Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry

“Bespeaks a profound ethical engagement as it foregrounds responsibility, collectiveness, and the need to grieve losses and honour survivors through creative acts of witnessing.” Sylvie Vranckx, Canadian Literature

"With this edition, the editors of Honouring the Strength of Indian Women are ensuring that Vera Manuel's voice will be heard in all its fullness, range, and power for generations to come and beyond. It's evident that Vera Manuel was ahead of her time in reckoning with the history of injustice that Indigenous people have faced in this land since the arrival of the Europeans. She confronts this history fearlessly but with such compassion and wisdom arising from the richness of Indigenous knowledge and ways that we can find within her vision our own individual duty and responsibility to the past."

Dale Lakevold, Prairie Fire

"Consistently, the reader meets individuals who are seeking and sometimes finding a way out of the intergenerational trauma that residential schools and genocidal colonialism have wreaked. Recurring themes and even recurring memories within the five plays and four stories emphasize these impacts, never allowing the reader to lose sight of what transpired in so many Indigenous peoples’ lives over the decades since Europeans took possession of their territories. From early days with grandparents on the land to the force of religion, enacted often violently by priests and nuns within the schools, and from the subsequent painful and often abusive relationships within families to the healing power of speaking truth, the emotions are palpable, the words forceful." Celia Haig-Brown, Native American and Indigenous Studies

"This book, as with other examples of Indigenous truth-telling, is in and of itself an act of powerful resistance, healing and resilience, ensuring that the experiences and knowledge of Vera Manuel's people are shared and remembered, and allowing space for wellbeing and the healing of historical traumas to take root." Rachel K.M. Lee Soon, Drama Therapy Review