, and our people.2023., Adult, Allen Lane Call No: NEW IND 305.897 G342s Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: It Stops Here is the story of the spiritual, cultural, and political resurgence of a nation taking action to reclaim their lands, waters, law, and food systems in face of colonization. The book recounts the intergenerational struggle of the Tsleil-Waututh to overcome the harms of colonization and the powerful stance they have taken against the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline--a fossil fuel megaproject that would triple the capacity of tar sands bitumen piped to tidewater on their unceded territory and result in a sevenfold increase in oil tankers moving through their waters. .
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1971., Oxford University Press Call No: SC Bio D7342s Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Canadian lives