Every day brings new headlines about climate change as politicians debate how to respond, scientists offer new data, and skeptics critique the validity of the research. To step outside these scientific and political debates, Timothy Leduc engages with various Inuit understandings of northern climate change. What he learns is that today’s climate …

In August 1880, businessman Adrian Jakobsen convinced eight Inuit men, women, and children from Hebron and Nakvak, Labrador to accompany him to Europe to be "exhibited" in zoos and Völkerschauen (ethnographic shows). Abraham, Maria, Noggasak, Paingo, Sara, Terrianiak, Tobias, and Ulrike agreed, partly for the money and partly out of curiosity to s …

In the early hours of April 22, 1914, American President Woodrow Wilson sent Marines to seize the port of Veracruz in an attempt to alter the course of the Mexican Revolution. As a result, the United States seemed on the brink of war with Mexico. An international uproar ensued. The governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile offered to mediate a pe …

Border security has been high on public-policy agendas in Europe and North America since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City and on the headquarters of the American military in Washington DC. Governments are now confronted with managing secure borders, a policy objective that in this era of increased free trade …

The Modern Language Association (MLA) awarded the Lois Roth Award to John Woodsworth and Arkadi Klioutchanski of the University of Ottawa’s Slavic Research Group for their translation of Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya’s My Life memoirs.

My Life was selected among the top 100 non-fiction works of 2010 by The Globe and Mail.
It has also won an honourab …

Surveyor, cartographer, fur trader, adventurer, naturalist and entrepreneur, David Thompson is now recognized as one of the greatest explorers and geographers of all time. By 1812, he had surveyed almost four million square kilometres of the North American wilderness and become the first European to navigate the entire length of the Columbia River. …

Love it or hate it, the Calgary Stampede is a place where myth, history and spectacle collide. 100 years after an American vaudeville cowboy first dreamed it up, the Stampede remains an unrivalled homage to the West.

Cowboy Wild was more than a decade in the making. Photographer David Campion roamed the world’s biggest Wild West show and brought b …

Winner! 2012 American Alpine Club Literary Prize (USA)

Winner! 2011 Munday Award, Banff Mountain Festival (CANADA)

Winner! 2011 Boardman Tasker Prize, Kendal Mountain Festival (UNITED KINGDOM)

Freedom Climbers—the most honoured book of mountaineering literature published in Canada—tells the story of a group of extraordinary Polish adventurers …

During the 1980s, the geography of minor-league professional hockey changed radically, moving from its roots in the Canadian Maritime provinces, New England and the Midwestern states into the American south. In addition to cities like Dallas, Charlotte, Norfolk and Oklahoma City, which had long traditions of minor-league hockey, unlikely places suc …

Technically it was a minor league, but for hockey fans west of the Mississippi, the Western Hockey League provided major-league entertainment for over 25 years.

The WHL was a determined and ambitious professional league, with some 22 teams based in major American and Canadian cities. Known as the Pacific Coast Hockey League prior to 1952, the WHL a …

Try as we might, parts of North America may not escape the impacts of the global water crisis. The same kinds of water supply and quality issues that have appeared around our crowded planet are already beginning to present themselves here. Unfortunately, this is occurring at a time when, as a direct result of declining global food production, the w …

Do you think the smuggling of drugs and people is a new phenomenon in Canada’s west? Think again! Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, many daring smugglers carried contraband goods and people into western Canada across the US–Canada border or into BC from Asia. Smugglers of the West tells the dramatic tales of the bold criminals who sm …

The years from the fall of New France in 1763 to the amalgamation of the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company in 1821 were marked by fierce competition in the fur trade. Traders from the warring companies pushed west, undertaking incredible voyages in their search for new sources of furs. Irene Gordon explores the eventful lives of those w …

The characters from Susan Musgrave’s A Cargo of Orchids are back in this brilliantly engaging novel. Rainy, the Mexican-American woman, and Frenchy, the African-American, along with Musgrave’s narrator X have returned and convincingly insist their story is not done. Once inmates on death row, now reunited and hanging out at an old house in a BC …

After suffering a crippling injury during a tour of Afghanistan, Michael has returned home to a Canadian veteran's care facility. The last thing he wanted was to spend his time with a twelve-year-old girl, but Halley, a spirited, physically disabled Pathfinder, is eager to earn her volunteer badge. The pair is at odds from the start, but they find …

This book will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the unique culture and spirituality of the fast-growing Pacific Northwest, which includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Envied by people around the world, Cascadia, as it is known, is remarkable for its famed mountains, evergreens, eagles, beaches and livable cities. Most people, ho …

Despite being neighbouring provinces with long ranching histories, British Columbia and Alberta saw their ranching techniques develop quite differently. As most ranching styles were based on one of the two dominant styles in use south of the border, BC ranchers tended to adopt the California style whereas Alberta took its lead from Texas. But the d …

In Skin Like Mine Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems on what it feels like to be inside the skin of many contemporary native individuals. He pulls no punches as he reflects on the challenges facing native people today. He speaks of minds full of anticipation yet with tongues pointing arrowheads. He tells of how so many native young people a …

Chaos Inside Thunderstorms draws the audience into the centre of the tumultuous political, socio/economical and historical reality of the First Nations experience in Canada today. It is poetic expression that examines leadership, resilience, honour, shame, and love. It examines the issues implicit in the Idle No More Movement and the Truth and Reco …

There is a special place on the southeastern shores of Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It is a magnificent landscape of rocky cliffs fronting onto the wild Pacific Ocean, sheltered beaches, lakes, mountains and forests. Since the beginning of time, it has been the ancestral home of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation.

Drawing directly …

George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within is a stunning retrospective of a career that has spanned nearly four decades. Featuring more than 150 of the Plains Cree artist’s mixed-media works, this sumptuous collection showcases the bold swaths of colour and subtle textures of Littlechild’s work.

Littlechild has never shied away from political …

Ticknor is the first novel by Sheila Heti, the author of the acclaimed story collection The Middle Stories and, with Misha Glouberman, the essay collection The Chairs are Where the People Go.

George Ticknor is trying to reconcile his own failure with the success of his boyhood friend, the famous American historian William Prescott. Ticknor's life h …

A revised and updated edition of a collection of personal essays that illuminate what life is like for those who live with mental illness, and how it impacts their family members.

More than 4 million Canadians and 57 million Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, and yet there are still considerable stigmas and a great deal of misunders …

In 2006 “outdoor philosopher” Kate Rawles cycled 4553 miles from Texas to Alaska, following the spine of the Rocky Mountains as closely as possible. Cycling across unforgiving but starkly beautiful landscapes in both the United States and Canada – deserts, high mountain passes, glaciers and eventually down to the sea – she encountered bears …

In her fourth historical novel dealing with British North America and the American Revolution, Jean Rae Baxter focuses on Broken Trail, a young boy who was born white but captured and adopted by the Oneida people. The great Mohawk leader Thayendanegea - known to Euro-Canadians as Joseph Brant - has chosen Broken Trail to assist him in the daunting …

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 …

Silas Pearson is plagued by nightmares. In them, his wife, Penelope, who has now been missing for four years, shows him where murder victims are buried across the Colorado Plateau. One such dream leads him to the Atlas Mill tailings site, outside Moab, Utah. There, Silas discovers the corpse of anti-uranium-mining activist Jane Vaughn, who went mis …

At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …

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 …

A murder, a tryst, a mysterious child. A Victoria aristocrat who obsesses over her Churchill relatives. A repressive Welsh mother with a royalty fixation. A once-carefree Hesquiat girl from Nootka Sound. A dashing Icelandic philanderer. And quiet, steady Julia Godolphin, trying to rise above it all. The lost novel of Norma Macmillan, the Vancouver …

The Real Thing is the first official biography of Ian McTaggart Cowan (1910–2010), the “father of Canadian ecology.” Authorized by his family and with the research support and participation of the University of Victoria Libraries, Briony Penn provides an unprecedented and accessible window into the story of this remarkable naturalist. From hi …

Celia Cantú, a pediatrician in Havana, is trying to live a regular life in today's Cuba. She is engaged to her childhood friend Luis and lives with her 16-year-old niece, Liliana. Celia's life is disrupted when Luis's brother, Joe, returns from Miami flaunting his American ways. Joe's arrival and Liliana's adolescent restlessness force Celia to ex …

Finalist for the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

During the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Anson Baird, a surgeon for the Union Army, is on the front line tending to the wounded. As the number of casualties rises, a mysterious soldier named John comes to Anson's aid. Deeply affected by the man's selfless actions, Anson soo …

Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is only thirty-three years old, if one begins counting from the premiere of Maria Campbell’s Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one an …

Salmon: A Scientific Memoir investigates a narrative that is important to the identity of the Pacific Northwest Coast – the salmon as an iconic species. Traditionally it’s been a narrative that is overwhelmingly about conflict. But is that always necessarily the case?

The story follows John Steinbeck’s advice: the best way to achieve reality i …

After losing her job and being left by her rock musician husband, Rose Okanese, a single mother of two feisty girls, resolves to claim some self-respect. She decides the fastest way to do that is to run the reserve’s annual marathon, but her training is sidetracked when she must do battle with an ancient demon. With a cast of unusual characters, …

Paul Munk is a socially conscious idealist, leaning left in his political convictions. In Crown Shyness, his skills as a writer for a current affairs magazine have garnered him an assignment that will challenge his relationships, present and future: to follow and profile Daniel Code, a member of the religious right who believes he has been called u …

The year is 1885 and Abigail Peacock is resisting what seems to be an inevitable future—a sensible career as a teacher and marriage to the earnestly attentive local storeowner.

But then she buys a rifle, and everything changes.

This Godforsaken Place is the absorbing tale of one tenacious woman’s journey set against the dramatic backdrop of the …

More than 100 wildly delicious recipes that use North America’s original red meat, from bison rancher and award-winning food writer Jennifer Bain.

Buffalo Girl Cooks Bison is the first comprehensive contemporary bison cookbook for a general North American market. With more than 100 well-tested, delectable recipes, Bain ensures that you’ll have p …

Reliving the adventures of past explorers.

Trail to the Interior is R. M. Patterson's rich account of exploration and personal adventure in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. The trail is the historic track from Wrangell, Alaska, along the Stikine and Dease rivers and across the height of the land into the valleys of the Liard and the Mackenz …

Silas Pearson is looking for answers. It's been more than three years since his wife, Penelope de Silva, disappeared while working on a conservation project in Utah's red rock wilderness. Law enforcement authorities have given up hope of finding the adventurous Penelope alive. And some suggest that she may not have vanished into the desert at all, …

Oral stories form a portal through which rich cultural and linguistic information is passed from generation to generation. Tellings from Our Elders, Volume 2, presents stories in the Skagit Valley dialects of Lushootseed, the language of the indigenous people of the southern and eastern shores of Puget Sound. Transcribed from recordings made of the …

Helping to promote healing in Aboriginal people with addiction and mental health issues requires specialized knowledge and unique skills. Health, social service and justice workers must first have a grasp of history and the emotional legacy that today’s generation of Aboriginal people carry. They must also be prepared to blend Aboriginal and West …

In Finding My Talk, fourteen aboriginal women who attend residential schools, or were affected by them, reflect on their experiences.

Captain Richards' journal is an account of three survey seasons on Vancouver Island aboard two British Navy ships, the HMS Plumper and the HMS Hecate. Between 1860 and 1862 Richards and his dedicated crew surveyed and charted the entire coastline of Vancouver Island, creating baseline information for the nautical charts we use today.This monumental …

Dubbed "the Wayne Gretzky of women's hockey," Angela James became the most dominant female player on the planet from the early 1980s through the mid 1990s. Her rise to hockey stardom, however, was a true long shot. During a difficult childhood plagued by near poverty and familial chaos, hockey was James's escape. Talent and determination eventually …

For almost three decades, Edward Curtis photographed the First Peoples of the North American West and studied their cultures. As part of his fieldwork, he cruised the Pacific Northwest coast and ventured into the lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, both north and south of the Medicine Line.

Alarmed that the traditional Aboriginal ways of life seemed …

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 …

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.