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These stories are full of the real lived violence of colonialism and of the beautiful tiny moments that our Elders and storytellers wrap around our children to teach them, protect them and nurture them. Up Ghost River is a powerful and unsettling read, full of heartbreaking truth-telling, resistance and Metatawabin’s uncompromising love of land, his people, his language and his culture. “Edmund Metatawabin’s voice is clear, brave and full of the grace of his Cree homeland. Winner of the CBC Bookie Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Praise For Up Ghost River: A Chief's Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History…įinalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction Haunting and brave, Up Ghost River is a necessary step toward our collective healing. His story gives a personal face to the problems that beset First Nations communities and fresh solutions, and untangles the complex dynamics that sparked the Idle No More movement. His work championing Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty and rights spans several decades and has won him awards and national recognition. Metatawabin has worked tirelessly to bring traditional knowledge to the next generation of Indigenous youth and leaders, as a counsellor at the University of Alberta, Chief in his Fort Albany community, and today as a youth worker, First Nations spiritual leader and activist.

#Alexandra shimo how to

By listening to elders' wisdom, he learned how to live an authentic First Nations life within a modern context, thereby restoring what had been taken from him years earlier. He later left behind his wife and family, and fled to Edmonton, where he joined a First Nations support group that helped him come to terms with his addiction and face his PTSD. Leaving high school, he turned to alcohol to forget the trauma. At his residential school-one of the worst in Canada-he was physically and emotionally abused, and was sexually abused by one of the staff. Her work can be painful to read, but, like other literature on reconciliation, it's a necessary contribution to addressing age-old wrongs.A powerful, raw and eloquent memoir about the abuse former First Nations chief Edmund Metatawabin endured in residential school in the 1960s, the resulting trauma, and the spirit he rediscovered within himself and his community through traditional spirituality and knowledge.Īfter being separated from his family at age 7, Metatawabin was assigned a number and stripped of his Indigenous identity. Shimo (coauthor of Up Ghost River: A Chief's Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History), no stranger to these issues, barely contains a palpable anger, as each injustice she witnesses firsthand becomes the springboard for a deeper exploration of the social, historical, and political roots of a reality that encompasses annual flood-induced evacuations, mold-encrusted housing, astronomical food prices, and a war-zone atmosphere that leaves her with post-traumatic stress disorder. Shimo's time in the northern Ontario Kashechewan reserve a place that drew international attention in 2005 for abominable living conditions serves as a microcosm of the obstacles First Nations face when the catch-22s of Indian Act provisions stunt economic development and condemn successive generations to despair and suicide rates that are among the highest in the world. What begins as a journalist's journey to discover the roots of a remote First Nations water crisis becomes a gripping first-person account of an outsider's short but intense experience of the brutal conditions that are daily life for many First Nations communities in Canada. Part memoir, part history of the Canadian reserves, Shimo offers an expansive exploration and unorthodox take on many of the First Nation issues that dominate the news today, including the suicide crises, murdered and missing indigenous women and girls, Treaty rights, Native sovereignty, and deep poverty.

Unable to cope with the desperate conditions, she begins to fall apart.Ī moving tribute to the power of hope and resilience, Invisible North is an intimate portrait of a place that pushes everyone to their limits. When freelance journalist Alexandra Shimo arrives in Kashechewan, a fly-in, northern Ontario reserve, to investigate rumours of a fabricated water crisis and document its deplorable living conditions, she finds herself drawn into the troubles of the reserve. A vivid first-person account of life on a troubled reserve that illuminates a difficult and oft-ignored history.Ģ017 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction - Shortlisted