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 …

Gandhi in a Canadian Context examines a range of intriguing and under-studied connections between India’s greatest nationalist leader, Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), and facets of life in Canada, including Gandhi’s interest in and contact with Canada and Canadians early in the twentieth century, and the implications of Gandhi’s thinking on a r …

This book explores the experience of Canadians who chose to convert to Buddhism and to embrace its teachings and practices in their daily lives. It presents the life stories of eight Canadians who first encountered Buddhism between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and are now ordained or lay Buddhist teachers.

In recent census records, over 300,000 Can …

Studies of the radical environmental politics of the 1960s have tended to downplay the extent to which much of that countercultural intellectual and social ferment continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Canadian Countercultures and the Environment adds to our knowledge of this understudied period. This collection contributes a sustained analysis of th …

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often …

This book examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography’s powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims …

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 …

What is Europe? Who is European? What do Europe and European identity mean in the twenty-first century? This collection of sixteen essays seeks to answer these questions by focusing on Europe as it is seen through its own eyes and through the eyes of others across a variety of cultural texts, including sport, film, literature, dance, cartography, a …

Bridging Two Peoples tells the story of Dr. Peter E. Jones, who in 1866 became one of the first status Indians to obtain a medical doctor degree from a Canadian university. He returned to his southern Ontario reserve and was elected chief and band doctor. As secretary to the Grand Indian Council of Ontario he became a bridge between peoples, convey …

What was romance like for Canadians a century ago? What qualities did marriageable men and women look for in prospective mates? How did they find suitable partners in difficult circumstances such as frontier isolation and parental disapproval, and, when they did, how did courtship proceed in the immediate post-Victorian era, when traditional romant …

Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance examines the deeper meanings and resonances of artistic dance in contemporary culture.

The book comprises four sections: methods and methodologies, autoethnography, pedagogies and creative processes, and choreographies as cultural and spiritual representations. The contributors bring an insiders i …

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 …

One little question propels both author and reader on a genre-bending quest to find the elusive essence of a Canadian province built on sturdy stereotypes of oil-spoiled, beef-eating, bible-thumping rednecks devoid of class or culture. Through essay, interview, colourful observation, and whatever other exposé it takes to amplify the hyperbolic abs …

The popular notion that sees the Anglo-Saxon era as “The Dark Ages” perhaps has tended to obscure for many people the creations and strengths of that time. This collection, in examining many aspects of pre-Norman Britain, helps to illuminate how Anglo-Saxon society contributed to the continuity of knowledge between the ancient world and the mod …

To Know Our Many Selves profiles the history of Canadian Studies, which began as early as the 1840s with the Study of Canada. Professor Dirk Hoerder discusses this comprehensive examination of culture by highlighting its unique interdisciplinary approach, which included both sociological and political angles. Years later, as the study of other ethn …

A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature is a collection of essays honouring Richard (Dick) Slobodin, one of the great anthropologists of the Canadian North.

A short biography is followed by essays describing his formative thinking about human nature and human identities, his humanizing force in his example of living a moral, intellectual life, his discern …

Trail of Story examines the meaning of landscape, drawn from Leslie Main Johnson’s rich experience with diverse environments and peoples, including the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en of northwestern British Columbia, the Kaska Dene of the southern Yukon, and the Gwich’in of the Mackenzie Delta.With passion and conviction, Johnson maintains that our …

What does Canadian popular culture say about the construction and negotiation of Canadian national identity? This third volume of How Canadians Communicate describes the negotiation of popular culture across terrains where national identity is built by producers and audiences, government and industry, history and geography, ethnicities and citizens …

Sixteen essays, written by specialists from many fields, grapple with the problem of a popular culture that is not very popular — but is seen by most as vital to the body politic, whether endangered by globalization or capable of politically progressive messages for its audiences.

Slippery Pastimes covers a variety of topics: Canadian popular mus …

Since first contact, Natives and newcomers have been involved in an increasingly complex struggle over power and identity. Modern “Indian wars” are fought over land and treaty rights, artistic appropriation, and academic analysis, while Native communities struggle among themselves over membership, money, and cultural meaning. In cultural and po …

How can postcolonialism be applied to Canadian literature?

In all that has been written about postcolonialism, surprisingly little has specifically addressed the position of Canada, Canadian literature, or Canadian culture.

Postcolonialism is a theory that has gained credence throughout the world; it is be productive to ask if and how we, as Canadi …

How do we make culture and how does culture make us?

Canadian Cultural Poesis takes a comprehensive approach toward Canadian culture from a variety of provocative perspectives. Centred on the notion of culture as social identity, it offers original essays on cultural issues of urgent concern to Canadians: gender, technology, cultural ethnicity, and …

Three Chilean Thinkers, a companion piece to Three Argentine Thinkers, attempts to examine some of the outstanding characters of Chile's intellectual development by way of analyzing the contribution of three of her distinguished representatives. Each thinker or philosopher, whichever the case may be, is symbolic of a definite sociopolitical movemen …

Vilhjalmur Stefansson has long been known for his groundbreaking work as an anthropologist and expert on Arctic peoples. His three expeditions to the Canadian Arctic in the early 1900s, as well as his expertise in northern anthropology, helped create his public image as an heroic, Hemingway-esque figure in the annals of twentieth-century exploratio …

Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World is an apt title for this collection of essays in honour of Roger C. Hutchinson who, over many decades, has encouraged and participated in shaping a Canadian contextual social ethics. His abiding interest in social ethics and in religious engagement with public issues is reflected in his life’s work — seeking …

Since the Second World War, Toronto's image as a rather staid, predominantly British community, has been transformed through massive immigration into what has been aptly described as a "salad bowl" of identifiable ethnic communities with their characteristic languages, neighbourhoods, shops, newspapers, radio programs and sporting events.