"From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried…. Sissy, born 1961: Sissy’s relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present,...

"Some readers have fallen in love with Warren’s poetry, including Morning Song of an Odawa and Peace Is, both of which are included in this autobiography. Others love his evocative description of the American Indian relationship to the landscape of the Great Lakes, where even the great rocks along the shore are recognized as loving grandparents. Many readers have thanked Warren for his honesty about the long-running tragedy of Indian boarding schools....

"Summer and her family always spend relaxed summers in Alberta, Canada, on the reservation where her mom’s family lives. But this year is turning out to be an eye-opening one. First, Summer has begun to have vivid dreams in which she’s running away from one of the many real-life residential schools that tore Native children from their families and tried to erase their Native identities. Not long after that, she learns that unmarked children’s...

"From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried…. Sissy, born 1961: Sissy’s relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present,...

"Margarent leaps off the board and reaces toward her family. It's been two years since she left her arctic home for the outsiders' school, and she can barely contain her excitement. But her mother stands stone-still. 'Not my girl,' she says angrily. Margaret is now ten, and her years at school have changed her. She has forgotten her language and can't stomach her mother's food. What's more, her best friend if forbidden to play with her. Now...

"To fulfill the government’s policy to 'destroy the Indian and save the man,' Alfred Swallow and his friends Orson and Junior are forced to leave their families and homes to attend a residential mission school. The students’ beautiful long hair is cut, and they are forbidden to speak their native language. Even the slightest infraction is severely punished. At the height of hopelessness, Alfred gets a ghostly visit from beyond the grave, telling...

"For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, 'Indian hospitals' and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike...

"Niizh Eshkanag is a member of the first generation of Anishinaabe children required to attend a U.S. government boarding school—schools infamously intended to 'kill the Indian and save the man,' or forcibly assimilate Native students into white culture. At the Yardley Indian Boarding School in northern Minnesota, far from his family, Niizh Eshkanag endures abuse from the school staff and is punished for speaking his native language. After his family...

"My interest in American Indian boarding schools survivors' stories evolved from recording my father and other family members speaking of their experiences. I never knew these stories existed, because my family members had all maintained silence on their experiences until I began asking questions....The journey to record survivors' stories led me through the Dakotas and Minnesota and into the personal and private space of boarding school survivors....

"When Europeans came to the Americas centuries ago, too many of them brought racism along with them. Even presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson each had different takes on how to solve the 'Indian Problem'—none of them beneficial for the Natives. In the early 1800s, the federal government and various church denominations devised the 'Indian Boarding Schools,' in which Native children were forced to give up their...