Bearskin Diary

Raw and honest, Carol Daniels adds an absolutely integral perspective to the Canadian literary landscape. Bearskin Diary gives voice to First Nations women who have always been marginalized and silenced, at a time when a national inquiry is being called for into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and the Province of Saskatchewan is finally officially apologizing for the Sixties Scoop. Taken from the arms of her mother as soon as she was born, Sandy was only one of over 20,000 Aboriginal children scooped up by provincial governments between the 1960s and 1980s. Out of this dreadful period in Canadian history, Sandy overcomes and exposes the discrimination that she suffers every day from her classmates, co-workers, from strangers, and most tragically, even from herself—as she navigates life as a pioneering First Nations TV reporter; an irrational love of a man in a lifelong abject denial of his own culture; and the systematic, racist and murderous subjugation of First Nations women on the Canadian Prairies. Sandy does not emerge unscathed, but she emerges strong—finding her way by embracing the First Nations culture that the Sixties Scoop had tried to deny.