Indigenous publishers preserve stories in print as book sales rise
With a mission to ensure the visibility and preservation of the Inuktitut language, Inhabit Books in Toronto fosters Indigenous storytelling and cultural continuity. BRODY WHITE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
FROM NEWSROOMS TO publishing houses, dog-eared style guides sit on the desks of writers and editors, an arm’s reach away for questions related to grammar, formatting and language.
On about 25,000 of those desks, and on bookshelves across the country, are copies of Elements of Indigenous Style by Greg Younging, the first guide for working with Indigenous stories and authors, published in 2018. A second edition will soon continue the conversation on Indigenous book publishing in Canada, as the industry grows.
“I can’t keep up with the amount of new extraordinary work that’s coming out,” says Warren Cariou, a Métis professor of Indigenous literature at the University of Manitoba.
Sales of Indigenous books—categorized by topic and published both by Indigenous and non-Indigenous-run companies—increased by 22 per cent from 2022 to 2023, according to BookNet Canada, the national sales tracking service for English language print books.
Sales are also up this year compared to the same period in 2023, with titles in the Indigenous fiction category alone increasing 107 per cent in January, 325 per cent in February, and 131 per cent in March, according to BookNet.
Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., was the top-selling Indigenous fiction book, and Five Little Indians by Michelle Good was the most-borrowed from libraries during the first quarter of 2024.
Inhabit Books in Toronto offers a welcoming space for readers to explore over 300 culturally rich books published by Inhabit Media, emphasizing Inuit stories and traditions.BRODY WHITE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Cariou says growing interest in Indigenous-written books might have been sparked, in part, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report back in 2015, bringing attention to experiences many non-Indigenous Canadians were not aware of, but it hasn’t slowed down.
More Indigenous books are coming out in response. “We’re really in this incredible upsurge of creativity that’s continuing every year,” he says.
Cariou, who is one of the editors of the second edition of Elements of Indigenous Style, says there was a clear need for the book when the first edition came out, and it had an enormous impact in the publishing world.
“Everyone I knew was saying, ‘we need to get a copy of this,’” Cariou says.
The author, Greg Younging, a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, passed away in 2019. He was the managing editor of Theytus Books, the first Indigenous publishing house in Canada, for more than a decade.
In the book, Younging lays out principles for editing Indigenous stories.
“This book really helped to shift the way we understand how Indigenous stories can and should be presented to the world, and how the authors should be treated, and how their communities should be engaged with,” Cariou says.
Before the book, there was a sense Indigenous writers had to fit their stories into a pre-existing mould to fit into the publishing world, he adds.
The second edition, slated to come out in January, 2025, will have new sections on topics such as creating editor-author relationships that are less hierarchical than typical publishing setups, how to cite Indigenous information instead of defaulting to academic citations that don’t fit—like in oral storytelling—and publishing in Indigenous languages. It will also introduce new ideas related to editing and AI, and it will be available in French for the first time.
Cariou says printing stories that have traditionally been passed down orally is top of mind for many Indigenous storytellers he’s worked with, and it’s part of the drive to publish more Indigenous books. “Sometimes the elders worry that their stories won’t be there in the next generation, so they’re thinking about other ways of helping to preserve them.”
For Louise Flaherty, co-founder of the Inuit publishing house Inhabit Media, preserving Elder’s stories is also a top priority. While storytelling was part of the daily routine when Inuit lived on the land with their families, Flaherty says she’s heard from Elders that children are more distracted nowadays and can’t retain the stories in the same way. Many Inuit also don’t have access to Elders anymore, or they live outside their traditional territories.
“The Elders are passing away at a rapid rate in Nunavut and a lot of the people who lived on the land have passed on,” Flaherty says. “There’s an urgency to this.”
Inhabit Books, opened in November 2023, is one of 10 Indigenous-owned bookstores in Canada, providing a platform for Inuit voices and narratives.BRODY WHITE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Inhabit Media was founded in 2005. Flaherty and one of two co-founders, Neil Christopher, while working in the teachers’ education program at Nunavut Arctic College, noticed there were not enough books for children learning Inuktitut, or books that were culturally relevant to kids in Nunavut.
Inhabit Media has now published more than 300 books that are used in schools and available in stores across the country. They are written in English and a range of Inuktitut dialects, so children in communities from Pangnirtung to Arctic Bay can read stories in their local dialect, based on traditional Inuit stories and folk tales.
“It’s rewarding and humbling,” Flaherty says, adding teachers tell her that kids are learning to read Inuktitut with these books.
In 2021, 41,005 Inuit reported speaking an Indigenous language, which is 825 fewer speakers than reported in the 2016 census, according to Statistics Canada. “Our mandate is to try and make sure that our language is visible, and that it’s preserved, retained and used,” Flaherty says.
While it started as a children’s book publisher, the company has branched into publishing Inuit books for adults, such as Niqiliurniq: A Cookbook from Igloolik, and young adult readers, like Stories of Survival and Revenge from Inuit Folklore.
Inhabit Books opened a store in Toronto in November, 2023, and it is one of 10 Indigenous-owned bookshops in Canada. Flaherty says the store serves to share Inuit stories on their terms.
“We want to educate the rest of Canada and the world about who we are because a lot of stories that have been written about Inuit contain stereotypes,” she says.
While Indigenous-run publishers like Inhabit Media, Theytus Books and Pemmican publications are putting books by Inuit, First Nations and Métis authors into the market, multinationals like Penguin Random House are doing the same, with growing lists of bestselling Indigenous titles.
Originally published by the Globe and Mail