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 …

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 …

The pace of technological, social, and environmental change in Canada’s Arctic has profound effects on resource management and policy decisions. The result of a project undertaken by the Ocean Management Research Network, Breaking Ice examines the nature of arctic environmental evolution and sustainability.

From the pressures of development, tech …

The frontier reality of confronting new conditions, adapting cultural inclinations, and dealing with a volatile environment in an effort to establish and nurture new communities is central to the western Canadian experience. It has shaped many aspects of our heritage, and it is within that context the essays assembled here strive to identify and c …

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 …

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 …

Alequiers is the story of a one–hundred–year–old log house on the banks of the Highwood River in Southern Alberta, with particular emphasis on the time that author Mike Schintz and his family spent there. The book details what little is known about Alexander McQueen Weir, the original settler on the site and goes on to describe the changes in …

Kathryn Chase Merrett celebrates 100 years of the Edmonton City Market in this groundbreaking local history.
Richly textured with archival photographs, drawings, maps, and anecdotes by vendors and customers of the city market, this book reveals how the market managed to thrive in the heart of a city that grew from a frontier outpost to a high–r …

Michael Mucz's prolonged primary research into Ukrainian-Canadian folk history culminates in Baba's Kitchen Medicines. This book bursts with the cultural memory of pioneering folk from Canada's prairieland. From fever to frostbite, this incomparable compendium of tinctures, poultices, salves, decoctions, infusions, plasters, and tonics will fascina …

La politique sur les langues officielles du Canada a transformé la composition et les considérations opérationnelles des institutions fédérales. Grâce aux modifications législatives, la fonction publique du Canada a réussi à mettre en place une représentation équitable de ses deux groupes de langues officielles, assure la prestation de s …

Activating the Heart is an exploration of storytelling as a tool for knowledge production and sharing to build new connections between people and their histories, environments, and cultural geographies. The collection pays particular attention to the significance of storytelling in Indigenous knowledge frameworks and extends into other ways of know …

Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today.

In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, t …

What is the relationship between literature and the society in which it incubates? Are there common political, social, and economic factors that predominate during periods of heightened literary activity?

New Brunswick at the Crossroads: Literary Ferment and Social Change in the East considers these questions and explores the relationships between p …

Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana, and 1960s and 1970s English Canada.

Focusing on Laurence’s published works as well as her unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her character …

The image of the “land” is an ongoing trope in conceptions of Canada—from the national anthem and the flag to the symbols on coins—the land and nature remain linked to the Canadian sense of belonging and to the image of the nation abroad. Linguistic landscapes reflect the multi-faceted identities and cultural richness of the nations. Earlie …

downstream: reimagining water brings together artists, writers, scientists, scholars, environmentalists, and activists who understand that our shared human need for clean water is crucial to building peace and good relationships with one another and the planet. This book explores the key roles that culture, arts, and the humanities play in supporti …

Elizabeth Smith Shortt was one of the first three women to obtain a medical degree in Canada, and her husband, Adam Shortt, enjoyed a successful career as a professor of politics and economics at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 1908 Adam Shortt relocated his family to Ottawa to take up a commission to oversee civil service reform under Prime M …

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 …

Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (WLU Press, 2008) challenged cultural studies to include nonhuman animals within its purview. While the “question of the animal” ricochets across the academy and reverberates within the public sphere, Animal Subjects 2.0 builds on the previous book and takes stock of this explosive turn. I …

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 …

Translation and Translating in German Studies is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Raleigh Whitinger, a well-loved scholar of German literature, an inspiring teacher, and an exceptional editor and translator. Its twenty chapters, written by Canadian and international experts explore new perspectives on translation and German studies as …

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 …

Sarah Carter’s "Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies" examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own.

Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the “spade-work” of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacin …

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 …

Making Feminist Media provides new ways of thinking about the vibrant media and craft cultures generated by Riot Grrrl and feminism’s third wave. It focuses on a cluster of feminist publications—including BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl—that began as zines in the 1990s. By tracking their successes and failures, this book provides …

Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in a …

This book is about the experience of reading–what reading feels like, how it makes people feel, how people read and under what conditions, what drives people to read, and, conversely, what halts the individual in the pursuit of the pleasures of reading. The authors consider reading in all of its richness as they explore readers' relationships wit …

First published in 1947, In Due Season broke new ground with its fictional representation of women and of Indigenous people. Set during the dustbowl 1930s, this tersely narrated prize-winning novel follows Lina Ashley, a determined solo female homesteader who takes her family from drought-ridden southern Alberta to a new life in the Peace River reg …

Celebrity Cultures in Canada is an interdisciplinary collection that explores celebrity phenomena and the ways they have operated and developed in Canada over the last two centuries. The chapters address a variety of cultural venues—politics, sports, film, and literature—and examine the political, cultural, material, and affective conditions th …

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures—from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized …

Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives presents critical essays on contemporary Canadian cartoonists working in graphic life narrative, from confession to memoir to biography. The contributors draw on literary theory, visual studies, and cultural history to show how Canadian cartoonists have become so prominent in the international market for …

Rural communities, often the first indicators of economic downturns, play an important role in planning for development and sustainability. Increasingly, these communities are compelled to reimagine the paths that lead not only to economic success, but also to the cultural, social, environmental, and institutional pillars of sustainability. As the …

In 1956, pioneering psychedelic researchers Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond were invited to join members of the Red Pheasant First Nation near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to participate in a peyote ceremony hosted by the Native American Church of Canada.

Inspired by their experience, they wrote a series of essays explaining and defending the co …

Horseback wrestling, catch-as-catch-can, glima; long before the advent of today’s WWE, forms of wrestling were practised by virtually every cultural group. C. Nathan Hatton’s Thrashing Seasons tells the story of wrestling in Manitoba from its earliest documented origins in the eighteenth century to the Great Depression.

Wrestling was never mere …

A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery.

A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of endurin …

Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau examines the complex identities assigned to Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau. Was he an uneducated artist plagued by alcoholism and homelessness? Was Morrisseau a shaman artist who tapped a deep spiritual force? Or was he simply one of Canada’s most significant artists?

Carmen L. Robertson charts both the colon …

"Sustainable development is, for government and industry at least, primarily a way of turning trees into lumber, tar into oil, and critique into consent; a way to defend the status quo of growth at any cost." —from the Introduction

In Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions, Jon Gordon makes the case for re-evaluating the theoretical, …

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 …

Food nourishes the body, but our relationship with food extends far beyond our need for survival. Food choices not only express our personal tastes but also communicate a range of beliefs, values, affiliations and aspirations—sometimes to the exclusion of others. In the media sphere, the enormous amount of food-related advice provided by governme …

This book shows how human rights became the primary language for social change in Canada and how a single decade became the locus for that emergence. The author argues that the 1970s was a critical moment in human rights history—one that transformed political culture, social movements, law, and foreign policy. Human Rights in Canada is one of the …

Fewer Canadians than ever are lacing up skates, swimming lengths at the pool, practicing their curve ball, and experiencing the thrill of competition. However, despite a decline in active participation, Canadians spend enormous amounts of time and money on sports, as fans and followers of sporting events and sports culture. Never has media coverage …

Since we all have one and use it every day, why is it that people squirm when the anus is mentioned? In Reading from Behind, Jonathan Allan addresses this question in a playful, yet scholarly exploration of everything from porn to poetry, from Brokeback Mountain to Myra Breckinridge, democratizing the anus as a site of necessity and as a location o …

A peasant in peaked hat and blue shirt, with trousers rolled up high above his bare knees, crossed the road and silently examined the tricycle. “You have a good horse,” he then said; “it eats nothing.” —from An Italian Pilgrimage

The 1880s was an exhilarating time for cycling pioneers like Elizabeth and her husband Joseph. As boneshakers a …

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 …

This collection of essays explores how women from a variety of religious and cultural communities have contributed to the richly textured, pluralistic society of Canada. Focusing on women’s religiosity, it examines the ways in which they have carried and conserved, and brought forward and transformed their cultures—old and new—in modern Canad …

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. She sought an escape from the suffocation she felt under the cultural rules of her country and the future her family had envisioned for her. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in February of 1979, …

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 …

“Notwithstanding their differing approaches—digital, archival, historical, iterative, critical, creative, reflective—the essays gathered here articulate new ways of seeing, investigating, and apprehending literature and culture.” – From the Preface

This collection of essays enriches digital humanities research by examining various Canadian …

Does hockey provide a better understanding of the differences between Canadian and Québécois nationalisms? Is there a fundamental relationship between the hockey arena and the political arena? What have we lost as a society in abolishing the tie game? Are salaries in the NHL really that outrageous? Is hockey more art than sport? Should hockey pla …

Like all First Nations languages, Lillooet (Lil'wat) is a repository for an abundantly rich oral literature. In These Are Our Legends, the fifth volume of the First Nations Language Readers series, the reader will discover seven traditional Lillooet sptakwlh (variously translated into English as "legends," "myths," or "bed-time stories."

These texts …