Morningstar: A Warrior's Spirit

Trade Paperback - NEW

LOCAL AUTHOR!

Memoir - Finalist, First People's Publishing,

2006 Saskatchewan Book Awards

Morningstar Mercredi wrote her memoir as a form of activism to speak to the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered women in Canada. Morningstar’s story, like thousands of First People, Metis and Innu people, describes how systemic colonialism and apartheid affected her, as a mother she became determined to come to terms with her personal struggles only to realize how severely the historical influences impacted her family.

Morningstar takes the reader through her survival and aftermath of post trauma as a first generation person who was not subjugated to an ‘Indian’ Industrial/Residential Institution, and though the institutions were mandated to ‘beat the Indian out’ of hundreds of thousands of children, Morningstar is adamant her ‘warrior spirit’ was not broken. She attributes this to her maternal lineage, her ‘grannies’ as well as the love of her ‘grandfathers’.

Morningstar understood, although she was not legally incarcerated in an, ‘Indian’ Residential’ institution, she was nonetheless traumatized by generational impact. Recounting sexual abuse, family violence, poverty, racism, and overcoming her own alcoholism, her inherent strength to survive a myriad of historical atrocities is notable. Historical atrocities, which to date, are affirmed as similar experiences within generations of First Peoples, Metis, and Innu peoples throughout Canada, documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Report two decades after her memoir was published in 2006.