UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Stitching Our Stories Together
Edited By: Catherine Richardson, PhD & Jeannine Carrière, PhD
Coming Spring 2025
Stitching Our Stories Together showcases emerging scholars who, by centering their own nations, communities, and individual realities, demonstrate how Indigenous knowledges can challenge settler ideas and myths around pan-Indigeneity.
This collection is bookended with reflections from the scholars’ thesis supervisors, who describe their philosophy of mentoring and supporting students through an Indigenous lens, and how their pedagogies embrace the significance of relationality in Indigenous worldviews.
Stitching Our Stories Together points toward a future where Indigenous ways of knowing and being take their rightful place in spaces of higher learning and social work practice—a necessary intervention in a discipline that has historically been complicit in colonialist harm.
PAST PUBLICATIONS
BElonging Métis
This book tells a story of what it means to be Métis through various voices and experiences. In the Indigenous spirit of inter-connectedness, these accounts are woven together through the various common threads and intersecting life experiences. As author, I assume the task of weaving together the experiences of the Métis people who have aligned themselves with this project, shared their experiences and stories related to “being Métis”. The gift and art of being Métis is not straightforward, and I strive to bring forth the complexities, joys and struggles therein. This book is written for Métis people seeking to find hope in the shared identity experience. As well, it is for allies, activists, Indigenous scholars, parents, teachers, researchers, counsellors and those in the helping professions. I hope this book will speak to everyone who is interested in holistic well-being, Métis emancipation and decolonization in this northern part of Turtle Island.
FACING THE MOUNTAIN
Nowhere in the texts on counselling, recovery, or lifespan development does it make links between well-being and not having your land stolen. When an entire people are generally portrayed as mentally ill, because that is, of course, what it means to have a diagnosis of clinical depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder, it is easy for the State to view these people as unfit to manage their lives. Then, all sorts of functions are performed on Indigenous families that are tantamount to victim-blaming formulations that, in the end, deny opportunities associated with full citizenship.
The author goes beyond offering social analysis, and possible pathways toward healing, and shares her own experience as an Indigenous woman with Metis, Cree and Gwichin heritage. She talks about her approach to a second cancer diagnosis, and explores the way she characterized her experience of chemotherapy and radiation in a way that cast the journey as personal and heroic, rather than merely medical and out of her control.
One of the main contributions of this book is a discussion of how mainstream counselling and the helping professions have overlooked important facts about oppression, including the reminder from Gloria Steinem that the personal is political.
SPEAKING THE WISDOM OF OUR TIME
Edited By: Catherine Richardson, PhD & Jeannine Carrière, PhD
Within this volume Métis stories of strength, courage and resistance are shared. Each of the chapters describe a need to re-examine how social policy is formulated and have impacted our relatives and continue to impact our children. Today we are faced with particular challenges on the planet and in our communities. We have stretched Mother Earth to the limits of her capacity and she is fighting back. As someone said, ‘we need the Earth, but the Earth does not need us’. One of the invitations of this time is to reduce our footprint, our consumption and to restore balance and harmony between mankind and the environment.
Calling Our Families Home: Métis Peoples’ Experiences with Child Welfare
Edited By: Jeannine Carrière, PhD & Catherine Richardson, PhD
This book is dedicated to informing social workers and other helping professionals in how Métis people are affected in the child welfare system. Métis peoples today negotiate a form of displacement that has occurred over generations although most Canadians are unaware of this history. The forced removal of children through child apprehension and adoption has been an integral part of displacement, perpetuating further family disruption and dislocation. There is scant literature on Métis experiences in child welfare systems, no national data is collected on the number of Métis children involved with child welfare systems, and there has never been a national study of these realities. The little research that does exist shows a very troubling picture: the misidentification of Métis children as simply “Aboriginal” or “White”, and the mass movement of Métis children outside of their birth communities.