N'in D'la Owey Innklan: Mi'kmaq Sojourns in England

This is a historical novel, beginning in 1497 and taking us, in a series of vignettes, through five centuries of interconnections between the Mi'kmaq people of Atlantic Canada and London. Each character begins their story in different regions of the Mi'kmaq world of the North American Atlantic Coast; they end up in various regions of London, ranging from the 16th-century Austin Friars monastery to 20th-century Limehouse. The novel encompasses descriptive scenes of London in different eras, alternately addressing the eroticism of lovers, the wide-ranging lives of whalers and sailors, the horrors of nursing during World War I and the overwrought world of heroin users in late 1970s' East London, interspersed with occasional short pages of intellectual commentary. Ultimately, it is a labour of love for homelands lost.

Bonita Lawrence, of both Mi'kmaw and English background, is a professor in Indigenous Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of two academic books, "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-Race Urban Native People and Indigenous Nationhood and Fractured Homeland: Federal Recognition and Algonquin Identity in Ontario. This is her first novel. She lives in Eastern Ontario on 100 acres of forested land with a lake that is gradually being reduced to a beaver swamp, massive gardens, family members, two dogs, and a cat.