FernFolio » Native Canadians

Reading the Bones by Gina McMurchy-Barber

fernfolio — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:37:24 +0000

Sent to live with her aunt and uncle while her widowed mother goes to Toronto to look for a job, twelve-year old Peggy Henderson resigns herself to a summer of listening to Aunt Margaret’s endless lectures, and her determined efforts to get Peggy out and making friends with other kids. She prefers helping Uncle Stu dig the hole in the backyard for the new koi pond to neatly folding her laundry or cleaning her bedroom, and has found all of the friendship she needs in Mrs. Hobbs, the elderly woman with whom she goes shell-hunting on the beach.
Then Peggy finds a human skull in that hole in the backyard and the police’s forensic team determines that the remains are several thousand years old. Though her aunt is annoyed to find her koi pond has become an archaeological excavation, Peggy rapidly becomes involved in investigating and documenting the site. She helps Eddy, the wise, comfortable and plain-speaking old archaeologist who arrives to work on the excavation, and finds herself learning more than she could possibly have imagined about the Coast Salish elder laid to rest in that hole thousands of years before.
Peggy discovers that, while Eddy and Mrs Hobbs, and others, believe that the artefacts found in these ancient burial sites ought to be preserved for study by museums and other agencies, the descendants of the elderly man want to ensure that his remains are once again laid to rest, and the owner of a local store selling native artefacts is prepared to pay cash for any interesting items that he can then turn around and sell at a profit.
Told from the perspective of Peggy, whose strong feelings and personal preoccupations help to drive the plot, Reading the Bones is a good story about a girl’s struggle to understand the past and its lessons for the present and future.
FernFolio Editor

Murphy and Mousetrap by Sylvia Olsen

fernfolio — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:57:33 +0000

Nine year-old Murphy Jones has lived in the same apartment with his mother, Lisa, and his cat, Mousetrap, for as long as he can remember. Though his mom worries that he doesn’t spend enough time with other boys his age, and her job doesn’t pay well enough for many trips to restaurants or the movies, Murphy is happy playing hide-and-seek with Mousetrap, surfing on the internet, and looking for rocks to add to his collection.
When his mother announces that she has got a new job, one that pays well, with her First Nation, and that they will be moving home into Grandma’s basement apartment on the reserve, Murphy is reluctant to go. The reserve might be where his mother comes from, but it has never felt like home to him. Used to just the two of them and the cat, Murphy feels overwhelmed by all the aunts and uncles and cousins that live on the reserve. He is nervous about how Mousetrap, a house cat, will adapt to the free-roaming life of the reserve animals, and, with his blonde hair, blue eyes and fair complexion, a legacy from his absent father, Murphy is afraid he won’t fit in.
Invited by some boys to play soccer on his first day on the reserve, Murphy tries to back out of the game, but is nudged along by his mother. Though he has never played soccer before, two of the boys put Murphy in nets and then set out to pummel him black and blue with flying soccer balls. Murphy is terrified and determined to duck away from the balls getting kicked his way, but somehow his body has other plans and he finds himself stopping balls by blocking them with his chest.
It seems that Murphy might be a natural goalie, and just what the Buckskin Bulldogs need for their upcoming tournament. If Albert and Levi can stop the harassment and the name-calling, and the team can teach Murphy the rudiments of soccer, perhaps they can pull off a victory.
Murphy and Mousetrap in a nice story about a boy, and his cat, who discover that new experiences and challenges can lead to great things and that, perhaps, they are more than they ever thought they could be.
FernFolio Editor

The Big Snapper by Katherine Holubitsky

fernfolio — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:22:46 +0000

Ten year-old Eddie lives with his mother and grandparents in Haida Gwaii, known by non-Natives as the Queen Charlotte Islands, along the coast of British Columbia. With his best friend, Jake, Eddie hikes up to Spirit Lake, where they have built a raft, helps Jake’s mother gather berries and plants to make traditional medicines, digs for clams on the beach, and rides around on the old bike they found in the local dump. Though money is a constant worry for his family, particularly since his father left to find work on the mainland and has not been heard from in six months, Eddie loves his life in the small Haida community. He especially loves fishing with his grandfather.
Every morning, Eddie and his grandfather head out in their small boat to fish. Since his mom has turned their home into a bed and breakfast for tourists visiting Haida Gwaii, the family is no longer completely dependent upon their catch to put supper on the table, but Eddie looks forward to the daily ritual of motoring out to a good spot, dropping the anchor, and baiting the lines with octopus. Since his grandfather’s hands have grown shaky and he doesn’t have the strength he used to, more and more of the fishing has fallen to Eddie, and he feels proud everytime he hauls another fish into the boat.
Once they are settled into the day’s fishing, Eddie knows that he will hear another of grandfather’s stories, tales about Trotter, the black bear who got driven out of his den by loggers and about the trick grandfather played to scared the loggers away, and about the humpback whale who got blown into the mountains during a tidal wave. But Eddie’s favourite stories are about the Big Snapper, a gigantic and wily fish with whom his grandfather has tangled several times over the course of his life. The way grandfather tells it, the Big Snapper is big and strong and smart and protective of his family and not above playing the odd trick upon fishers who try to hook him.
When grandfather becomes too weak to fish, Eddie feels bereft. Though Jake and his brother-in-law, Fred, welcome him into their fishing boat, things are not the same without grandfather’s stories and, more importantly, his strong and gentle spirit.
The Big Snapper is a wonderful story about the importance of family, the strength of a community’s ties to their environment, and the power of story. This small book is a perfect example of good things coming in small packages. Katherine Holubitsky has written a book that young readers, and their parents and teachers, will remember long after the last pages are finished!
FernFolio Editor

Tom Finder by Martine Leavitt

fernfolio — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:23:35 +0000

The first thing Tom remembers is walking, his back and backside screaming in pain. He has forgotten everything that came before, family, friends, school, his last name. In his backpack he finds a notebook with notes about Mozart and a candy heart imprinted with the words You are nice, so he concludes that he is nice, and when he finds a big native man standing at the river’s edge praying and weeping, he asks if he can help. The native man, Samuel Wolflegs, is looking for his son, Daniel, a drug addict, who is living on the streets. Samuel looks at Tom and sees him as the answer to his prayers. Although loser is the first word Tom hears after forgetting, Samuel calls him a finder and asks him to look for his son.
Armed with his notebook, in which he compulsively records what he finds and a mind so empty of memory and preconception that each new experience, large and small, resonates in his heart and soul and intellect, Tom sets out to find Daniel. On his 3-month journey, he finds Jenks, a homeless man who sees ghosts, Jeans, a claustrophobic chicken cooker from Jamaica who longs to get home so he can marry his sweetheart, Gina, and Pam, a beautiful young girl sliding down the slippery slope into prostitution. He also finds that he possesses strengths and abilities; he can spell, he can run fast and swim, he can work out deals for food, a locker, clothing and the occasional shower, and he can make things true by writing about them.
Martine Leavitt’s Tom Finder is a moving story about a young man who looks for another lost youth and finds himself. Written in words that flow like poetry, this book is a must read for students from Grade 7.
Fern Folio Editor

Stolen Away by Christopher Dinsdale

fernfolio — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 22:38:44 +0000

Captured during a Viking raid on her Irish village, Kiera is taken to Iceland where she is auctioned off as a slave to Bjorn and his wife Dagmar. When they join a small group of Norse settlers looking for richer fishing and hunting grounds and fertile land in which to plant crops, Kiera finds herself travelling from Greenland to Vinland, on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Though Bjorn and Dagmar are not unkind, and their small daughter, Lorna, loves her, Kiera longs to return to Ireland and the family she left behind.
The Viking settlement comes under repeated attacks from a local native band, the Thules, who are bent upon driving the invaders from the island. When a small group of Viking warriors sets sail in search of a safer site for their community, Kiera, a skilled seamstress, accompanies them to make necessary repairs to the ship’s sail. A sudden storm batters the ship and Kiera is thrown into the sea. The Vikings, believing Kiera lost, sail on, but Kiera is rescued by a young native man named Chocan who, with his sister Sooleawaa, nurses her back to health, and then introduces her to the Beothuck peoples.
Welcomed into Beothuck nation, Kiera learns participates in the caribou hunt, travels with them to their winter meeting place, and discovers that she has far more in common with these mysterious people than she could have ever imagined. However, though Kiera finds friendship and acceptance among the Beothuck, she continues to dream of returning home to her family in Ireland.
This book provides an interesting view of life in the earliest European settlements in North America, and of the vanished Beothuck peoples of Newfoundland.
FernFolio Editor