National Network for Equitable Library Service

There is, in all of Canada, a severe shortage of decent quality housing that is affordable to those with low incomes, and a great deal of inadequate, and often appalling, housing. This has been the case for many decades. The poor condition of their housing adds to the weight of the complex poverty that poor people endure-their health is likely to worsen, their children's education may be adversely affected, their neighbourhoods may be prone to violence.

A Thousand Miles of Prairie is a fascinating look at Manitoba’s early boom years (1880-1910) through the eyes and words of some of the most interesting personalities of early Winnipeg. This collection brings together fourteen pieces from the first decades of the Manitoba Historical Society, when its lectures were attended by the province’s political and cultural elite. Jim Blanchard has chosen selections that give us a vivid taste of the diversity of intellectual life in turn of the century Manitoba.

In the supposedly enlightened 60s and 70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn't talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973, with no statistics, no money and little public support, five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened Canada's first battered women's shelters. Today, there are well over 600. Goodhand tracks down the rogue feminists whose work forged an underground railway for women and children, weaving their stories into an until now untold history.

A thoughtful account of life on a reserve and of the interaction of Native people with White society, this volume is based on the author’s three years’ experience with one Indian band on the prairie, during a period in which there were intense negotiations between the band and the federal government. Lithman’s analysis of the political manoeuvring of both sides makes this a rare contemporary account.

The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree).

Inuit qaujimajatuqangit--which means a complete body of knowledge and experience passed from generation to generation--is a collection of contributions by Inuit Elders. It not only helps preserve important knowledge and tradition, but also provides an Inuit perspective on personal growth and development, and how we relate to each other, to other living beings, and to the environment.

Wild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon. In her search for sources for telling the new (or old, forbidden story) against a tradition of narrative absence, Brandt turns to Canadian fiction representing a varety of cultural traditions — Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Jovette Marchessault, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee — and a collection of oral interviews about childbirth told by Mennonite women.

In 2012, journalist Hugo Meunier went undercover as a Walmart employee for three months in St. Leonard, Quebec, just north of Montreal. In great detail, Meunier charts the daily life of an impoverished Walmart worker, referring to his shifts at the box store giant as "somewhere between the army and Walt Disney." Each shift began with a daily chant before bowing to customer demands and the constant pressure to sell. Meanwhile Meunier and his fellow workers could not afford to shop anywhere else but Walmart, further indenturing them to the multi-billion-dollar corporation.

Through Harlo Jones's eyes, we explore the prairie landscape from coulee to slough; watch the construction of the first buildings, with basements dug by fresnos, and walls insulated with wood shavings; and peer inside village landmarks, from that "most excellent of jakes" with the knothole that turned the structure into a giant pinhole camera, to his father's garage, scene of many semi-official town-hall meetings.

For many Canadians, the first introduction to Viola Desmond will have been was seeing her portrait on the new $10 banknote. Those who are familiar with her life Others know that she was wrongfully arrested in 1946 for refusing to give up her seat in the racially segregated Roseland Theater in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Her singular act of courage was a catalyst in the struggle for racial equality, which ultimately resulted in the passage of human rights legislation that officially ended the practice of racial segregation in Nova Scotia.