National Network for Equitable Library Service

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.

The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue. Instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is nonlinear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents.

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An accessible introduction to disability studies, Disability Politics and Theory provides a concise survey of disability history, exploring the concept of disability as it has been conceived from the late 19th century to the present. Further, A.J. Withers examines when, how and why new categories of disability are created and describes how capitalism benefits from and enforces disabled people's oppression. Critiquing the model that currently dominates the discipline, the social model of disability, this book offers an alternative: the radical disability model.

For many Canadians, the state of our health care and medical system is at the top of the public agenda. By following the growth and development of modern medicine in one Canadian province, Manitoba Medicine provides an insight into where our present medical system came from and how it developed. Beginning with a description of some early Aboriginal healing practices and of the physicians of the Red River Settlement, Manitoba Medicine follows the struggles in the 1870s to establish what would become the first medical college and the first major hospitals in Western Canada.

Politics in Manitoba is the first comprehensive look at the Manitoba party system. It combines political history with contemporary public opinion data to reveal the political and voter trends that have shaped the province of Manitoba over the past 130 years. Written by Christopher Adams, Politics in Manitoba details the histories of the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, and the New Democratic Party from 1870 to 2007.

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.