Devil in Deerskins
Anahareo (1906-1985) was a Mohawk writer, environmentalist, and activist. She was also the wife of Grey Owl, aka Archie Belaney, the internationally celebrated writer and speaker who claimed to be of Scottish and Apache descent, but whose true ancestry as a white Englishman only became known after his death.
Devil in Deerskins is Anahareo’s autobi …
Magic Weapons
The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking rea …
Piecing the Puzzle
In 1979, Dr. Allan Ronald, a specialist in infectious diseases from Canada, and Dr. Herbert Nsanze, head of medical microbiology at University of Nairobi, met through the World Health Organization. Ronald had just completed a successful project that cured a chancroid (genital ulcer) epidemic in Winnipeg and Nsanze asked him to come to Kenya to help …
We Are Coming Home
In 1990, Gerald Conaty was hired as senior curator of ethnology at the Glenbow Museum, with the particular mandate of improving the museum’s relationship with Aboriginal communities. That same year, the Glenbow had taken its first tentative steps toward repatriation by returning sacred objects to First Nations’ peoples. These efforts drew harsh …
As Long As This Land Shall Last
As Long As This Land Shall Last is a thorough document of Treaty 8 (1899-1900) and Treaty 11 (1921) between the Canadian Government and the Indigenous Peoples of Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. These treaties promised that the Indigenous Peoples who inhabited these places could live and hunt in freedom on their ancestral lands "as …
A Metaphoric Mind
Dr. Joseph Couture (1930–2007), known affectionately as "Dr. Joe," stood at the centre of some of the greatest political, social, and intellectual struggles of Aboriginal peoples in contemporary Canada. A profound thinker and writer, as well as a gifted orator, he easily walked two paths, as a respected Elder and traditional healer and as an educ …
Elder Brother and the Law of the People
In the pre-reserve era, Aboriginal bands in the northern plains were relatively small multicultural communities that actively maintained fluid and inclusive membership through traditional kinship practices. These practices were governed by the Law of the People as described in the traditional stories of Wîsashkêcâhk, or Elder Brother, that outli …
Freshwater Fishes of Manitoba
Manitoba's ninety-three species of fish give the province the third most diverse fish population in Canada. The provinceís variety of geological features, with its major lakes, rivers, tributaries, and watersheds, is due in large part to its history as the basin for Glacial Lake Agassiz. This, combined with its access to the waters of Hudson Bay a …
Shy
"We're not exactly scene-stealers, so you don't hear much from us shy folk-and that's usually how we like it." -Elizabeth Zotova, "My Dear X" The pages of this anthology are filled with personal essays and poems of thoughtful musings, raw memories, and humorous self-examinations by authors and poets who have been labelled by the world-teachers, par …
Whose Man in Havana?
In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of Pres …
Métis in Canada
These twelve essays constitute a groundbreaking volume of new work prepared by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, constitutional law, political science, and sociology, who identify the many facets of what it means to be Métis in Canada today. After the Powley decision in 2003, Métis peoples were no longer conceptually limite …
Jemmy Jock Bird
Jemmy Jock Bird, the son of a Cree woman and an English trader employed by the Hudson's Bay Company, has become part of the mythology of the mountain man era. In this creative non-fiction account, Jackson meticulously reconstructs the life of this intriguing individual who was caught between opposing sides of a dual Métis heritage.
Closely identifi …
A Historical and Legal Study of Sovereignty in the Canadian North
Gordon W. Smith, PhD, dedicated much of his life to researching Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic. A historian by training, his 1952 dissertation from Columbia University on “The Historical and Legal Background of Canada’s Arctic Claims” remains a foundational work on the topic, as does his 1966 chapter “Sovereignty in the North: The Can …
An Inside Look at External Affairs During the Trudeau Years
Between these covers, you will read about the life of an individual—Mark MacGuigan—who dedicated his life to bettering Canada. From his fascination with the law to his interest in politics and international affairs, Mark made a lasting impact on virtually every area to which he turned his efforts . . . from the forward by Paul Martin
Mark MacGu …
Seeing Red
The first book to examine the role of Canada’s newspapers in perpetuating the myth of Native inferiority. Seeing Red is a groundbreaking study of how Canadian English-language newspapers have portrayed Aboriginal peoples from 1869 to the present day. It assesses a wide range of publications on topics that include the sale of Rupert’s Land, the …
Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures
In the past decade, Jane Ash Poitras, an Indigenous woman from northern Alberta, has emerged as one of the most important Canadian artists of her generation. Raised by a German widow who powdered her dark skin and tried to make her straight hair curl, Poitras did not begin to fully explore her Indigenous roots until adulthood. Seeking out her exten …
Dark Storm Moving West
The fur trade was the impetus for much of the exploration and discovery of North America. Like rolling storm clouds, the expanding enterprise of the fur trade moved relentlessly west to explore the furthest reaches of the continent. From Hudson Bay, Lake Superior, and the Mississippi River, European and American explorers and traders followed a web …
Restoring the Balance
First Nations peoples believe the eagle flies with a female wing and a male wing, showing the importance of balance between the feminine and the masculine in all aspects of individual and community experiences. Centuries of colonization, however, have devalued the traditional roles of First Nations women, causing a great gender imbalance that limit …
Frederick Baraga's Short History of the North American Indians
Originally published in 1837 in Europe in German, French, and Slovenian editions, and appearing here in English for the first time, Frederic Baraga's Short History of the North American Indians is the personal, first–hand account of a Catholic missionary to the Great Lakes area of North America.
When Frederic Baraga, a young Roman Catholic Pries …
Sanaaq
Sanaaq is an intimate story of an Inuit family negotiating the changes brought into their community by the coming of the qallunaat, the white people, in the mid-nineteenth century.
Composed in 48 episodes, it recounts the daily life of Sanaaq, a strong and outspoken young widow, her daughter Qumaq, and their small semi-nomadic community in northern …
The Crimes of Hector Tomas
Enrique Tomás lives a quiet life with a large, loving family in an unnamed South American country. But Enrique has secrets. When his second eldest son, Hector, and Hector’s beloved friend Nadia uncover one of Enrique’s secrets, the course of Hector's life is irrevocably altered. Exiled by his parents to the isolated countryside, Hector is accu …
Coded Territories
This collection of essays provides a historical and contemporary context for Indigenous new media arts practice in Canada. The writers are established artists, scholars, and curators who cover thematic concepts and underlying approaches to new media from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Through discourse and narrative analysis, the writers disc …
Canadian Indian Cowboys in Australia
The big new thrill at this year's Royal Show will be the Chuck Wagon Races, with Red Indians in full war-paint going helter-skelter around the arena, chuck wagons swaying and jostling perilously, horse teams urged with wild whooping into a frenzy of speed.
—Newspaper advertisement, Sydney, Australia, March 1939.
In 1939, a troupe of eight rodeo …
Blackfoot Ways of Knowing
Blackfoot Ways of Knowing is a journey into the heart and soul of Blackfoot culture. As a scholar and researcher, Betty Bastien places Blackfoot tradition within a historical context of precarious survival amid colonial displacement and cultural genocide. In sharing her personal story of reclaimed identity, Bastien offers a gateway into traditional …
West End Murders
When a series of murders threatens the lives of an entire community in Vancouver, RCMP Corporal Paul Blakemore and Inspector Coswell team up once again to solve the case. What begins as an array of hate crimes suddenly culminates into a conspiracy against an American politician, and the lines between Canada and the United States become blurred as s …
Weasel Tail
Peigan elders Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged to a generation still bright with the traditional knowledge and deep memories of their grandparents. They lived under a paternalistic government system that denied them their language, culture, and religion. They reclaimed their heritage and shared it with the larger community receiving honours for …
The Seven Oaks Reader
Finalist for the Wildrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards!
The long rivalry between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company for control of the fur trade in Canada's northwest came to an explosive climax on June 19th, 1816, at the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. Armed buffalo hunters – Indigenous allies …
Those Who Know
"The elders in Those Who Know have devoted their lives to preserving the wisdom and spirituality of their ancestors. Despite insult and oppression, they have maintained sometimes forbidden practices for the betterment of not just their people, but all humankind.
First published in 1991, Dianne Meili’s book remains an essential portrait of men and …
First Nations Gaming in Canada
While games of chance have been part of the Aboriginal cultural landscape since before European contact, large-scale commercial gaming facilities within First Nations communities are a relatively new phenomenon in Canada. First Nations Gaming in Canada is the first multidisciplinary study of the role of gaming in indigenous communities north of the …
The Frog Lake Reader
Nonfiction author Myrna Kostash merges the past and the present in The Frog Lake Reader, which offers a multi-layered perspective on the tragic events surrounding the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. By bringing together eyewitness accounts and journal excerpts, memoirs and contemporary fiction, and excerpts from interivews with historians, Kostash prov …
The Ojibwa of Western Canada 1780-1870
Among the most dynamic Aboriginal peoples in western Canada today are the Ojibwa, who have played an especially vital role in the development of an Aboriginal political voice at both levels of government. Yet, they are relative newcomers to the region, occupying the parkland and prairies only since the end of the 18th century. This work traces the …
Travelling Knowledges
In the context of de/colonization, the boundary between an Aboriginal text and the analysis by a non-Aboriginal outsider poses particular challenges often constructed as unbridgeable. Eigenbrod argues that politically correct silence is not the answer but instead does a disservice to the literature that, like all literature, depends on being read, …
Life Among the Qallunaat
Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an …
Mountain Masculinity
In 1906, Nello Vernon-Wood (1882–1978) reinvented himself as Tex Wood, Banff hunting guide and writer of “yarns of the wilderness by a competent outdoorsman.” His homespun stories of a vanishing era, in such periodicals as The Sportsman, Hunting and Fishing, and the Canadian Alpine Journal, have much to tell us about the west as envisioned by …
One Step Over the Line
This unfamiliar territory is the borderlands of women’s histories traversing the American and Canadian Wests. Specialists in women’s history, settler societies, colonialism, storytelling, education, and native and borderlands studies introduced by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus pool their distinct contributions toward forging the very fir …
The Water Lily Pond
This evocative narrative draws us into the inner life of a young Chinese peasant girl, May-ping, and her first glimmerings of youthful love and idealism under the Maoist regime in China. As she grows into a mature woman, she becomes increasingly aware of the strife around her.
An intelligent girl born into a Poor-Class family in a small village in …
Thanks for Listening
A treasure chest of exceptional stories by one of Canadas classic authorsall now available in one volume.
Ernest Buckler, best known as the author of the Canadian classic, The Mountain and the Valley, never achieved the lasting fame he deserved. His first story was published in Esquire, a significant American literary magazine known for publishing …
He Was Some Kind of a Man
He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century’s most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red R …
Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase
In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, twenty-five contributors investigate how dystopian fiction reflects twenty-first century reality, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility.
Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy …
Where No Doctor Has Gone Before
Tens of thousands of people around the world die each day from causes that could have been prevented with access to affordable health care resources. In an era of unprecedented global inequity, Cuba, a small, low-income country, is making a difference by providing affordable health care to millions of marginalized people.
Cuba has developed a world …
Cross-Currents
Most activities in our lives involve electricity. Yet, how often do we recall that even the simple act of turning on a light is supported by a long history of debates over group vs. individual rights, environmental impact, political agendas and technological innovations?
Using the image of cross-currents as the organizing metaphor, this book detail …
Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective
From sentimental stories about polio to the latest cherub in hospital commercials, sick children tug at the public’s heartstrings. However sick children have not always had adequate medical care or protection. The essays in Children’s Issues in Historical Perspective investigate the identification, prevention, and treatment of childhood disease …
Slanting I, Imagining We
The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment—from cultural appro …
Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities
Since the 1970s, Aboriginal people have been more likely to live in Canadian cities than on reserves or in rural areas. Aboriginal rural-to-urban migration and the development of urban Aboriginal communities represent one of the most significant shifts in the histories and cultures of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The essays in Aboriginal Peoples i …
From the Iron House
In From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing, Deena Rymhs identifies continuities between the residential school and the prison, offering ways of reading “the carceral”—that is, the different ways that incarceration is constituted and articulated in contemporary Aboriginal literature. Addressing the work of writers like Tomso …
Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought
Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought has intrigued readers from feminist-philosopher J.S. Mill (who used it in his The Subjection of Women) to the latest generation of women’s activists. Although selections from this long work have been published, Lynn McDonald is the first editor to work through the numerous surviving drafts of Night …
Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity
Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity discusses the diverse cultural destinies of early Christianity, early Judaism, and other ancient religious groups as a question of social rivalry.
The book is divided into three main sections. The first section debates the degree to which the category of rivalry adequately n …
Literary Land Claims
Literature not only represents Canada as “our home and native land” but has been used as evidence of the civilization needed to claim and rule that land. Indigenous people have long been represented as roaming “savages” without land title and without literature. Literary Land Claims: From Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat analyzes works produ …
From Logos to Christos
From Logos to Christos is a collection of essays in Christology written by friends and colleagues in memory of Joanne McWilliam. McWilliam was a pioneer woman in the academic study of theology, specializing in Patristic studies and internationally recognized for her work on Augustine. For countless students she was a teacher, a mentor, an inspirati …