Longlist #1: Michelle Good’s Truth Telling
There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Michelle Good’s Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada (HarperCollins Canada).
A bold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada. With authority and insight, Truth Telling examines a wide range of Indigenous issues framed by Michelle Good’s personal experience and knowledge.
From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening. Truth Telling also demonstrates the myths underlying Canadian history and the human cost of colonialism, showing how it continues to underpin modern social institutions in Canada.
Passionate and uncompromising, Michelle Good affirms that meaningful and substantive reconciliation hinges on recognition of Indigenous self-determination, the return of lands, and a just redistribution of the wealth that has been taken from those lands without regard for Indigenous peoples. Truth Telling is essential reading for those looking to acknowledge the past and understand the way forward.
MICHELLE GOOD is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After three decades of working with Indigenous communities and organizations, she obtained her law degree. She earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while still practising law. Her novel, Five Little Indians, was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It received the HarperCollins Publishers Ltd/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Five Little Indians was also chosen for Canada Reads in 2022. Michelle Good’s poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.
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