National Network for Equitable Library Service

Lacrosse has been a central element of Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. The Creator’s Game focuses on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities from the 1860s to the 1990s, exploring Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and Indigenous identity formation.

Canadian members of Parliament (MPs) are often dismissed as “trained seals,” helpless to do anything other than take commands from party leaders. Representation in Action challenges this view of MPs and shows that the ways they represent their constituents are as diverse as Canada itself. Royce Koop, Heather Bastedo, and Kelly Blidook examine the activities MPs engage in to represent their ridings and determine what accounts for differences in style and agency.

Migrant workers, though long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Marsden shows that people with precarious migration status face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their access to institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards.

There is increasing pressure on university scholars to reach beyond the “ivory tower” and engage in collaborative research with communities. But what exactly is community-based participatory research (CBPR) and what does engagement look like? This book presents stories about CBPR from Manitoba Research Alliance projects in marginalized communities. Bringing together experienced researchers with new scholars and community practitioners, the stories describe the impetus for the projects, how they came to be implemented, and how CBPR is still being used within the community.

Drawing on the insights of Indigenous feminist legal theory, Emily Snyder examines representations of Cree law and gender in books, videos, graphic novels, educational websites, online lectures, and a video game. Although these resources promote the revitalization of Cree law and the principle of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), Snyder argues that they do not capture the complexities of gendered power relations.

The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption. Liverant’s fresh approach connects the emergence and diffusion of these ideas with changes in political processes and social policy.

What do we mean by left wing or right wing? People started using the language of a political spectrum when early twentieth-century political parties began to distinguish their platforms by offering different approaches to income distribution. The Terrific Engine examines how income taxation modernized political language over the period from the 1911 election through the Second World War. David Tough controversially argues that income taxation was established by popular demand, first to replace existing taxes and then to address income inequality through equalizing social programs.

The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy. Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) was the last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, and her biography opens a window onto the political and social landscape of her time. She embraced issues such as minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, and employment equality throughout her six decades of activism.

Lose weight. Quit smoking. Exercise. For over a century, public health campaigns have encouraged Canadians to adopt healthy habits in order to prolong lives, cost the state less, and produce more efficient workers. Be Wise! Be Healthy! explores the history of public health from the 1920s to the 1970s and its emphasis on health as a responsibility of citizenship. But public health campaigns can stigmatize marginalized populations by implying that poor health is due to inadequate self-care, despite clear links between health and external factors such as poverty.

In the 1990s, headlines about declining caribou populations grabbed international attention. Were caribou the canary in the coal mine for climate change, or did declining numbers reflect overharvesting or failed attempts at scientific wildlife management? Grounded in community-based research in northern Canada, a region in the forefront of co-management efforts, these collected stories and essays bring to the fore the insights of the Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, and Sahtú, people for whom caribou stewardship has been a way of life for centuries.