Bad Banana

   Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society Press A new memoir called SURVIVAL FOOD shares tales from growing up on the Menominee Indian Reservation. The author, Thomas Weso, was born in 1953.  He passed away in July before the book was published. Thomas Weso grew up in a time of economic transformation – when commodity goods were eaten alongside game from Wisconsin’s Northwoods.  And then there was the rise of processed foods. He often wrote about food. Here he is speaking in a 2021 interview with Wisconsin Historical Society Press. “We should think about where food comes from. Because if we think where food comes from, we’ll take better care of the land around us.” Weso’s wife, the writer Denise Low, says he was interested in writing about Indigenous people in the present. “He had a very zen sense of like, “What’s here now?” and not “what were Indians like, or Indigenous people like, 100 years ago? Here we are now.” Thomas Pecore Weso (1953-2023) was an aut...

 Soon to be on BOOKSHOP! One Small Sacrifice, Second Edition is BACK! Republished Oct. 11, 2022. AMAZON has the paperback and ebook. Ten years had passed since it was first published. You have to read this memoir! See the reviews on Amazon. READ THIS $10.99 paperback, $3.99 ebook

  Journalist Brandi Morin tells her own difficult stories in debut memoir Brandi Morin opens her debut memoir, Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising, with her visit, along with a New York Times reporter and photographer, to the home of Tina Fontaine’s great-aunt Thelma Favel for a piece on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Tina Fontaine was the 15-year-old Sagkeeng First Nations girl whose body was found in Winnipeg’s Red River in 2014, and her murder ignited the MMIWG movement. Sitting in the girl’s great-aunt’s home, Morin realized that she herself could have easily gone missing and been murdered. Morin, a French/Cree/Iroquois journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, has made a name for herself in journalism, with stories for Al Jazeera , National Geographic , Aboriginal People...

Toni Jensen. Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land. Ballantine Books, 2020. 304 pp. ISBN: 9781984821188.   https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608247/carry - by - toni - jensen/   Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land by Toni Jensen is a poetic and creative memoir about a present - day Métis woman’s life as she moves across the US for her academic pursuits . Jensen uncovers historical place - based revelations to show that these mundane places are not always what they seem , nor are they as simple as the words on a sign describe. In fact, these places carry a broken story that , if truly confronted by the visitors and inhabitants of these places, they would undoubtedly awaken to the historical and continued violence across the US.   Jensen shows how people living in the same place do not all share the same story . S he exposes how Indigenous stories have largely been erased in an effort to favor a more desirable story of Amer...

 Watching Star Wars led Jesse Wente on a journey in search of Indigenous identity, truth and joy 'The reason I want Indigenous joy to be seen is because we're more than our tragedies...we're fully human' CBC Radio ·  September 17 Jesse Wente is a First Nations Canadian arts journalist and chairperson of the Canada Council for the Arts. (Red Works 2021) 20:49 Jesse Wente on Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance Jesse Wente is an Anishinaabe writer, broadcaster and arts leader. He's best known for the more than two decades he's spent as a columnist for CBC Radio's   Metro Morning . He has also worked at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2018, he was named the first executive director of the Indigenous Screen Office and in January of 2020, he was appointed chair of the Canada Council for the Arts. When he was just three years old, Wente fell in love with the 1977 epic space-opera film  Star Wars . He remembers it fondly be...