National Network for Equitable Library Service

Sam Steele, “the man who tamed the Gold Rush,” had a high-profile public career, yet his private life has been closely protected. Sam Steele: A Biography follows Steele’s rise from farm boy in backwoods Ontario to the much-lauded Major General Sir Samuel Benfield Steele.

This well-paced narrative recounts the story of the great Sioux chief Sitting Bull's retreat into Canada after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The story tells of the respect that developed between the fierce warrior and the celebrated Mountie Major James Walsh.

“My work as a scientist who studies bird parasites causes me to wonder about the hidden part of the drama unfolding before my eyes: the flying zoo that makes each bird what it is. As I gaze out at my favourite birds, I wonder what role their parasites have played in shaping their fascinating behaviours and alluring appearance.” — From Chapter 1 In The Flying Zoo, Michael Stock gives readers an enthusiastic tribute to birds and the parasites that live in and on them.

Diane Payment has a long personal association with Batoche; her study is the culmination of thirty years of documentary and field research as a participant-observer within the community. Her inquiry draws on a range of dictated and written historical sources, both Métis and non-Métis, as well as more recent oral history narratives and personal observations. The Free People is one of the few studies on Métis communities in western and northern Canada.

Translated from personal memoirs and diaries, this is a compelling story of Anthony Hlynka, the only sitting Member of Parliament of Ukrainian origin from 1940 to 1945. Representing the constituency of Vegreville, Alberta, for the Social Credit party, Hlynka was a high-profile Member of Parliament who garnered much attention from the English-language press. He was instrumental in raising awareness of human rights issues and the plight of displaced persons following the Second World War and was a major supporter of the so-called third wave of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada.

During a time of two world wars and a sluggish world economy, many Northern Europeans left their homelands to build the American and Canadian West with dreams of abundance and new life. Spanning a period from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, To Be a Cowboy recounts the dreams and realities of a father and a son. Otto Christensen came to North America in the early 1900s as an indentured farm worker from Denmark with a dream of becoming a successful farmer in Alberta.

"It is my hope, and the hope of the Office of the Treaty Commissioner, that this publication can help provide the historical context needed to intelligently and respectfully forge new relations between First Nations people and non-Aboriginal people in the province of Saskatchewan. It has already done so, in part, by facilitating the work of our office in bringing together the parties of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations and Canada to reach common understandings and to use the Treaties as a bridge from the past to the future ...

Alberta’s ranching heritage occupies an important place in the province’s historical consciousness. Trails and Trials documents the development of the beef cattle industry in Alberta from its open-range ranching phase to the beginnings of the modern era. This narrative history documents how the beef cattle industry responded to the challenges following the end of the open-range era through two world wars and the Great Depression and provides a new case study of Canada’s economic development and settlement history.

Trudeau appeared to enjoy the encounter. He stood his ground while escaping projectiles, including a tomato… In this insightful and lively history, Liberal insider Darryl Raymaker recalls the attempt to broker “a marriage from hell” between the federal Liberal Party and Alberta’s Social Credit government in the late 1960s. Raymaker uses his deep connections and backroom knowledge to trace the tangled political relationships that developed when charismatic statesman Pierre Trudeau confronted the forces of oil and agriculture in Canada’s west.

Looking back over the past half century, Jaques recounts the tumultuous history of the Alberta farm organization Unifarm. This book documents Alberta farmers’ quest to increase control over the forces that have had such an impact on their lives and describes how it led them to form organizations that have afforded them measures of stability and security throughout the past century. Unifarm, one of the most enduring of these organizations, is chronicled from its development in the 1970s to its reorganization as the Wild Rose Agricultural Producers in 1995.