In 1945, Alfred Adams, a respected Haida elder and founding president of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC), was dying of cancer. After decades of fighting to increase the rights and recognition of First Nations people, he implored Maisie Hurley to help his people by telling others about their struggle. Hurley took his request to bot …

"Wanted: lesbian couple to foster wonderful eleven-year-old African American boy with gender identity issues."

Meet Antwan. Not only has he got gender issues, he's severely emotionally disturbed, severely demanding and, as he puts it, "born to argue."

In the late nineties, Nicola Harwood and her girlfriend moved to San Francisco in order to be at the …

Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie—as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her—believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on Chauncey’s cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town tw …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …

On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people living in the house on Melville …

In 1954, when Florence Kaefer was just nineteen, she accepted a job as a teacher at Norway House Indian Residential School of Manitoba. Not fully aware of the difficult conditions the students were enduring, Florence and her fellow teachers nurtured a school full of lonely and homesick young children.

Edward was only five when he was brought to the …

In 1926, Lillian Alling, a European immigrant, set out on a journey home from New York. She had little money and no transportation, but plenty of determination. In the three years that followed, Alling walked all the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing the North American continent on foot. She walked across the Canadian landscape, weathering the ba …