Carefully curated

A new series of books from publisher McClelland & Stewart that contemplates life in Canada coincides with the 10th anniversary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

Published on July 15, Kanata Classics’ first six titles, which are all previously released works of fiction and non-fiction, feature writing by a range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadian authors and feature new packaging and introductions.

The initiative was spearheaded by publisher Stephanie Sinclair, who joined McClelland & Stewart (which is owned by Penguin Random House) in 2022. “We started to talk about it within six months of my starting … the first conversations were enthusiastic,” she says. “It felt really important to get it done in 2025 to honour the 10th anniversary of the TRC.”

Sinclair worked with Robert Wheaton, Penguin Random House Canada’s chief strategy and operations officer, to navigate the bureaucratic details and create an advisory board (which includes McNally Robinson Booksellers co-owner Chris Hall and Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair). “I could ask them the big questions — not about title selections, but about the framing of the series,” she says. “It felt really helpful to have this brain trust that I could go to for advice.”

For Stephanie Sinclair, who identifies as Cree, Ojibwa, and German/Jewish, the first six books — three by Indigenous writers and the other three by non-Indigenous authors — speak to the experience of Canadian life. “One of the things that was really important to me, as an urban Indigenous person who didn’t grow up in ceremony or in community, was that the books speak to all of our relationship with land, and how differently that can be experienced,” she says. “That’s one of the threads through all the books. It’s something that is so often overlooked, and that is really, deeply important to our survival on multiple levels.”

With the titles selected, Sinclair then turned to finding writers to pen introductions to each of the books (save Maria Campbell’s memoir Halfbreed — Campbell wrote her own introduction). “I had a list of ideal people — I wrote to them, and everyone very enthusiastically and quickly said yes. It was beautiful … it just came together incredibly seamlessly,” she says. (Winnipeg’s David A. Robertson wrote the introduction to Richard Wagamese’s novel Medicine Walk.)

Sinclair then enlisted book designer Kelly Hill to create the look and feel of the Kanata Classics series. “Kelly really understood my vision for it, and has such an incredibly beautiful esthetic and brought such thoughtful care to all of the choices,” Sinclair says.

One of Sinclair’s first choices for the Kanata Classics series was Nisga’a author Jordan Abel’s Nishga. Originally published in 2021 by McClelland & Stewart, Nishga sees the Edmonton-based author grappling with the legacy of intergenerational trauma through fragments of memoir, transcriptions of talks as well as visual art and photography.

“I have a difficult relationship with this book — it’s about intergenerational trauma and urban indigeneity and the afterlife of residential schools,” Abel says.” When I go to readings and perform parts of the book, there are only four or five pages that I can really even read from.”

For Abel, the inclusion of Nishga in the Kanata Classics series was humbling. “When I wrote Nishga, I had no real understanding of where it would go, or who would pick it up, or if anyone would pick it up, really,” he says. “It’s really an incredible honour for Nishga to be included alongside what I think are some of the best, most canonical texts in Canadian literature and also Indigenous literature,” he adds, calling Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed “maybe the most important book that I’ve ever read.”

Like Sinclair, Abel sees the books existing in conversation with each other as well as with Canadian readers about the experience of life in Canada. “The books are all very different — they speak to really specific experiences within this nation … even the ones that resist that category of nation and Canadian nationalism,” he says. “They attempt to shine a light on certain kinds of experiences that we don’t always talk about, or that we don’t talk about enough. I think these are underrepresented kinds of experiences of ‘Canadian-ness.’”

Sinclair hopes the Kanata Classics series is able to continue stimulating conversation and reflections by readers on life in Canada. “I feel like the scope of how Canadians identify themselves has only gotten smaller over many years,” she says. “Part of my aim with the series is, of course, to advocate for Indigenous storytelling, which has not been welcomed into the Canadian ‘canon.’ But I also want to make sure that books like (Vietnamese-Canadian author Kim Thúy’s) Ru are there too, because they all speak to an equally important human experience.”

ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca