About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
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Description
The first-ever biography written about a woman of the Northwest Coast's Kwakwakawakw people, Paddling to Where I Stand presents the memoirs of Agnes Alfred (c.1890-1992), a non-literate noble Qwiqwasutinuxw woman of the Kwakwakawakw Nation and one of the last great storytellers among her peers in the classic oral tradition. Agnes Alfred documents through myths, historical accounts, and personal reminiscences the foundations and the enduring pulse of her living culture. But this is more than another anthropological interpretation; it is the first-hand account of the greatest period of change the Kwakwaka’wakw people experienced since first contact with Europeans, and Alfred’s memoirs flow from her urgent desire to pass on her knowledge to younger generations.
Contributor Notes
Martine J. Reid (editor) is an independent scholar whose interests are in the field of Northwest Coast cultural and aesthetic anthropology. Daisy Sewid-Smith (translator) is Agnes Alfred's granddaughter, a cultural historian, and a Kwakwaka'wakw language instructor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.
Awards
- Commended, BC Historical Federation Book Prize, BC Historical Federation
Editorial Reviews
The pleasure of reading Paddling to Where I Stand ... will be found, first, in Reid’s interrogation of autobiography and her strategies for ensuring that this story is Agnes Alfred’s story, and second, in the successful outcome of these strategies. Agnes Alfred emerges, in her own words, the “extraordinary woman with an extraordinary life” that her granddaughter describes in her funeral elegy.
— University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, winter 2006
Reid carefully conveys gestures, moods, and inflections evident in storytelling, enhancing authenticity. Paddling to Where I Stand deserves a spot in every Canadian library’s shelf.
— Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. XXXVII, no.2, 2005
