Examines the history, culture, changing fortunes, and future prospects of the Montagnais-Naskapi Indians. Includes a picture essay on their crafts.

Casewrap hardcover book. This book of the Chahkapas hero legend cycle is the second book in a series prepared for reading in Naskapi and in English by the Naskapi Development Corporation. John Peastitute (1896 - 1981) was a Naskapi Elder who was not only well respected as a story-keeper, but also as a storyteller. His repertoire of both tipâchimûna (stories) and âtiyûhkinich (legends) was extensive, and his performances engaging. The tape recordings of his stories that have survived to be preserved, processed and studied are a precious legacy. The Chahkapas stories tell of the small but mighty hero who snares the sun, is swallowed by a fish, rescues his sister, and avenges the death of his parents by the monster Kachituskw.

Labrador Innu cultural and environmental activist Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue is well-known both within and far beyond the Innu Nation. The recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award and an honorary doctorate from Memorial University, she has been a subject of documentary films, books, and numerous articles. She led the Innu campaign against NATO’s low-level flying and bomb testing on Innu land during the 1980s and ’90s, and was a key respondent in a landmark legal case in which the judge held that the Innu had the “colour of right” to occupy the Canadian Forces base in Goose Bay, Labrador. Over the past twenty years she has led walks and canoe trips in nutshimit, “on the land,” to teach people about Innu culture and knowledge. Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive began as a diary written in Innu-aimun, in which Tshaukuesh recorded day-to-day experiences, court appearances, and interviews with reporters. Tshaukuesh has always had a strong sense of the importance of documenting what was happening to the Innu and their land. She also found keeping a diary therapeutic, and her writing evolved from brief notes into a detailed account of her own life and reflections on Innu land, culture, politics, and history. Beautifully illustrated, this work contains numerous images by professional photographers and journalists as well as archival photographs and others from Tshaukuesh’s own collection.

In this poetry collection, Joséphine Bacon challenges our traditional notions of culture and perception, landscape and wilderness, the limits of experience, and the nature of human being. With a surreal blend of emotions and memories, "A Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat" portrays a complex and ever-shifting landscape of possibilities. The author passionately reveals a finely wrought sensibility, which elevates the subtle scenery of life's everyday events. The French-language edition of this book was shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

The definitive Hubbard, combining her previously unpublished diary, a full biography, and new maps that break down her daring canoe trip day by day.