“Indigenous Writes” by Chelsea Vowel

First of all, what baffled me was that the author had to spend the beginning of the book basically apologizing before even starting.

And I get why. I guess this is just the state of Canadian reality: even people who are on the receiving end of government oppression have to spend half an hour carefully explaining that they are not being unfair, not being too angry, not being too generalizing, not being too mean. God forbid oppressed people speak directly about oppression.

The beginning of the book was genuinely useful. Vowel goes through different terms used for Indigenous peoples in North America, and that cleared up a lot of misconceptions and half-formed questions I had. It is one of those things where I sort of knew some of the words, but not the histories, politics, and implications behind them.

The part that really dumbfounded me was hunter-gatherers not necessarily being nomadic. Which now feels obvious? Why were we taught that they had to move all the time? It actually makes way more sense that people would stay connected to specific lands, seasonal cycles, food sources, and knowledge built over generations. Moving constantly and losing all that local knowledge sounds much less logical than the simplified school version.

I had already read “Clearing the Plains,” so I thought I had some idea of the historical violence. But what I did not fully realize is how much of this was still standing in 2015, when this book was written. I think part of me still wanted to file it under “horrible things from the past.” But no. Lack of clean water, jurisdictional nonsense, broken obligations, poverty, child welfare, land rights — it is not some finished chapter. It is ongoing.

And then there is the child welfare part. I knew about residential schools, obviously. But I did not properly understand the other forms this took: children not just being sent to institutions, but being forcibly taken and adopted into settler families. Different mechanism, same logic: remove children, break families, erase cultures.

It is insane how much of this is still being minimized, softened, or thrown under the rug.

This book made me more educated, and more supportive of First Nations. Not in a vague “Canada should do better” way, but in a much more concrete “these are specific ongoing injustices and people have been explaining them for a very long time” way.

Very useful book. Probably should be required reading in Canada.