By Lindsay Sproule
This month’s reading challenge invites reflection on a topic that touches everyone. At some point, each of us will experience a mental health challenge ourselves or support someone who is navigating one. By reading Indigenous perspectives on mental health, we are invited to better understand experiences that may differ from our own—experiences shaped by culture, history, and community.
Indigenous views often understand wellness as more than an individual experience. Through an Indigenous lens, the body and mind are deeply connected to ancestors, lands, spirits, and animals. Healing is often guided by relationships, ceremony, land, and traditional knowledge. We are reminded that mental health journeys and healing often happen with others, not just within ourselves.
These stories also help readers better understand the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism and intergenerational trauma, while challenging the assumption that healing follows a straight or predictable path. Indigenous authors show us that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to wellness and that healing can be nonlinear, personal, and closely tied to identity and belonging.
Indigenous stories invite us to listen closely to what others are experiencing around us. They shine a light on how people cope, survive, and find hope—even in difficult circumstances—while reminding us that family and community are often sources of strength and refuge. As we take on this month’s challenge, we are encouraged not only to read, but to listen, reflect, and deepen our understanding of lives and experiences beyond our own.
1) All the Little Monsters by David A. Robertson (HarperCollins Publishers)
From the outside, David A. Robertson looks as if he has it all together—a loving family, a successful career as an author, and a platform to promote Indigenous perspectives, cultures and concerns. But what we see on the outside rarely reveals what is happening inside. Robertson lives with “little monsters”: chronic, debilitating health anxiety and panic attacks accompanied, at times, by depression. During the worst periods, he finds getting out of bed to walk down the hall an insurmountable task. During the better times, he wrestles with the compulsion to scan his body for that sure sign of a dire health crisis.
In All the Little Monsters, Robertson reveals what it’s like to live inside his mind and his body and describes the toll his mental health challenges have taken on him and his family, and how he has learned to put one foot in front of the other as well as to get back up when he stumbles. He also writes about the tools that have helped him carry on, including community, therapy, medication and the simple question he asks himself on repeat: what if everything will be okay?
In candidly sharing his personal story and showing that he can be well even if he can’t be “cured,” Robertson hopes to help others on their own mental health journeys.
2) On Wholeness by Quill Christie-Peters (House of Anansi Press)
Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility, Anishinaabe visual artist Quill Christie-Peters explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness—despite pain and displacement—is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.
In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father’s survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabe lens, the body is more than just flesh—it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.
This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism—through the body itself. On Wholeness takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond.
3) An Anthology of Monsters by Cherie Dimaline (University of Alberta Press)
An Anthology of Monsters by Cherie Dimaline, award-winning author of The Marrow Thieves, is the tale of an intricate dance with life-long anxiety. It is about how the stories we tell ourselves can help reshape the ways in which we think, cope, and ultimately survive. Using examples from her books, from her mère, and from her own late night worry sessions, Dimaline choreographs a deeply personal narrative about all the ways in which we tell stories. She reveals how to collect and curate our stories, how they elicit difficult and beautiful conversations, and how family and community is a place of refuge and strength.
4) Pitiful by Brandi Bird (House of Anansi Press)
Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as “sovereignty” itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.
The FOLD Admin