National Network for Equitable Library Service

Through a unique combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography, Cherie Smith traces four generations of her immigrant family and, in doing so, charts the very course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over the last one hundred years. Mendel's Children: A Family Chronicle begins in the shtetles of Poland and Latvia in the 1890s and follows an often wild and woolly assortment of relatives as they strive to become Canadians.

"Picturesque," "immense," "fantastic," and "sublime" are a few of the ways early British travellers described the landscape of the Rocky Mountains and the surrounding terrain. As part of a long tradition of British travellers' tales, these tourists-explorers, sportsmen, writers, scientists, artists, missionaries, and merchants-sought ways to describe the vastness and strangeness of the North American landscape to a British audience.

Critical forces of culture and nature collide in this comprehensive history of Ellesmere Island in the age of contact. Surveying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lyle Dick presents an impressive treatment of European-Inuit contact in the High Arctic (the area of what is now the Quttinirpaaq National Park) while considering the roles of the natural environment and cultures as factors in human history.

Myth of the Barrens is a true account of a young Metis woman's discovery of the land and ancient spirits of the Canadian North. Bren Kolson travels with a Dene elder in winter across the Barrens, entering a world in which the landscape is both physical and spiritual -- the sacred land of the ancestors. Kolson vividly describes the challenges that lead her to a deeper understanding of both the land and herself, as she discovers how to not only survive but to thrive in this seemingly inhospitable landscape.

Neighbours and Networks explores the economic relationship that existed between the Blood Indian reserve and the surrounding region of southern Alberta between 1884 and 1939. The Blood tribe, though living on a reserve, refused to become economically isolated from the larger community and indeed became significant contributors to the economy of the area. Their land base was important to the ranching industry.

As a history of the development of self-government in education, Nunavik provides Native perspectives on formal education in Nunavik while offering readers a unique view into contemporary Inuit society. This book documents the development of education from the arrival of the first traders and missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century through the creation of the Kativik School Board and the evaluation of its operations by the Nunavik Education Task Force in the 1990s.

From the colonial era of waterborne transport, through nineteenth-century changes in transportation and communication, to globalization, the history of the Great Lakes Basin has been shaped by the people, goods, and capital crossing and recrossing the U.S.-Canadian border. During the past three centuries, the region has been buffeted by efforts to benefit from or defeat economic and political integration and by the politics of imposing, tightening, or relaxing the bisecting international border.

Winner of the 2014 Book of the Year Award from the Petroleum History Society! The importance of energy to the functioning of any economy has meant that energy industries are amongst the most regulated of industries. What might appear to be purely private decisions are made within a complex and evolving web of government regulations.

Policing the Wild North-west analyzes the effects of social phenomena—from political radicals and vagrants to prohibition bootleggers and black market profiteers—on provincial police in Alberta and Saskatchewan. These factors placed enormous demands on the development of policing and had a significant impact on specific and interrelated areas including the professionalization of police organizations within society, the shifting focus of policing, and the impact of policing on rates of crime.

In this comprehensive study of Belgian settlement in western Canada, Cornelius Jaenen shows that Belgian immigration was unique in its character and brought with it significant benefits out of proportion to its comparatively small numbers.