Acts of Courage
She had been running, stumbling, walking for sixteen hours. It seemed that every muscle was screaming in pain. She did not even stop to check the new wound. When she reached the top of the hill, she stopped abruptly, trembling at an unexpected sight.
Clusters of tents and groups of men around campfires were silhouetted against the sky.
In Acts of Cou …
Hamatsa
The first book-length study of whether cannibalism existed on the Pacific Northwest coast. McDowell shows how a "cannibal complex" among Westerners coloured many early accounts of "man-eating," and how this perception obscured the importance of ritual cannibalism in the secret Hamatsa ceremony—a crucial feature of Native spirituality.
…Beyond Bullets
Award-winning photographer Rafal Gerszak spent a year embedded with the American military in Afghanistan, where he used his camera to document everyday life in the war-torn country. While there, he developed a deep affection for the land and its people, and he later returned on his own. Despite the dangers around him, he continued taking photos, ex …
Any Day Now
A movement in the sonata form traditionally comprises thee sections -- exposition, development and recapitulation -- which explore two themes according to set key relationships. In the 1920s dancer/choreographer Martha Graham and her musical collaborator Louis Horst developed a modern dance structure based on the sonata form and the inevitable chan …
Flicker Tree, The
How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes’ new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes com …
Freedom Bound
In this, the final instalment of Jean Rae Baxter's best-selling young adult trilogy, eighteen-year-old Charlotte sails from Canada to Charleston in the beleaguered Thirteen Colonies to join her new husband Nick. During these final months of the American Revolution, she must muster all her wit and courage when she has to rescue Nick from being tortu …
The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah
First-hand accounts of Indigenous people's encounters with colonialism are rare. A daily diary that extends over fifty years is unparalleled. Based on a transcription of Arthur Wellington Clah's diaries, this book offers a riveting account of a Tsimshian man who moved in both colonial and Aboriginal worlds. From his birth in 1831 to his death in 19 …
First Nations, Museums, Narrations
When the Franklin Motor Expedition set out across the Canadian Prairies to collect First Nations artifacts, brutal assimilation policies threatened to decimate these cultures and extensive programs of ethnographic salvage were in place. Despite having only three members, the expedition amassed the largest single collection of Prairie heritage items …
Visitors Who Never Left
These legends, translated by Chief Kenneth Harris, tell of the origin of the Native people who live in the region between the Skeena and Nass rivers of British Columbia. Other stories tell of occurrences particularly significant in the 'history' of the people -- the origins of the 'Killer Whale' and 'Thunderbird Twtjea-adku,' and the revenge of 'Me …
The God of Gods: A Canadian Play
Carroll Aikins’s play The God of Gods (1919) has been out of print since its first and only edition in 1927. This critical edition not only revives the work for readers and scholars alike, it also provides historical context for Aikins’s often overlooked contributions to theatre in the 1920s and presents research on the different staging techni …
Hugh Garner's Best Stories
Hugh Garner’s Best Stories received the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1963. The collection consists of twenty-four stories composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and reflects the immense flux of the mid-century, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights mo …
Venezuela’s Health Care Revolution
Established under late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Misión Barrio Adentro (MBA) — Venezuela’s adaptation of the Cuban social medical model — utilizes a free, universal health care system to serve and educate rural, poor and marginalized populations and to broaden the very praxis and ideology of what health means in a true Latin America …
Lab Literacy for Doctors
Lab Literacy for Doctors helps you make quick and efficient decisions about the right tests for typical clinical situations, thereby improving patient care. In a study published by the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (2014-03-01), primary care physicians reported that 15% of the time they are unsure about ordering lab tests and 8% …
Spirit Builders
The inspiring story of how one organization has tried to alleviate the struggles faced by First Nations peoples in Canada by building houses and developing livable communities for those in desperate need.
The people who were living here on Turtle Island (North America) before us have been pushed aside from their own land for decades. Mining companie …
The Great Blackfoot Treaties
The expansive ancestral territory of the Blackfoot Nation ranged from the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta to the Missouri River in Montana and from the Rocky Mountains east to the Cypress Hills. This buffalo-rich land sustained the Blackfoot for generations until the arrival of whiskey traders, unscrupulous wolfers, smallpox epidemics, and the …
The One World Kitchen Cookbook
Shortlisted for a Taste Canada Award
Winner of two Gourmand World CookBook Awards
As seen on Gusto TV!
Canada is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. Fantastic foods and culinary traditions that originated on the other side of the globe are available right here at home, and they are arguably just as Canadian as tourtière and po …
Hope's Journey
The fifth volume in the “Forging a Nation” series begins in 1791. The year a new province is created in the country that will one day be called Canada. The year Hope Cobman’s life turns around. At thirteen, she must leave the orphanage where she has lived since her mother’s death one year ago. Alone in the world, she dreams of finding her f …
Wake The Stone Man
Set in a small northern town, under the mythical shadow of the Sleeping Giant, Wake the Stone Man follows the complicated friendship of two girls coming of age in the 1960s. Molly meets Nakina, who is Ojibwe and a survivor of the residential school system, in high school, and they form a strong friendship. As the bond between them grows, Molly, wh …
Grey Eyes
"With his novel Grey Eyes, Frank Busch taps into the traditional in a way I've not seen before. At once historical and fantastical, Grey Eyes reclaims some of our most powerful stories with authenticity and with heart and with that bit of magic that brings all of it to such beautiful life. Busch is amongst the new generation of voices so vital to o …
Fists upon a Star
Fists upon a Star is the hard-hitting memoir of Florence James, a pioneering American theatre director, whose devastating experience with McCarthyism led her to flee to Canada.
The memoir is as epic as America itself. Born in 1892 in the frontier society of Idaho, she became a suffragette in New York City, was the first to put Jimmy Cagney on stage, …
Clearing the Plains
In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s "National Dream."
It was a dream that came at great expense …
The Greatest Lover of Last Tuesday
Eighty-year-old Alberto Camelo has searched for love in all the wrong places. Nevertheless, he claims that his experiences have made him the world’s greatest lover. This claim is belied by his ancient neighbour and closest friend Adriana who taunts: “Perhaps you are the greatest lover of last Tuesday.” Despite his claims, Alberto has never ex …
The Blue Dragon
A murder at the Blue Dragon, a small apartment building in San Francisco’s Chinatown, prompts the absentee owner to hire Chinese American Peter Strand to calm the anxious tenants. But Strand isn’t exactly what he appears to be. Neither are the tenants, who on the surface seem to be regular people going about their lives. Strand, a forensic acco …
Children of the Broken Treaty
Children of the Broken Treaty exposes a system of apartheid in Canada that led to the largest youth-driven human rights movement in the country's history. The movement was inspired by Shannen Koostachin, a young Cree girl named by George Stroumboulopoulos as one of "five teenage girls in history who kicked ass." All Shannen wanted was a decent educ …
Omens in the Year of the Ox
Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from …
Behind the Badge
Buckle up for true stories of the chiefs, strongmen, and outlaws who kept the peace.
Where did the concept of policing originate? Who fought crime in ancient civilizations like those of Greece and Rome? How did the monarchs of the Middle Ages keep the countryside free of bandits? Why were the frontier towns of the American West policed by gunfighter …
Unsettling Canada
Unsettling Canada is built on a unique collaboration between two First Nations leaders, Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ron Derrickson.
Both men have served as chiefs of their bands in the B.C. interior and both have gone on to establish important national and international reputations. But the differences between them are in many ways even more in …
Northern Trader
With previously unpublished photographs, this new edition of Northern Trader is a vivid personal memoir and valuable primary account of the last days of the fur trade. Harold Kemp recounts the routines and rhythms of that long-lost way of life and paints a portrait of the north as a "vast region of infinite allure."
In palpable, often gripping prose …
Upgraded to Serious
National Book Award finalist Heather McHugh presents a fast-paced and brilliantly humorous book. Utilizing medical terminology to work through loss and detachment, McHugh's startling rhymes and rhythms -- along with her sarcastic self-reflection -- serve as antidotes to the sufferings of the world. Being upgraded to serious from critical condition …
Ancient Thunder
A beautiful and visionary book, Ancient Thunder celebrates wild horses and the natural world of the prairies. Using an extraordinary technique, Leo Yerxa, an artist of Ojibway ancestry, makes paper look like leather, so that his illustrations seem to be painted on leather shirts. The art is accompanied by a rich song of praise for the wild horses t …
Tecumseh
Two hundred years after his death, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh is still considered one of the greatest leaders of North America's First Peoples. This richly illustrated biography tells the story of his remarkable life, culminating in the War of 1812.
Tecumseh lived during turbulent times, when the thirteen colonies that were to become the United Sta …
Runaway Dreams
Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where “the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything.” These are Medi …
Thompson's Highway
For his third volume about BC literary history, Alan Twigg traces the writings of David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and thirty of their peers, mainly Scotsmen, who founded and managed more than fifty forts west of the Rockies prior to 1850. After the failure of Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser to find a navigable route to the Pa …
I Just Ran
At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics an unknown Vancouver runner named Percy Williams shocked the sports world by capturing the 100- and 200-metre gold medals. Some said the feat was a fluke. It wasn't. In 1929 Percy silenced naysayers by sweeping the US indoor track circuit, then he went on to set a world record in the 100 metres that would stand until …
If This Is Freedom
If This Is Freedom continues the story of struggle for Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia after the American Revolutionary War. In the black settlement of Birchtown, times are especially hard for the former slaves. They face the difficulties of a hardscrabble existence and continued discrimination from their white counterparts.
Like many desperate Bi …
Street Stories
Homelessness is not new to Vancouver. There have been homeless people in Vancouver since it was founded in 1886. As in other major North American cities, until the late '70s and early '80s homelessness in Vancouver followed the economic logic of boom and bust capitalism.
However, since the run-up to the World Exposition of 1986, that logic has no lo …
The Once and Future Great Lakes Country
North America's Great Lakes country has experienced centuries of upheaval. Its landscapes are utterly changed from what they were five hundred years ago. The region's superabundant fish and wildlife and its magnificent forests and prairies astonished European newcomers who called it an earthly paradise but then ushered in an era of disease, warfare …
Five Little Bitches
Five Little Bitches chronicles the rise and fall of the all-woman band, Wet Leather. Each of the women is plagued by her own unique demons, but their devotion to music and the punk lifestyle keeps them pushing on. As the band progresses, they tour Canadian, American and European towns and cities—and all the alleys, gutters, back stages, vans, hot …
Reclaiming Indigenous Planning
Centuries-old community planning practices in Indigenous communities in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia have, in modern times, been eclipsed by ill-suited western approaches, mostly derived from colonial and neo-colonial traditions. Since planning outcomes have failed to reflect the rights and interests of Indigenous people, a …
The Newcomers
Lily Poritz Miller brings us this story of family, love and displacement with the same vivid, haunting prose and skilled storytelling as In a Pale Blue Light, her critically-acclaimed debut novel.
Recently-widowed Sara Hoffman is filled with dreams of a new beginning. She is bringing her children from South Africa to join her brother, Meyer, in a sm …
He Moved A Mountain
Dr. Frank Arthur Calder of BC’s Nisga’a First Nation was the first indigenous person to be elected to any Canadian governing body. For twenty-six years he served as an MLA in the legislature of British Columbia. He was the driving force behind Canada’s decision to grant recognition of indigenous land title to First Nations people throughout t …
Battle for the Bay
As the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 approaches, a new chapter in the history of the war is being opened for the first time. Although naval battles raged on the Great Lakes, combat between privateers and small government vessels boiled in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine. Three small warships — the Provincial sloop Brunswicker, His M …
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis and missionary settlement of Lac St. Anne, Canada. A young woman of mixed-blood named Mahkesîs is carrying the child of the married Englishman who manages the Hudson Bay Company trading post. She is forced to reveal her devastating secret to her Cree grandmother. As an unmarried Catholic gi …
Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay
This is the first major body of annotated texts in James Bay Cree, and a unique documentation of Swampy and Moose Cree (Western James Bay) usage of the 1950s and 1960s. Conversations and interviews with 16 different speakers include: legends, reminiscences, historical narratives, stories and conversations, as well as descriptions of technology. The …
Way Lies North, The
This young adult historical novel focuses on Charlotte and her family, Loyalists who are forced to flee their home in the Mohawk Valley as a result of the violence of the “Sons of Liberty” during the American Revolution. At the beginning, fifteen-year-old Charlotte Hooper is separated from her sweetheart, Nick, who sympathizes with the Revoluti …
Running Toward Stillness
In 2006 Stephen Legault experienced a period of tremendous upheaval, the result of bad decisions and a lifetime of anger and fear that left him in a deep depression, struggling to come to terms with the choices he had made. While running on a sun-dappled trail around Victoria’s iconic Mount Doug he realized that, like so many other people, he fel …
Enemy Offshore!
On June 20, 1942, the lighthouse at Estevan Point on Vancouver Island was shelled by the Japanese submarine I-26. It was the first enemy attack on Canadian soil since the War of 1812. But this was only one incident in the incredible and little-known Japanese campaign to terrorize North America’s west coast and mount an invasion through the Aleuti …
Night for the Lady, A
A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, …
To Right Historical Wrongs
Following the Second World War, liberal nation-states sought to address injustices of the past. Canada's government began to consider its own implication in various past wrongs, and in the late twentieth century it began to implement reparative justice initiatives for historically marginalized people. Yet despite this shift, there are more Indigeno …
Accelerated Paces
Dodging down back-alleys in bomb-torn Beirut. Wheeling past God and traffic in Mombassa, Kenya. Slipping around the edges of Alzheimer's disease, the Gulf War, and the eternity of CNN.
Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten's debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top s …