Kirjahaku

WINNER OF THE HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION * NOMINATED FOR THE EVERGREEN AWARD * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL, WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, AND CBC Capricious, big-hearted, joyful: an epic memoir from one of Canada's most acclaimed Indigenous writers and performers Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars, sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails, and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends. Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his was in many ways an idyllic far-north childhood. But five of Tomson's siblings died in childhood, and Balazee and Joe Highway, who loved their surviving children profoundly, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was six, he was flown south by float plane to attend a residential school. A year later Rene joined him to begin the rest of their education. In 1990 Rene Highway, a world-renowned dancer, died of an AIDS-related illness. Permanent Astonishment is Tomson's extravagant embrace of his younger brother's final words: "Don't mourn me, be joyful." His memoir offers insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest, and survival.

Tomson Highway is one of Canada's foremost playwrights and novelists. In Comparing Mythologies he addresses a theme that is central to much of his work: the ways that Canadian culture today is shaped by the mixture of Aboriginal and Western mythologies. What interests him is not merely the differences between these cultures, but the ways that inherited beliefs enable Native communities to cope with the cultural and social challenges facing them today.

-In his first novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, noted playwright Tomson Highway tells the story of two Cree brothers who were severely abused at a Catholic residential school, and he uses the full transformative power of magic and myth, as well as a compelling traditional novel plot, to restore to them their dignity and, by implication, that of their people.---Toronto Globe and Mail-Highway's novel vibrates with the force of the collision of two cultures, the long history of a people living at one with nature, and the violence of their enforced conversion to Christianity. Emotionally complex, witty, symphonic and sad, Kiss of the Fur Queen is a remarkable novel, filled with blood, guts, life and love.---Vancouver Sun

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow each other like the cyclical seasons they represent. Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a "Trickster language" within which the hysterically comic spills over into the unutterably tragic and back, this play is haunted by the blood of the dead spreading over the landscape like a red mist of mourning.

Canada's most famous Aboriginal playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined. Born and raised in Lovely, Ontario, a small French-Canadian farming village near Lake Huron, Marie-Louise Painchaud has never had occasion to venture much farther than the nearest community -- Complexity, a copper-mining town and a somewhat larger dot on the map of the Georgia Bay area. For thirty years, Marie-Louise has worked at the local post office, and, through the many letters she sorts when they arrive and the ones that she stamps before they go out, she has come to know the lives of everyone in town and vicariously experience their various loves, losses, and personal dramas. In this one-woman musical tour de force, Marie-Louise confides in us the interwoven stories sealed in the envelopes she handles every day.A samba beat offers the soundtrack for the tale of a local woman's passion- ate but doomed affair with a man from Rio de Janeiro; a rhythmic tango plays as Marie-Louise divulges a friend's steamy tryst in Argentina. All together, twelve unique musical pieces, ranging from Berlin cabaret to French cafe chanson to smooth bossa nova, accompany a multilingual French, Cree, and English libretto. In The (Post) Mistress, Tomson Highway creates not only a rural comedy but also a sublime parody of small-town life -- the northern Ontario version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town or Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Profiles Aboriginal Canadians telling their own stories about their own people in their own voice from their own perspective.

Aboriginal Canadians tell their own stories, about their own people, in their own voice, from their own perspective. If as recently as forty years ago there was no recognizable body of work by Canadian writers, as recently as thirty years ago there was no Native literature in this country. Perhaps a few books had made a dent on the national consciousness: The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, and the poetry of Pauline Johnson and even Louis Riel. Now, three decades later, Native people have a literature that paints them in colours that are psychologically complex and sophisticated. They have a literature that validates their existence, that gives them dignity, that tells them that they and their culture, their ideas, their languages, are important if not downright essential to the long-term survival of the planet. Tomson Highway's From Oral to Written is a study of Native literature published in Canada between 1980 and 2010, a catalogue of amazing books that sparked the embers of a dormant voice. In the early 1980s, that voice rose up to overcome the major obstacle Native people have as writers: they are not able to write in their own Native languages, but have to write in the languages of the colonizer, languages that simply cannot capture the magic of Native mythology, the wild insanity of Trickster thinking. From Oral to Written is the story of the Native literary tradition, written - in multiple Aboriginal languages, in French, and in English - by a brave, committed, hard-working, and inspired community of exceptional individuals - from the Haida Nation on Haida Gwaii to the Mi'kmaq of Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. Leading Aboriginal author Tomson Highway surveys the first wave of Native writers published in Canada, highlighting the most gifted authors and the best stories they have told, offering non-Native readers access to reconciliation and understanding, and at the same time engendering among Native readers pride in a stellar body of work.

"Speaking one language, I submit, is like living in a house with one window only..." From his legendary birth in a snow bank in northwestern Manitoba, through his metamorphosis to citizen-artist of the world, playwright, pianist, polyglot, storyteller, and irreverent disciple of the Trickster, Tomson Highway rides roughshod through the languages and communities that have shaped him. Cree, Dene, Latin, French, English, Spanish, and the universal language of music have opened windows and widened horizons in Highway's life. Readers who can hang on tight-Highway fans, culture mavens, cunning linguists, and fellow tricksters-will experience the profundity of Highway's humour, for as he says, "In Cree, you will laugh until you weep."

Champion et Ooneemeetoo Okimasis, jeunes Cris du nord du Manitoba, sont arrach s leur famille et plac s dans une cole catholique r sidentielle du Sud. Ali n s par une culture qu'on leur impose, ils luttent pour leur survie. La Reine blanche, personnage mythique, veille sur eux et les ram ne vers l'univers magique dont ils sont issus. L'un deviendra musicien et l'autre danseur. De leur art, un monde nouveau mergera.

Once upon a magical time, a young rabbit named Weeskits hurried home to Kisoos--a town known as the Earth's belly button--to deliver some thrilling news. Salamoo Cook, the Grand Chief of all rabbits in the world, was on his way to announce a mysterious contest. The prize? A year's supply of all-healing waaskee-choos juice fresh from spruce cones that have just fallen. Would Weeskits be able to help his brother Keegach win the juice to rid his wife of the dreadful manchoos? From Tomson Highway, acclaimed author and playwright, best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and most recently his award-winning memoir, Permanent Astonishment. Grand Chief Salamoo Comes to Town is a laugh-out-loud riot of a tale, interspersed with eight jazzy songs performed in Cree. This musical picture book includes a QR code to access the narrated story and songs online and a glossary of Cree words used throughout the tale.