Tracey Lindberg is a citizen of As’in’i’wa’chi Ni’yaw Nation Rocky Mountain Cree and hails from the Kelly Lake Cree Nation community. She is an award-winning academic writer and teaches Indigenous studies and law at two Canadian universities. She is the first Aboriginal woman in Canada to receive a graduate law degree from Harvard University. She sings the blues loudly, talks quietly and is next in a long line of argumentative Cree women. Lindberg received the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2007 for her dissertation on Indigenous Legal Theory. Birdie is her first novel, and she was named as one of CBC Books’ 12 Writers to Watch in 2015.

Birdie

Bernice Meetoos is a big, beautiful Cree woman with a dark secret in her past. Bernice has left her home in Alberta to travel to Gibsons, B.C. She is on a vision quest, looking for family, for home, for understanding. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Jesse from The Beachcombers because he is a “working, healthy Indian man.” Bernice heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers, but they are not the ones she expected. Informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions, Birdie is a darkly comic and moving novel about the universal experience of recovering from tragedy