SCPL Reads: Truth and Reconciliation 2025

In this anthology, Jaime Black-Morsette shares her own intimate stories and memories of the REDress Project along with the voices of Indigenous women, Elders, grassroots community activists, artists, academics, and family members affected by this tragedy of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people from across Turtle Island.

When Bugz, who is caught between the worlds of life on the Rez and the virtual world, meets Feng, they form an instant bond as outsiders and gamers and must both grapple with the impact of family challenges and community trauma.

For years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing--in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water and a question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To exist with and alongside water? So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms.

52 Ways to Reconcile is an accessible, friendly guide for non-Indigenous people eager to learn, or Indigenous people eager to do more in our collective effort towards reconciliation, as people, and as a country. As much as non-Indigenous people want to walk the path of reconciliation, they often aren’t quite sure what to do, and they’re afraid of making mistakes. This book is the answer and the long overdue guide.

This potent, practical book is a manual for allies for Indigenous Peoples. It presents a roadmap to creating better relationships, equity, and true reconciliation. It offers concrete steps individuals can take, in the organizations they work for and in their personal lives, to become powerful allies.

In candid, incisive, and delicate prose, Chyana Marie Sage shares the pain of growing up with her father, a crack dealer who went to prison for molesting her older sister. In revisiting her family’s history, Chyana examines the legacy of generational abuse, which began with her father’s father, who was forcibly removed from his family by the residential schools and Sixties Scoop programs. Yet hers is also a story of hope, as it was the traditions of her people that saved her life, healing one small piece in the mosaic that makes up the dark past of colonialism shared by Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.

At a youth conference, Michael sees a chance to help people. But the speaker on stage is saying things about his community that aren’t true! Will Michael be brave enough to use his voice to stand up for what he knows is right?

By the time Brittany Penner is seven years old, she has loved and lost twenty-one foster siblings who have come into her family and left—all of them Indigenous like her. "When will it be my turn?" she asks her mother time and time again. "When will I be taken away?" You won't be, she is told. You're adopted. You're here to stay. You're the lucky one. Children Like Us asks difficult questions about family, identity, belonging and cultural continuity. What happens when you find what you're looking for, but it can't offer you everything you need? What does it mean to belong when you feel torn between cultures?

From the #1 national bestselling author of 'Indian' in the Cabinet and True Reconciliation, a polyphonic history of our land -- powerful, devastating, remarkable -- as told through the voices of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.