Join authors Karen Stote and Morningstar Mercredi for the launch of their books The Genocide Continues and Sacred Bundles Unborn 2nd ed.
The launch can be viewed remotely here.
About the books:
Sacred Bundles Unborn - Malpractice and systemic racism are as interwoven as a spider's web. Should a dragline break, the spider spins its silk and the web is easily rewoven, like systemic racism, it is all linked. Sterilizations, forced or coerced, without consent, is the deadliest entrapment effectively eliminating generations of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples lineages. This strategy of genocide continues its silent covert assault, with or without the knowledge of the survivors of sterilizations.
The Genocide Continues offers new insights to show how federal, provincial and corporate activities intersected to criminalize and regulate Indigenous reproduction. Saskatchewan, which first established family planning policies in the 1970s and is now the province with the highest number of Indigenous women coming forward with experiences of coerced sterilization, is Stote’s case study to demonstrate why family planning activities consistently targeted Indigenous women. Stote weaves compelling archival evidence with principled storytelling to connect violence against Indigenous bodies to violence against Indigenous lands. Unless and until colonialism, extractivism and dispossession are addressed, a genocide against Indigenous peoples will continue.
About the authors:
Morningstar Mercredi is of the Wolf Clan, a member of ACFN K’ai Taile Dene in Treaty 8 Territory. She is an accomplished author, poet, artist, researcher, social activist, producer, actress, and filmmaker with a background in multimedia communications. Her work suffuses and moves across multiple genres of writing and mediums of storytelling. In addition to publishing several articles, she is the author of four books: ‘Second Edition; Sacred Bundles Unborn’, ‘First edition; Sacred Bundles Unborn,’ ‘Morningstar: A Warrior’s Spirit’, and ‘Fort Chipewyan Homecoming’ which explore the multifarious impacts that colonialism and persistent anti-Indigenous racism play in shaping definitions of personhood and how this, in turn, informs how one relates to and experiences a sense of self in the world, as well as home and community as an Indigenous person in Canada.
Karen Stote is a queer settler with Irish, Scottish and English roots who grew up on the unceded territories of the Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) and L'nu (Mi’kmaw) Peoples. She is associate professor in women and gender studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, located within the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe, Chonnonton and Haudenosaunee peoples. She teaches on Indigenous-settler history, feminism and the politics of decolonization, and issues of reproductive and environmental justice. She has been researching the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women for nearly 20 years and is the author of An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women.
