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 …

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 …

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 …

“My name is Weetaltuk; Eddy Weetaltuk. My Eskimo tag name is E9-422.” So begins From the Tundra to the Trenches. Weetaltuk means “innocent eyes” in Inuktitut, but to the Canadian government, he was known as E9-422: E for Eskimo, 9 for his community, 422 to identify Eddy.

In 1951, Eddy decided to leave James Bay. Because Inuit weren’t allo …

Manitoba is more than one of Canada's three prairie provinces. Encompassing 649,950 square kilometres, its territory ranges from Canadian Shield to grassland, parkland, and subarctic tundra. Its physical geography has been shaped by ice-age glaciers, while its human geography reflects the influences of its various inhabitants, from the First Nation …

Born in 1912, Alice Ahenakew was brought up in a traditional Cree community in north-central Saskatchewan. As a young woman, she married Andrew Ahenakew, a member of the prominent Saskatchewan family, who later became an Anglican clergyman and a prominent healer. Alice Ahenakew’s personal reminiscences include stories of her childhood, courtship …

Indigenous North Americans continue to be overrepresented among those who are poor, unemployed, and with low levels of education. This has long been an issue of concern for Indigenous people and their allies and is now drawing the attention of government, business leaders, and others who know that this fast-growing population is a critical source o …

In an age where southern power-holders look north and see only vacant polar landscapes, isolated communities, and exploitable resources, it is important to note that the Inuit homeland encompasses extensive philosophical, political, and literary traditions. Stories in a New Skin is a seminal text that explores these Arctic literary traditions and, …

Living the Changes explores the nature and extent of women's changing realities. The contributors include writers, artists, academics, street kids and social workers, and range in age from nine to seventy-three. Their topics reflect the diversity and complexity of the concerns of contemporary women – birthing and aging, body image, culture, drugs …

Ethnic elites, the influential business owners, teachers, and newspaper editors within distinct ethnic communities, play an important role as self-appointed mediators between their communities and “mainstream” societies. In Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity, Aya Fujiwara examines the roles of Japanese, Ukrainian, and Scottish elites during th …

Twelve essays are presented by outstanding authorities in Nordic medieval studies. These essays range from treatment of broad aspects of the Edda, to consideration of single poems, to analysis of parts of specific works. An attractive and important collection for every scholar of Old Scandinavian.

In 2004 Canadian farmers led an international coalition to a major victory for the anit-GM movement by defeating the introduction of Monsanto's genetically modified wheat. Canadian farmers' strong opposition to GM wheat marked a stark contrast to previous producer acceptance of other genetically modified crops. By 2005, for example, GM canola accou …

The prairies are a focal point for momentous events in Canadian history, a place where two visions of Canada have often clashed: Louis Riel, the Manitoba School Question, French language rights, the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, and the dramatic collapse of the Meech Lake Accord when MLA Elijah Harper voted “No.”Gerald Friesen believes that it …

Mennonite Women in Canada traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years. Marlene Epp explores women’s roles, as prescribed and as lived, within the contexts of immigration and settlement, household and family, church and organizational life, work and education, and in response to social trend …

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 …

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, …

These are a collection of 20 stories, dictated in 1941 to Bloomfield's linguistics class, edited from manuscripts now in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution, and published for the first time. In Ojibwe, with English translations by Bloomfield. Ojibwe-English glossary and other linguistic study aids.

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 …

What did happen to the body of Thomas Scott? The disposal of the body of Canadian history’s most famous political victim is the starting point for historian J.M. Bumsted’s new look at some of the most fascinating events and personalities of Manitoba’s Red River Settlement.To outsiders, 19th-century Red River seemed like a remote community pre …

Being homeless in one’s homeland is a colonial legacy for many Indigenous people in settler societies. The construction of Commonwealth nation-states from colonial settler societies depended on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The legacy of that dispossession and related attempts at assimilation that disrupted Indigenous …

Post-secondary education, often referred to as “the new buffalo,” is a contentious but critically important issue for First Nations and the future of Canadian society. While First Nations maintain that access to and funding for higher education is an Aboriginal and Treaty right, the Canadian government insists that post-secondary education is a …

George Kenny is an Anishinaabe poet and playwright who learned traditional ways from his parents before being sent to residential school in 1958. When Kenny published his first book, 1982’s Indians Don’t Cry, he joined the ranks of Indigenous writers such as Maria Campbell, Basil Johnston, and Rita Joe whose work melded art and political action …

Winnipeg writer Katherine Martens interviewed 26 women from the Mennonite community in southern Manitoba, ranging in age from 22 to 88 years old. They had many different backgrounds, but they all had one important characteristic: all were mothers.In the course of these interviews, Martens was searching for answers to questions that affected her bot …

Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities is a study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined tra …

Power Struggles: Hydro Development and First Nations in Manitoba and Quebec examines the evolution of new agreements between First Nations and Inuit and the hydro corporations in Quebec and Manitoba, including the Wuskwatim Dam Project, Paix des Braves, and the Great Whale Project. In the 1970s, both provinces signed so-called “modern treaties” …

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 …

Why don’t more Métis people go to traditional ceremonies? How does going to ceremonies impact Métis identity?

In Rekindling the Sacred Fire, Chantal Fiola investigates the relationship between Red River Métis ancestry, Anishinaabe spirituality, and identity, bringing into focus the ongoing historical impacts of colonization upon Métis relation …

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 …

When dealing with Indigenous women’s history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singul …

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 …

On January 12, 1986, Jim Walding was nominated as the New Democratic Party candidate for the Manitoba constituency of St. Vital. Although Walding had been an MLA for fifteen years, he had fallen out of favour with key elements in his party, and won the nomination by only a single vote. Walding went on, in turn, to bring down his own government by a …

Despite the long human history of the Canadian central arctic, there is still little historical writing on the Inuit peoples of this vast region. Although archaeologists and anthropologists have studied ancient and contemporary Inuit societies, the Inuit world in the crucial period from the 16th to the 20th centuries remains largely undescribed and …

Manitoba has always been a province in the middle, geographically, economically, and culturally. Lacking Quebec’s cultural distinctiveness, Ontario’s traditional economic dominance, or Alberta’s combustible mix of prairie populism and oil wealth, Manitoba appears to blend into the background of the Canadian family portrait. But Manitoba has a …

Despite the fact that Russian Mennonites began arriving in Canada en masse in the 1870s, Mennonite Canadian literature has been marked by a compulsive retelling of the mass migration of some 20,000 Russian Mennonites to Canada following the collapse of the “Mennonite Commonwealth” in the 1920s. This privileging of a seminal dispersal within the …

Few things are as important as the food we eat. Conversations in Food Studies demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary research through the cross-pollination of disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Widely diverse essays, ranging from the meaning of milk, to the bring-your-own-wine movement, to urban household waste, ar …

During the first half of the twentieth century, Winnipeg Beach proudly marketed itself as the Coney Island of the West. Located just north of Manitoba’s bustling capital, it drew 40,000 visitors a day and served as an important intersection between classes, ethnic communities, and perhaps most importantly, between genders. In Winnipeg Beach, Dale …

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 …

Francis Pegahmagabow (1889–1952), a member of the Ojibwe nation, was born in Shawanaga, Ontario. Enlisting at the onset of the First World War, he became the most decorated Canadian Indigenous soldier for bravery and the most accomplished sniper in North American military history. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing, Ontario. He ser …

What does it mean to be an Indigenous man today? Between October 2010 and May 2013, Sam McKegney conducted interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists, and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood. In offices, kitchens, and coffee shops, and once in a car driving down the 401, McKegney and his participants tackled crucial ques …

John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a Ge …

Margaret Laurence’s much admired Manawaka fiction—The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners—has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books …

When Sylvia Van Kirk published her groundbreaking book, Many Tender Ties, in 1980, she revolutionized the historical understanding of the North American fur trade and introduced entirely new areas of inquiry in women’s, social, and Aboriginal history. Finding a Way to the Heart examines race, gender, identity, and colonization from the early nine …

A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities. The process of “digging up medicines” - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings …

Climate change and an evolving non-renewable energy sector threaten the future viability and sustainability of communities across the country. While rural communities have a special place in the national fabric, they often lack the resources to tackle these important and evolving threats.

Planning for Rural Resilience: Coping with Climate Change an …

In the 1930s Grey Owl was considered the foremost conservationist and nature writer in the world. He owed his fame largely to his four internationally bestselling books, which he supported with a series of extremely popular illustrated lectures across North America and Great Britain. His reputation was transformed radically, however, after he died …

The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois or Six Nations, have been one of the most widely written-about Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada. But seldom have the voices emerging from this community been drawn on in order to understand its enduring intellectual traditions. Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters offers the f …

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 …

The first economic, military, and diplomatic history of the Plains Cree from contact with the Europeans in the 1670s to the disappearance of the buffalo from Cree lands by the 1870s, focussing on military and trade relations between 1790 and 1870.

Milloy describes three distinct eras, each characterized by a paramount motive for war—the wars of mi …

The first comprehensive history of the Aboriginal First World War experience on the battlefield and the home front. When the call to arms was heard at the outbreak of the First World War, Canada’s First Nations pledged their men and money to the Crown to honour their long-standing tradition of forming military alliances with Europeans during time …

In this long-awaited book from one of the most recognized and respected scholars in Native Studies today, Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdisciplinary study of the Native literary response to racist writing in the Canadian historical and literary record from 1850 to 1990. In When the Other is Me, LaRocque brings a metacritical approach to Na …