Guide to Indian Quillworking
A guide to North American Indian Quillworking. Quillwork, once practiced by Great Lakes and Plains Indian tribes, has inspired Christy Ann Hensler to save this delicate art from extinction. Mrs. Hensler's detailed step-by-step instructions and how-to sketches describe the techniques of quillworking, from plucking and preparing the quills, to finish …
Histories, Territories and Laws of the Kitwancool
The Kitwancool people live in a village of the same name on a tributary of the Skeena River, near Hazelton. In his introduction, Wilson Duff says, "the Kitwancool think of themselves as an independent and completely autonomous tribe." This book, written by the Kitwancool, contains statements about their history, territories, laws and customs. It is …
Chiefs of the Sea and Sky
This book is drawn from Haida Monumental Art, the most important work yet published on Haida culture. Chiefs of the Sea and Sky presents an overview of extensive research carried out by archeologist George MacDonald in the 1960s and 1970s to document the history of the Haida villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
In this abridgement, MacDonald re …
The Happiest Man in the World and Other Stories
The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear as they seem to be — husbands and wives, fat …
A White Man's Province
Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association.
A White Man’s Province examines how British Columbians changed their attitudes towards Asian immigrants from one of toleration in colonial times to vigorous hostility by the turn of the century and describes how politicians responded to popular …
The Voyage of the Komagata Maru
In May 1914, 400 Sikhs left for British Columbia by chartered ship, resolved to claim their right to equal treatment with white citizens of the British Empire and force entry into Canada. They were anchored off Vancouver for over two months, enduring extreme physical privation and harrassment by immigration officials, but defying federal deportatio …
Resistance and Renewal
One of the first books published to deal with the phenomenon of residential schools in Canada, Resistance and Renewal is a disturbing collection of Native perspectives on the Kamloops Indian Residential School(KIRS) in the British Columbia interior. Interviews with thirteen Natives, all former residents of KIRS, form the nucleus of the book, a fra …
Like a Child of the Earth
Like a Child of the Earth, the first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy, won the Prix France-Québec in 1976. In it, the largely self-taught artist and author, who left school at the age of fourteen to work in a factory, reflects upon her “years of wandering before encountering painting and writing.” Though a first nove …
Stoney Creek Woman
The captivating story of Mary John (who passed away in 2004), a pioneering Carrier Native whose life on the Stoney Creek reserve in central BC is a capsule history of First Nations life from a unique woman's perspective. A mother of twelve, Mary endured much tragedy and heartbreak--the pangs of racism, poverty, and the deaths of six children--but …
Spider Woman
A traditional northwest coast legend for ages six to adult, told simply and gently be one of BC's best-loved writers.
". . . should be added to any collection of materials concerned with native peoples."
-Canadian Materials
Coast Salish Essays
Wayne Suttles has devoted much of his professional life to research on the cultures of the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, especially the Coast Salish of the Georgia Strait-Puget Sound Basin. Born and raised in this region, he has been guided by a life-long love of its natural environment and wish to know how its Native peoples lived in it …
Local Boy Makes Good
This book does more than collect three of John Gray’s musical plays in one volume. In his preface to each play, and in his charming and wide-ranging introduction, Gray takes this opportunity to offer his readers some startling insights into the process by which his plays have come about; into his ongoing concern that his audiences not experience …
An Error in Judgement
On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Nati …
Indian Education in Canada, Volume 2
The two volumes comprising Indian Education in Canada present the first full-length discussion of this important subject since the adoption in 1972 of a new federal policy moving toward Indian control of Indian education. Volume 1 analyzes the education of Indian children by whites since the arrival of the first Europeans in Canada. Volume 2 is con …
Orca's Song
Orca's Song is the tale of the love between Orca and Eagle-Flies-High, and explains the origin of the killer whale's song and exuberant dance.
Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image
Jack Shadbolt was inspired in his formative years by his contact with Emily Carr and with her brooding works portraying the remnants of Indian villages against the overwhelming wilderness. He made sketches of Indian artefacts and the Cowichan Reserve in the 1930s, but it was only after World War II that elements of Indian art began to show up in hi …
Jitters
Jitters, David French’s sophisticated backstage comedy, opens on the night of a preview of a new play, “The Care and Treatment of Roses.” Within minutes, the audience is plunged into the world of the theatre, a world of instant loves and hates, easily bruised egos, contradictory interpretations of role and script—all complicated by crises …
Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism
Challenging standard dependency theory, William Carroll argues from empirical evidence that Canada's financial-industrial elite have maintained and consolidated their competitive position at the centre of an inter-corporate network. Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism thus acknowledges the unusually high degree to which capital is concentrated …
A Narrow Vision
In A Narrow Vision, Brian Titley chronicles Scott's career in the Department of Indian Affairs and evaluates developments in Native health, education, and welfare between 1880 and 1932. He shows how Scott's response to challenges such as the making of treaties in northern Ontario, land claims in British Columbia, and the status of the Six Nations c …
Incredible Eskimo
The Book is a story of survival and hope in the Central Canadian Arctic. Father Raymond's first hand accounts of survival and life with the Eskimo. For twelve arduous but captivating years, Raymond de Coccola was, for all intents and purposes, a Barren Land Eskimo. Trained as an Oblate missionary, he ministered to the people of the Central Canadian …
Robes of Power
The button blanket is eye-catching, prestigious and treasured -- one of the most spectacular embellishments to the Indian culture of the Northwest Coast and a unique form of graphic and narrative art. The traditional crest-style robe is the sister of the totem pole and, like the pole, proclaims hereditary rights, obligations and powers. Unlike the …
Indian Education in Canada, Volume 1
The two volumes comprising Indian Education in Canada present the first full-length discussion of this important subject since the adoption in 1972 of a new federal policy moving toward Indian control of Indian education. Volume 1 analyzes the education of Indian children by whites since the arrival of the first Europeans in Canada. Volume 2 is con …
Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon
Douglas Glover is at his versatile best in this new collection of short stories. Urbane, stylish and slightly off-beat, the stories touch on the lives of a wide variety of human beings, whose only shared experience is the age in which they happen to meet: an abbot and a tramp sharing a seat on a Mexican train, a retarded farm boy and his incontinen …
How Raven Freed the Moon
A beautifully illustrated book for children ages 6 and up relating the classic northwest coast myth telling how Raven, the trickster, freed the moon from the old fisherwoman's cedar chest and carried it to its rightful place in the heavens. Entrancingly retold from the female viewpoint by the celebrated author of Dreamspeaker and Daughters of Coppe …
How the Loon Lost her Voice
The famous northwest coast Indian myth, sometimes called "Raven Steals the Light" telling how Loon, Raven, and all the animals rallied to retrieve the daylight from behind its wall of ice after it was stolen by evil spirits. Amusingly retold for ages six to adult by the well-known Canadian poet and novelist.
The Subarctic Fur Trade
The papers in this book focus on themes which have been near the centre of fur trade scholarship: the identification of Indian motivations; the degree to which Indians were discriminating consumers and creative participants; and the extent of Native dependency on the trade. Spanning the period from the seventeenth century up to and including the tw …
A Sarcee Grammar
Likely to become one of the classic works in Amerindian linguistics, this book presents a comprehensive grammar of Sarcee, an Athapaskan language spoken in southern Alberta. Based on the voluminous notes collected by Edward Sapir in 1922 and supplemented by extensive data from Cook's own work with the few remaining speakers of Sarcee, the book not …
White Hoods
White Hoods is the first book about the Hooded Empire in Canada. Award?winning journalist and author Julian Sher traces the Canadian Ku Klux Klan from its birth in the early 1920s, through its powerful influence within Saskatchewan's Conservative party in the 1920s and 1930s, to its renaissance under James McQuirter in the 1980s. McQuirter led the …
Ninstints
Ninstints, located on Anthony Island, one of the smallest and most southerly of the Queen Charlotte chain, contains the vestiges of the great wooden structures and houses of the Kunghit Haida people who abandoned the village in the late 1800s. George MacDonald combines archival material and scientific and photographic evidence to record what is kno …
Walsh
A historical documentary of Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn. The play examines Sitting Bull’s relationship with superintendent Walsh of the North West Mounted Police and is the study of the disillusionment of a man who believes in his government’s integrity but who is betrayed by that government. …
Haida Monumental Art
During the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, images of the Haida’s immense cedar houses and soaring totem poles were captured by photographers who travelled to then-remote villages such as Masset and Skidegate to marvel at, and record, what they saw there. Haida Monumental Art includes a large number of these remarkable photographs. They de …
As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows
This collection of papers focuses on Canadian Native history since 1763 and presents an overview of official Canadian Indian policy and its effects on the Indian, Inuit, and Metis. Issues and themes covered include colonial Indian policy, constitutional developments, Indian treaties and policy, government decision-making and Native responses reflec …
River of Tears
A young black girl disappears from Cincinnati's West End. No witnesses, no leads. Two days later, a white girl the same age is snatched from Hyde Park Square. Cincinnati's mayor receives a letter brutally stating: "Find the black girl and we'll return the white girl."
The fuse lit, two female detectives race to uncover the kidnappers. Hope dwindles …
A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend
Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed here in A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs and Native informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this book a comprehensive surv …
Totem Poles
The massive wood carvings unique to the Indian peoples of the Northwest Coast arouse a sense of wonder in all who see them. This guide helps the reader to understand and enjoy the form and meaning of totem poles and other sculptures. The author describes the origin and place of totem poles in Indian culture – as ancestral emblems, as expressions …
Orchids of North America
This practical guide to the identification of North American species is not only a useful and reliable addition to any enthusiast's library-it is also splendidly beautiful. Although many of our orchids are modest little plants, hard to find and sometimes difficult to appreciate because of their small size, they are captured here in closeups that br …
Argillite
An exploration of the art of the Haida, an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Their main territory is the archipelago of Haida Gwaii in northern British Columbia, Canada. Haida society continues to produce a robust and highly stylized art form, a leading component of Northwest Coast art. In particular, this work expl …
Strangers in Blood
For two centuries (1670-1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyages the myriad waterways of Rupert’s Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson’s Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer’s survi …
The Salish People: Volume IV
Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. He was a pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, where he raised his family in a log cabin. He devoted many years of field work to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthro …
The Salish People: Volume I
Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada an …
The Salish People: Volume II
Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years studying the Salish and publishing in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada and as a fellow of the …
The Salish People: Volume III
Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada an …
Totem Poles of the Northwest
The illustrations primarily illustrate Haida poles, the tools carvers used, and the meaning of the symbolic figures seen on the poles.
Eskimo Life of Yesterday
Detailed account of life as an Eskimo.This book was first published as a tribute to the Eskimo peoples. It presents a simple and classic view of Eskimo life from Labrador, the Canadian Arctic, Alaska and Siberia at the turn of the Century.
Images Stone: British Columbia
- Thirty centuries of Northwest Indian Sculpture.
Theme for Diverse Instruments
Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories, some of which were first published in The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. Jane Rule is also the author of Desert of the Heart and Memory Board.
In the sensual and tender “Middle Children,” two closeted young lesbians radiate the joy of their love …