National Network for Equitable Library Service

Five hundred years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: substance use disorders and shockingly high rates of depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. With passionate logic and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others' stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization.

This accessible and engaging book introduces readers to key historical events, and the women who were central to them, in the struggle for women’s equality in Canada. Four and a half decades after the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, the feminist struggle is as necessary as ever — but thanks to the hard work of activist women, many forms of discrimination are a thing of the past.

For a country as wealthy as Canada, poverty is utterly unnecessary. In About Canada: Poverty, Jim Silver illustrates that poverty is about more than a shortage of money: it is complex and multifaceted and can profoundly damage the human spirit. At the centre of this analysis are Canada’s neoliberal economic policies, which have created conditions that make a growing number of people vulnerable to low income, vanishing public services and poor physical health.

The voices of young female prostitutes offer a chorus of disturbing firsthand perspectives on sexual exploitation and the inadequacies of government programs designed to help them in this account of the sex trade. To provide a full picture of the complex issues of the sex trade, discussions are included of health and safety concerns, the effect of prostitution on identity, the prevalence of violence, the legislation passed to protect prostitutes, the factors that force young women to become prostitutes, and the support required to facilitate their transition out of the sex trade.

Living the Changes explores the nature and extent of women's changing realities. The contributors include writers, artists, academics, street kids and social workers, and range in age from nine to seventy-three. Their topics reflect the diversity and complexity of the concerns of contemporary women - birthing and aging, body image, culture, drugs, violence, sexual abuse, prostitution, reproductive technology, and spirituality.

Published some two decades ago, Elizabeth Comack's Women in Trouble explored the connections between the women's abuse histories and their law violations as well as their experience of imprisonment in an aged facility. What has changed for incarcerated women in those twenty years? Are experiences of abuse continuing to have an impact on the lives of criminalized women? How do women find the experience of imprisonment in a new facility?

Violence in the lives of women with disabilities is not a new problem, but it is a problem about which little has been written. This gap in our knowledge needs to be addressed, as women with disabilities are valuable members of our society whose experiences need to be made known. Without such knowledge, political action for social justice and for the prevention of violence is impossible.

Social movements across North America have suffered from the rise of neoliberalism. Feminism in particular has not been able to call itself a structured movement since the 1990s with the end of National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Instead, feminism and other social movements have survived in a grassroots, disjointed manner.

While games of chance have been part of the Aboriginal cultural landscape since before European contact, large-scale commercial gaming facilities within First Nations communities are a relatively new phenomenon in Canada. First Nations Gaming in Canadais the first multidisciplinary study of the role of gaming in indigenous communities north of the 49th parallel.

With the advent of Aboriginal street gangs such as Indian Posse, Manitoba Warriors, and Native Syndicate, Winnipeg garnered a reputation as the 'gang capital of Canada.' Yet beyond the stereotypes of outsiders, little is known about these street gangs and the factors and conditions that have produced them. Indians Wear Red locates Aboriginal street gangs as a form of resistance to colonialism. But just as colonialism has been destructive, so too has street gang activity, including the illegal trade in drugs.