2017’s Nonfiction November is hosted by Katie at Doing Dewey, Lory at Emerald City Book Review, Julie at Julz Reads, and Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness!

Three ways to join in this week! You can either share 3 or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).

Earlier this week, I posted about Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City. It’s a gripping story, bound to appeal to readers who appreciate elements of true crime, history, memoir, social justice and narrative-driven journalism.

The students whose deaths are at the heart of this book were attending an Indigenous-run high school in Thunder Bay, Ontario. To understand the importance of this educational opportunity (even with the challenges of students’ adjustments to city life and the embedded racism in the community), it’s useful to have some understanding of the residential school system, which was wielded like a weapon against Indigenous communities from the later nineteenth-century until 1996.

I have some newer books on the stacks right now, too (like Eddy Weetaltuk’s From the Tundra to the Trenches and Chelsea Vowel’s Indigenous Writes, if you’re curious), but I also want to make time for some of these classic texts as well.