National Network for Equitable Library Service

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 times of war, and as a means of resisting cultural assimilation and attaining equality through shared service and sacrifice.

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.

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 in April 1938, and it was revealed that he was not of mixed Scottish-Apache ancestry, as he had often claimed, but in fact an Englishman named Archie Belaney.

Part ethnography, part narrative, Like the Sound of a Drum is evocative, confrontational, and poetic. For many years, Peter Kulchyski has travelled to the north, where he has sat in on community meetings, interviewed elders and Aboriginal politicians, and participated in daily life. In Like the Sound of a Drum he looks as three northern communities — Fort Simpson and Fort Good Hope in Denendeh and Pangnirtung in Nunavut — and their strategies for maintaining their political and cultural independence.

What force of will and circumstance drove a woman from a comfortable life painting china tea services to one of hardship and loneliness in the battle zones of France and Belgium following the Great War? For western Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton (1868-1954), art was her life’s passion. Her tale is one of tragedy and adventure, from homestead beginnings, to genteel drawing rooms in Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver, to Berlin and Parisian art schools, to Vimy and Ypres, and finally to illness and poverty in old age.

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 nineteenth to the late twentieth century, and illustrates Van Kirk’s extensive influence on a generation of feminist scholarship.

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 singular story of decline and loss.

Oil is not new to Saskatchewan. Many of the wells found on farmland across the province date back to the 1950s when the industry began to spread. But there is little doubt that the recent boom (2006–2014) and subsequent downturn in unconventional oil production has reshaped rural lives and landscapes. While many small towns were suffering from depopulation and decline, others reoriented themselves around a booming oil industry.

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 Barbour takes us into the heart of this turn-of-the-century resort area and introduces us to some of the people who worked, played and lived in the resort.

Saskatchewan is the anchor and epitome of the ‘prairie’ provinces, even though half of the province is covered by boreal forest. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily-understood ‘regions’ has reduced the Saskatchewan identity to its southern prairie denominator and has distorted cultural and historical interpretations to favor the prairie south. Forest Prairie Edge is a deep-time investigation of the edge land, or ecotone, between the open prairies and boreal forest region of Saskatchewan.