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Being the oldest unmarried girl in her Blackfoot tribe is misery for fifteen-year-old Sweetgrass, but her father feels she’s not ready for the hard work and responsibility that come with being an Indian wife. Then, during the cold prairie winter, a smallpox epidemic breaks out. With the men away at war, Sweetgrass is one of the few women left to fight for the survival of her tribe. This is her chance to prove her maturity, but is she strong enough to fight the cold, hunger, and disease?
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After a girl she knows from school goes missing and is found dead in the Red River, Feather is shocked when the police write it off as a suicide. Then, it's Feather's best friend, Mia, who vanishes but Mia's mom and abusive stepfather paint Mia as a frequent runaway, so the authorities won't investigate her disappearance either. Everyone knows that Native girls are disappearing and being killed, but no one is connecting the dots.
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Lydia Buckingham is an ice queen. She wasn’t always that way, but after her parents uprooted the family to move to an isolated and rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, she has been forced to adapt this personality in order to survive in rural Saskatchewan. Despite her interest in the local history at Batoche, Lydia finds herself unable to relate to her peers at school or to her surroundings. To top it all off her parents are constantly fighting, drinking, and abandoning Lydia and her younger sister Victoria for days on end. Soon the sisters have had enough, and they decide to set out alone into the brutal Saskatchewan winter.
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In 1903, a mysterious, desperate woman flees alone across the West, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand. Two vengeful brothers and a pack of bloodhounds track her across the wilderness. She is nineteen years old and half mad.
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Torn from her home and delivered to St. Mark’s Residential School for Girls by government decree, young Rose Marie finds herself in an alien universe where nothing of her previous life is tolerated, not even her Blackfoot name. For she has entered into the world of the Sisters of Brotherly Love, an order of nuns dedicated to saving the Indigenous children from damnation. Life under the sharp eye of Mother Grace, the Mother General, becomes an endless series of torments, from daily recitations and obligations to chronic sickness and inedible food. And then there are the beatings.
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Fifteen-year-old Jim Hobbs, alienated from life in Toronto, hitchhikes to the Prairies on a whim, where he finds shelter in an abandoned farmhouse. There, he encounters his neighbours, members of Majestic Farm, a group that abides by an old-fashioned, ultra-conservative set of rules enforced by their ruthless pastor. When Miriam, one of the pastor’s daughters, secretly befriends Jim, they must hide their blossoming love for one another — or face terrifying consequences.
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Hawk, a First Nations teen from northern Alberta, is a star athlete until a serious illness yanks him out of competition and into a fight for his life. Struggling to recover, he comes across a young osprey trapped in a tailings pond, helpless. Rescuing the bird gives Hawk a new purpose in life, if he can survive to see it through.
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Jared's plane has crashed in the Alberta wilderness, and Kyle is first on the scene. When Jared insists on hiking up the highest hill in search of cell phone reception, Kyle hesitates; his Cree grandmother has always forbidden him to go near it. There's no stopping Jared, though, so Kyle reluctantly follows. After a night spent on the hilltop, with no cell service, the teens discover something odd: the plane has disappeared. Nothing in the forest surrounding them seems right. In fact, things seem very wrong. And worst of all, something is hunting them.
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Since her brother's death, eight-year-old Egg Murakami has been living day-to-day on the family ostrich farm near Bittercreek, discovering life to be an ever-perplexing condition. Mama Murakami has curled up inside a bottle, and Papa has exiled himself to the barn with the birds. Big sister Kathy tells stories to Egg so that the world might not seem so awful. The Murakami family is not happy. But in the hands of Tamai Kobayashi, their story becomes a drama of rare insight and virtuosity. Weighing physical, cultural, and emotional isolation against the backdrop of schoolyard battles and adult mysteries, Kobayashi paints a compelling portrait of a feisty and endearing outsider. As Kathy's final year in high school counts down to an uncertain future, the indomitable Egg sits quiet witness to her unravelling family as she tries to find her place in a bewildering world.
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It's 1941, and Canada is two years into World War II. Meanwhile, in rural Manitoba, fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Cote begins a war of her own as she and her brother and sister, all stricken with tuberculosis, are taken by their anguished parents to "chase the cure" at nearby Pembina Hills Sanatorium. While her roommate retains a dogged cheerfulness that is both heroic and irritating, Marie-Claire resists with all of her prideful strength while she fights her own illness and tries to seek privacy where there is none.
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Strange things are happening in Horshoe. Matthew, Robert's seven-year-old brother, has vanished on a walk into town to buy some gum. Robert's mother had asked him to accompany Matthew to Horshoe, but Robert was away--his mind deep in a swashbuckling adventure story set on Mars, not home on his dust-bowl farm in Depression-era Saskatchewan. Matthew never made it to town and Robert knows that it's his fault. That he has to find Matthew. That he has to figure out why the hens are frightened and their eggs full of blood. Why a broken jar he finds in the grass echoes with the sad sound of a little girl's voice. Why, most frighteningly of all, his parents seem lost in a comforting dream, Matthew forgotten, his memory abandoned.
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A young boy comes to face with the inequities of the adult world as he grows up in a small Canadian western town during the Depression.
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Kevin faces polar bears, lost luggage, and being the only youth on a seniors' eco-tour when he wins first prize in a photography contest-a five-day trip to Churchill, Manitoba, to photograph wildlife.
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In the midst of a heaven-rattling summer storm a young stranger blows into a small prairie town. On the run after taking her latest boyfriend's truck, with a pocketful of stolen money and a heart full of pain, seventeen-year-old Noreen Stall seems to invite trouble. And trouble comes soon enough, as Noreen's new mistakes trigger calamities that shake the lives of the residents of Pembina Lake.
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It's World War II. Erich, a young German prisoner of war who dislikes Nazism, and Max, the twelve-year-old son of German immigrants, become friends when Erich is sent to work at a Canadian logging camp near Max's town. But with a saboteur haunting the logging camp and anti-German feeling running high in town, their friendship puts them both in danger.
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Jess, a camp counselor, struggles to find the moral courage to remain loyal to her best friend, Casey, who has been accused of murdering an eight year old girl at summer camp.
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Spanning three decades against the backdrop of the Jewish community in the north end of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Holding My Breath is a poignant coming-of-age tale told from the point of view of Beth Levy, the youngest in a household of two generations of strong Jewish women.
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April 1997: the city of Grand Forks is destroyed, thousands are evacuated, and Owen and Andrew are starting to enjoy themselves as they follow the flood to Winnipeg in this odd, exciting, and cheerfully irresponsible adventure.
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Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages - and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home for his step-father's funeral, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
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Eighteen-year-old Taylor Jane Simon, sheltered most of her life because of an autistic condition, sees new possibilities opening up for her when she goes to spend the summer in Prince Albert National Park where her mother has taken a job working in a pizza restaurant.
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Jess is an angry loner trying to escape a troubled past, Sara Jean is a dutiful granddaughter trying to escape a strait-jacketed future. They come together over a 250-hour community service sentence to clean out a garage full of secrets that has implications for them both.
Forging the Prairie West by 
Saskatchewan by 
Louis Riel : a comic-strip biography by 
Harm's Way : Disasters in Western Canada by 
Alberta (Britannica School article)
Saskatchewan (Britannica School article)
Manitoba (Britannica School article)
History of Settlement in the Canadian Prairies (Canadian Encyclopedia article)
Plains Indigenous Peoples in Canada (Canadian Encyclopedia article)