Canadian Schools

For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system.

The New York Times bestselling author of the book club classics The Kitchen House and Glory Over Everything returns with a sweeping and “richly detailed story of a woman caught between two cultures” (Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author) inspired by the real life of Crow...

“A masterwork by one of our most essential storytellers.” —Jesse Wente, author of Unreconciled From award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga comes a riveting exploration of the dark history of residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums For generations...

A Sweping History Of Canada's Northwest Territories Stand on the bank of the Mackenzie River at breakup and you will understand something that no map has ever quite managed to convey: this is one of the oldest, most storied, and most misunderstood places on Earth. For ten thousand years, the Dene and Inuit peoples of the Northwest Territories built civilizations of extraordinary sophistication — navigating vast Arctic seas, managing caribou migrations across millions of hectares, and encoding millennia of ecological knowledge into languages that are only now being recognized for the ...

Award-winning author Michelle Porter makes her fiction debut with an enchanting and original story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Métis women and the land and bison that surround them. Written like a crooked Métis jig, A...

Born into a magical Cree world in snowy northern Manitoba, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis are all too soon torn from their family and thrust into the hostile world of a Catholic residential school. Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are...

From bestselling author Patrick deWitt, a brilliant and darkly comic novel about a wealthy widow and her adult son who flee New York for Paris in the wake of scandal and financial disintegration. Frances Price – tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature – is in dire...

September 1984, Thornton College private school. After 15-year-old Zahabiya’s father remarries, she can’t wait to leave home and convinces him to send her away to boarding school. But will she fit in? She joins a clique of smart students but isn’t sure if she measures up or how to read the mixed messages from a guy she’s crushing on.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Fred Sasakamoose played in the NHL before First Nations people had the right to vote in Canada. This page turner will have you cheering for 'Fast Freddy' as he faces off against huge challenges both on and off the ice--a great gift to every proud hockey fan, Canadian, and...

"A book that's a feast, an occasion and a celebration. Randy Boyagoda delightfully skewers the industrial-academic complex but also creates moving characters who seem to have walked in from the dorm and faculty meeting next door. The result is as moving as it is hysterically funny." —Gary...

Follow the misadventures of free-spirited young schoolteacher Betty Wheatley – or Sweetly – as she’s nick-named by her handful of students at a remote school house in the Canadian wilderness. She soon encounters bears, risqué romance, revelry – and retribution from judgemental locals. An insightful engaging novel based on the real-life experiences of author Denise McKay, a former teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in the rugged British Columbia interior. Denise McKay was born in Vancouver and now resides in Ancaster, Ontario. She studied creative writing at Ryerson University and ...

In A Canadian Shame, Darren Grimes has collected and presented overwhelming evidence which shows beyond doubt that a monster bent on the complete destruction of the Indigenous peoples of Canada (First Nations, Inuit, Metis, and all the other Aboriginal inhabitants of the land) has been devouring not only men and women, but also children of those cultures, that this monster has been doing so for hundreds of years, that this destruction has been deliberate and systematic rather than accidental or unintended.

Return to Sarah's Valley is a follow-up story to Sarah's Valley, which was published in 2012 by the same author, Sharon Mierke. In Sarah's Valley, Patrick Smithson meets Frank Lawdry. Frank, who prefers his Abenaki name, Winnipesaukee, spends the night recalling his life story. He and his sister, Sarah, were left orphans when everyone on a wagon train died in a horrific tragedy. It was their story of survival. Return to Sarah's Valley continues where Sarah's Valley leaves off. Now an old man in his nineties, Patrick meets Michael Lawdry, one of Winnipesaukee's descendants, and tells him how...

From the internationally bestselling author of the “extraordinary” (Fredrik Backman) novel Stolen, Punished is the harrowing story of five Sámi children who are forced to attend a government-run boarding school in 1950s Sweden and the emotional scars that haunt them thirty years later. Can...

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).

This book is for everybody who wants to improve their English. It’s fun to learn English by listening to interesting stories.

A Young Adult novel by Louisa Onomé, Twice As Perfect follows a Nigerian Canadian girl dealing with an estranged older brother, helping her cousin plan a big Nigerian wedding, and pressure from her parents about her future. She thinks the only things worth doing are those that will lead to...

Saints and Misfits is an unforgettable debut novel that feels like a modern day My So-Called Life…starring a Muslim teen. There are three kinds of people in my world: 1. Saints, those special people moving the world forward. Sometimes you glaze over them. Or, at least, I do. They’re in...

A boy, a body, a girl, a secret. From award-winning author Mariko Tamaki, Cold is a haunting YA audiobook about a shocking murder in a quiet town and four students who knew too much and said too little. This is the story of a boy who died—and a girl who wants to know why. Todd Mayer is dead...

In May 2021, the world was shocked by news of the detection of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) in British Columbia, Canada. Ground-penetrating radar confirmed the vestiges of children as young as three on this site of the infamous residential school system, which systematically removed children from their families and brought them to the schools.