Part coming-of-age novel, part searing examination of a community finding itself, Small Ceremonies is a tantalizing and heartbreaking debut.

“I fear for our friendship, for the day it will end, wondering when that day will be . . .”

Tomahawk Shields (a.k.a. Tommy) and Clinton Whiteway are on the cusp of adulthood, imagining a future rife with possibility and greatness. The two friends play for their high school’s poor-performing hockey team, the Tigers, who learn at the start of the new season that the league wants them out. Their annual goal is now more important than ever: to win their first game in years and break the curse.

As we follow these two Indigenous boys over the course of a year, we are given a panoptic view of Tommy and Clinton’s Winnipeg, where a university student with grand ambitions chooses to bottle her anger when confronted with numerous micro- (and not so micro-) aggressions; an ex-convict must choose between protecting or exploiting his younger brother as he’s dragged deeper into the city’s criminal underbelly; a lonely rink attendant is haunted by the memory of a past lover and contemplates rekindling this old flame; and an aspiring journalist does everything she can to uncover why the league is threatening to remove the Tigers. These are a sampling of the chorus of voices that depicts a community filled with individuals searching for purpose, leading them all to one fateful and tragic night.

Ferociously piercing the heart of an Indigenous city, Kyle Edwards's sparkling debut is a heartbreaking yet humour-flecked portrayal of navigating identity and place, trauma and recovery, and growing up in a land that doesn't love you.

Kyle Edwards' profile page

KYLE EDWARDS is an award-winning Anishinaabe journalist and writer from the Lake Manitoba First Nation and a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation. A graduate of Ryerson University, he has worked as a journalist for Native News Online, ProPublica, and Maclean’s, and has been a Nieman Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has won two National Magazine Awards in Canada for his reporting and was named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists. Kyle’s writing and reporting has appeared in BBC News World, Nieman Reports, BuzzFeed, CBC, Toronto Star, Global News, Sportsnet, Winnipeg Free Press, This Magazine, Advocate Magazine, U of T Magazine, and the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada. He is a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature.

“The geographical and familial landscape of the ironically named Whiteway clan yields a subtle and fascinating portrait of growing up Native in Manitoba. The understatement underscores the intensity and contradictions of outgrowing your home and self. This is a truly fine novel.”
—Percival Everett, author of James