Tracking the Caribou Queen

by Margaret Macpherson

Memoir of a Settler Girlhood

In this challenging memoir about her formative years in Yellowknife in the ’60s and ’70s, author Margaret Macpherson lays bare her own white privilege, her multitude of unexamined microaggressions, and how her childhood was shaped by the colonialism and systemic racism that continues today. Macpherson’s father, first a principal and later a federal government administrator, oversaw education in the NWT, including the high school Margaret attended with its attached hostel: a residential facility mostly housing Indigenous children. Ringing with damning and painful truths, this bittersweet telling invites white readers to examine their own personal histories in order to begin to right relations with the Indigenous Peoples on whose land they live. Tracking the Caribou Queen is beautifully crafted to a purpose: poetic language and narrative threads dissect the trope that persisted through her girlhood, that of the Caribou Queen, a woman who seemed to embody extreme and contradictory stereotypes of Indigeneity. Here, Macpherson is not striving for a tidy ideal of “reconciliation”; what she is working towards is much messier, more complex and ambivalent and, ultimately, more equitable.

Trade Paperback / Oct. 15, 2022 ISBN 10: 1-77439-061-2

ISBN 13: 978-1-77439-061-0

BISAC 1: BIO026000 BISAC 2: BIO028000 BISAC 3: BIO019000 236 pp / 6” x 9” / $24.95 cdn $19.95 usd

“This is a brave, unsparing story by a gifted writer with her eyes wide open to Canada’s hypocrisies. Can we find the courage to look at our own hometowns with Margaret Macpherson’s unflinching gaze? She insists we try.

~ Linda Goyette of Disinherited Generations

About The Author

Margaret Macpherson has recently taken up residence on the shore of the Ottawa River on the southern border of Northern Ontario or the northern border of Southern Ontario, depending whom she speaks. She lives in Deep River, Ontario, near the Algonquin Nation of Pikwakanagan and across the river from the wilds of Quebec.

ADDITIONAL SALES POINTS

• Author has written five previous books, including nonfiction, novels, and a short story collection. • Book will appeal to readers of childhood memoirs and to settlers looking to reflect on their own personal culpabiliity towards Indigenous Peoples.

MARKETING PLAN

• International press release and ARC mailout. • Announcement of book’s release by email newsletter and on the NeWest Press Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. • Podcast/reading interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio. • Press releases and review mailouts to various CBC outlets across the nation, both radio and television. • Submit to all eligible awards. • Ads in Brick, Glass Buffalo, Prairie Books NOW, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Read Alberta Books (Alberta Views), subTerrain, and the ULS Super Forthcoming Catalogue.

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• Online Zoom launch, and eventual in-person launches in Toronto.

MARKETS

• National trade: childhood memoir / settler memoir • US and UK trade: childhood memoir / settler memoir • Northwest Territories / Canada

COMPARISON TITLES

• The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations by Shirley Hager and Mawopiyane (978-1-487545-88-8, U of T Press, 2022) • Teaching at the Top of the World by Odette Barr (978-1-989725-03-0, Pottersfield Press, 2020) • Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller (978-0-375758-99-7, Random House, 2003)