Wisdom from Indigenous authors to guide you into the new year
CBC
Unreserved spoke to many acclaimed Indigenous authors in 2025. Each shared a few lessons that help them navigate life’s challenges and joys.
From memoir to poetry, here are some of Unreserved’s favourite books of 2025, and their authors’ wisdom to help prepare you for 2026.
In her latest collection of poetry, procession, Métis writer katherena vermette ponders her role as a future ancestor. She honours her own ancestors and considers what she can leave for those who come after her.
For vermette, being a good ancestor means caring for the next generation through small acts of kindness.
“Caring for our children or those people who come behind us, those people who we care for — I think that’s the greatest action of the revolution,” vermette told Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild.
“I think that in itself will change the world, however slowly.”
Swampy Cree writer David A. Robertson lives with debilitating anxiety and panic attacks that he nicknames his “little monsters.” In All the Little Monsters, Robertson writes about the skills and practices he’s built that help him live alongside them. One skill he’s still working on is showing himself more kindness.
“Sometimes it’s OK to go out and get yourself a little treat,” Robertson told Deerchild in April. Robertson treats himself to comic books.
But self-compassion has its limits when mental health is still difficult to talk about, says Robertson.
“I want mental health to be something that we accept, and because we accept it, we’re able to address the epidemic in ways that are going to be effective longterm.”
As the title suggests, Quill Christie-Peters’ debut explores what it means to be whole.
“Wholeness to me is our ability to have access to our expansive relationality as Indigenous peoples — so feeling and having access to our relationships with our ancestors, our homelands, our communities,” she said. “It’s really about that deeper sense of embodiment and presence within the body.”
While the impacts of colonization and cultural genocide have interrupted this wholeness, Christie Peters says she reconnects with it through parenting, making art, and activism.
“My wholeness I think is always fleeting. It’s like a dance. And I think until we live in a less violent world, it will always be a dance.”
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Abel Charles throws on a pair of headphones and pulls his radio studio microphone closer to his face.
A new study by biologists at the University of Victoria has revealed why the simple back-and-forth motion of drift logs on B.C. beaches has destroyed critical ecosystems that keep the ocean healthy.
According to Niagara native, Lindsay Davies, the complaint that Ontario is a boring province when it comes to outdoor adventures is just plain wrong.
As of Jan. 1, most job postings in Ontario need to include salary figures, carbon monoxide alarms need to be on every level of a home and municipalities are now out of the recycling business.