Born in Vancouver, Lee Maracle grew up on the North Shore. She is an award-winning poet, novelist, storyteller, and “knowledge keeper” of the Stó:lō Nation. Some of her critically acclaimed books include Sundogs, Daughters Are Forever, Ravensong, Celia’s Song, Sojourner’s Truth and Other Stories, First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style, Bent Box, Talking to the Diaspora, Will’s Garden, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel and I Am Woman. Currently she is an instructor and student mentor in the Aboriginal Studies Program at the University of Toronto, as well as the Traditional Teacher for First Nations’ House at Toronto’s Centre for Indigenous Theatre. Maracle is the 2016 recipient of Wordfest’s Anne Green Award, given annually to an artist whose work explores and challenges the traditional form of story and narrative.

Memory Serves

Memory Serves gathers together the oratories that award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the Stó:lō in particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle shares her knowledge of Stó:lō history, memory, philosophy, law, spirituality, feminism and the colonial condition of her people.

Celia’s Song

Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nu:Chahlnuth territory. Celia is a seer who – despite being convinced she’s a little “off” – must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews. While mink is visiting, a double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor. The occurrence signals the unfolding of an ordeal that pulls Celia out of her reveries and into the tragedy of her cousin’s granddaughter. Each one of Celia’s family becomes involved in creating a greater solution than merely attending to her cousin’s granddaughter. Celia’s Song relates one Nu:Chahlnuth family’s harrowing experiences over several generations, after the brutality, interference, and neglect resulting from contact with Europeans.