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"Moving the museum : indigenous & Canadian Art at the AGO documents the reopening of the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art with a renewed focus on the AGO's Indigenous art collection. The volume reflects the nation to nation treaty relationship that is the foundation of Canada, asking questions, discovering truths, and leading conversations that address the weight of history. Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 reproductions, Indigenous & Canadian Art at the AGO features the work of First Nations artists--including Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, and Kent Monkman--along with work by Inuit artists like Shuvinai Ashoona and Annie Pootoogook. Canadian artists include Lawren Harris, Kazuo Nakamura, Joyce Wieland, and many others. Drawing from stories about our origins and identities, the featured artists and essayists invite readers to engage with issues of land, water, transformation, and sovereignty and to contemplate the historic representation of Indigenous and Canadian art in museums. Contains a list of works at the back."--

"Members of Eli Baxter's generation are the last of the hunting and gathering societies living on Turtle Island. They are also among the last fluent speakers of the Anishinaabay language known as Anishinaabaymowin. Aki-wayn-zih is a story about the land and its spiritual relationship with the Anishinaabayg, from the beginning of their life on Miss-koh-tay-sih Minis (Turtle Island) to the present day. Baxter writes about Anishinaabay life before European contact, his childhood memories of trapping, hunting, and fishing with his family on traditional lands in Treaty 9 territory, and his personal experience surviving the residential school system. Examining how Anishinaabay Kih-kayn-daa-soh-win (knowledge) is an elemental concept embedded in the Anishinaabay language, Aki-wayn-zih explores history, science, math, education, philosophy, law, and spiritual teachings, outlining the cultural significance of language to Anishinaabay identity. Recounting traditional Ojibway legends in their original language, fables in which moral virtues double as survival techniques, and detailed guidelines for expertly trapping or ensnaring animals, Baxter reveals how the residential school system shaped him as an individual, transformed his family, and forever disrupted his reserve community and those like it. Through spiritual teachings, historical accounts, and autobiographical anecdotes, Aki-wayn-zih offers a new form of storytelling from the Anishinaabay point of view."--

"The History of the 'Slave of Christ' : From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr offers the first critical editions and English translations of the two Syriac recensions of this fascinating text, which narrates the story of a young Jewish child, Asher, who after converting to Christianity and taking the name ʻAbda da-Miḥa ('slave of Christ') is martyred by his father Levi in a scene reminiscent of Abraham's offering of Isaac in Genesis 22. In a detailed introduction, the authors argue that the text is a fictional story composed during the early Islamic period (ca. 650-850) probably in Shigar (modern Sinjār). Building upon methodology from the study of Western Christian and Jewish texts, they further contend that the story's author constructs an imagined Jew based on the Hebrew Bible, thereby challenging the way that previous scholars have used this text as straightforward evidence for historical interactions between Jews and Christians in Babylonia at this time. This ultimately allows the authors to reevaluate the purpose of the text and to situate it in its Late Antique Babylonian context"--