National Network for Equitable Library Service

The generation to which Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged spanned more than the length of their lifetimes. That generation fought heroically in world wars and at the same time raised children under a paternalistic federal regime that denied both a culture and a heritage. The Crowshoes regained their heritage and shared it with the larger community, gaining respect from all the people with whom they were in contact and becoming articulate representatives and the holders of stories, legends, and customs.

Darwin's Moving introduces readers to the colourful characters who populate the furniture moving trade, a male-dominated world of labour with relatively high pay and no need for education of any sort. Movers have a unique window into the private spaces of the city as they perform their difficult and delicate job inside all manner of homes, from government-subsidized housing developments to multi-million dollar McMansions. Taylor Lambert intriguingly explores class and work in a city that would rather focus on the wealth and prosperity brought to it by the oil and gas industry.

Myrna Kostash's follow up to The Frog Lake Reader is an engaging and exciting overview of the rivalry between fur trading companies in Nineteenth Century Canada.

On a warm spring day in June of 1914, two hundred and thirty-five men went down into the depths of the Hillcrest mine found in Alberta?s Crowsnest Pass. Only forty-six would make it out alive. The largest coal-mining disaster in Canadian history, the fateful tale of the Hillcrest Mine is finally captured in startling detail by Stephen Hanon. A deft examination of the coal mining industry in an Alberta just on the cusp of the Great War, The Devil?s Breath is a startling recollection of heroism and human courage in the face of overwhelming calamity.

South Away is an adventure story of the author's bicycle trip with her sister from Terrace, BC along the West coast to (almost) the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Meaghan Marie Hackinen experiences apprehension and determination as she camps in the dense forests of northern Vancouver Island and in frigid Mexican deserts; encounters strange men, suicidal highways and monster trucks; strong winds and violent storms; flat ties and broken spokes. Her couch-surfacing adventures provide an insight into the "kindness of strangers" en route.

Nonfiction author Myrna Kostash merges the past and the present in The Frog Lake Reader, which offers a multi-layered perspective on the tragic events surrounding the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. By bringing together eyewitness accounts and journal excerpts, memoirs and contemporary fiction, and excerpts from interivews with historians, Kostash provides a panoramic view of a tragedy often overshadowed by Louis Riel's rebellion of the same year.

Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is just over thirty years old, if one begins counting from the premier of Linda Griffiths and 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 another.

To understand Canada one must understand racism, for Canada was born and grew as a racist state. Race riots, segregated schools, racially-based union membership, mass deportations of innocent people, the state sanctioned kidnapping of children, a conscious attempt at cultural genocide and much more have shaped Canada’s history. Last Steps to Freedom: The Evolution of Canadian Racism encourages Canadians to look truthfully at their past, admit mistakes, atone for crimes and applaud progress. The book is organized chronologically, by region, and by ethnic group.

This account of the Sigfusson Transportation Company details how it was unfairly treated by the Government, in attempting to create a network of winter roads in northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

In this memoir, Lamees Al Ethari traces her transition from an idyllic childhood in a large extended Iraqi family to the relative stability of family exilic life in Canada. Through memory fragments, clips of poetry, diary entries, and her own art, the author reveals the trauma of three senseless wars, a decade of dehumanizing sanctions on an innocent population, the blindness of a dictatorship to the suffering of its own people, and finally their resilience and the humanity they manage to preserve.