Hobnobbing with a Countess and Other Okanagan Adventures
In 1891, Alice Barrett moved from Port Dover, Ontario, to the Okanagan Valley to keep house for her brother and uncle. She soon married Harold Parke, a former NWMP officer, and spent the next decade recording her experiences in a series of notebooks sent to her Ontario family. Few women’s diaries have survived from that time, and Barrett Parke re …
Plains Indian Rock Art
Archaeologists James Keyser and Michael Klassen show us the origins, diversity, and beauty of Plains rock art. The seemingly endless variety of images include humans, animals, weapons, masks, mazes, handprints, finger lines, geometric and abstract forms, tally marks, hoofprints, and the wavy lines and starbursts that humans universally associate wi …
This Blessed Wilderness
The twenty-five years between 1821 and 1846 were turbulent but important years in the history of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest: 1821 saw the merger of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, and 1846 saw the signing of the Oregon Treaty, which established the Canada-U.S. border.
Archibald McDonald was a man who experienced t …
Scars of War
Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still …
Aboriginal Autonomy and Development in Northern Quebec and Labrador
The Canadian North is witness to some of the most innovative efforts by Aboriginal peoples to reshape their relations with “mainstream” political and economic structures. Northern Quebec and Labrador are particularly dynamic examples of these efforts, composed of First Nations territories that until the 1970s had never been subject to treaty bu …
Butterflies of British Columbia
Butterflies are found everywhere in British Columbia. Written for butterfly watchers, butterfly gardeners, naturalists, and biologists, Butterflies of British Columbia will provide years of enjoyment for the butterfly enthusiast.
The Butterflies of British Columbia
- provides the most complete coverage of species and subspecies of any North America …
Birds of British Columbia - 4 Volume Set
The four volumes of The Birds of British Columbia provide unprecedented coverage of BC's birds, presenting a wealth of information on the ornithological history, habitat, breeding habits, migratory movements, seasonality, and distribution patterns of each of the 472 species of birds. The text is supported by hundreds of full-colour pictures, includ …
Telling Tales
Women played a vital role in the shaping of the West in Canada between the 1880s and 1940s. Yet surprisingly little is known about their contributions or the differences sex and gender made to the opportunities and obstacles women encountered. Telling Tales contributes to the rewriting of western Canada’s past by integrating women into the shifti …
Quasi-Democracy?
Many Canadian parties are shifting their process for selecting leaders from delegate conventions to methods that -- at least in theory -- allow all members to vote for the leader. In the leadership selections of the 1990s, Alberta's governing Conservatives used a primary balloting system, the opposition Liberal Party allowed members to vote by phon …
Democracy
What is democracy? Is it the movement toward united self-government in which equality is our highest value? Or is it about preserving the freedom of individuals? In Democracy: A History of Ideas, Boris DeWiel argues that neither of these popular definitions is correct. Inspired by Isaiah Berlin, he describes democracy as a contest of values. Equali …
A People's Dream
In this provocative and passionate book, Dan Russell outlines the history of Aboriginal self-government in Canada. He compares it to that of the United States, where, for over 150 years, tribes have practised self-government -- domestic dependent nationhood. Russell provides specific examples of how those institutions of government operate, and elo …
Early Childhood Care and Education in Canada
Larry Prochner and Nina Howe reflect the variation within the field by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of experts to address key issues in the field: What programs are currently available and what are their origins? How are adults prepared for work in these programs? How do children within the programs spend their day? What policies gui …
The Canadian Department of Justice and the Completion of Confederation 1867-78
The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …
The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80
In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about c …
Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision
This book seeks to clarify postcolonial Indigenous thought beginning at the new millennium. It represents the voices of the first generation of global Indigenous scholars and converges those voices, their analyses, and their dreams of a decolonized world. -- Marie Battiste, Author.
The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an …
Flexible Crossroads
British Columbia's forest economy is at a crucial crossroads. Its survival, Roger Hayter argues, rests on its ability to remain flexible and open to innovation -- a future by no means assured given recent policy initiatives and the current contested nature of British Columbia's forests.
Flexible Crossroads looks at the contemporary restructuring of …
Islands of Truth
In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specifi …
Potlatch at Gitsegukla
William Beynon was born in 1888 in Victoria to a Welsh father and a Tsimshian mother. He was an accomplished ethnographer and had a long career documenting the traditions of the Tsimshian, Nisga'a, and Gitksan. In 1945 he attended and actively participated in five days of potlatches and totem pole raisings at Gitksan village of Gitsegukla. There he …
Japan's Emergence as a Modern State - 60th anniv. ed.
Originally published in 1940 by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), this classic work by a leading 20th-century Japanologist has an enduring value. Japan's Emergence as a Modern State examines the problems and accomplishments of the Meiji period (1868-1912).
This edition includes forewords by: R. Gordon Robertson, a former member of the Canadi …
The Social Life of Stories
In this illuminating and theoretically sophisticated study of indigenous oral narratives, Julie Cruikshank moves beyond the text to explore the social power and significance of storytelling. Circumpolar Native peoples today experience strikingly different and often competing systems of narrative and knowledge. These systems include more traditional …
The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney
The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney is a biography of a man who played a key role in the events which marked the political, social, and economic transformation of western Canada in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An immigrant adventurer seeking his fortune in the colonies, Dewdney was embroiled in the gold rushes of the 1860s, the B.C. d …
Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism
The militarisation of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka began in the 1970s when attempts to reconcile by peaceful means the Tamils’ claim for basic individual and collective rights with the Sinhalese need to allay their chronic sense of insecurity finally failed. Since then the struggle has intensified, erupting successively in the burning …
Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics
Canadian party politics collapsed in the early 1990s. This book is about that collapse, about the end of a party system, with a unique pattern of party organization and competition, that had governed Canada’s national politics for several decades, and about the ongoing struggle to build its successor. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics discusses …
No Place to Run
Historians of the First World War have often dismissed the important role of poison gas in the battles of the Western Front. Tim Cook shows that the serious threat of gas did not disappear with the introduction of gas masks. By 1918, gas shells were used by all armies to deluge the battlefield, and those not instructed with a sound anti-gas doctrin …
Since the Time of the Transformers
This book examines over 4000 years of culture history of the related Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah peoples on western Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. Using data from the Toquaht Archaeological Project, McMillan challenges current ethnographic interpretations that show little or no change in these peoples’ culture. Instead, by co …
Legends of Our Times
Throughout the world, the cowboy is an instantly recognized symbol of the North American West. Legends of Our Times breaks the stereotype of “cowboys and Indians” to show an almost unknown side of the West. It tells the story of some of the first cowboys – Native peoples of the northern Plains and Plateau.
Through stories, poetry, art, and re …
The Burden of History
This book is an ethnography of the cultural politics of Native/non-Native relations in a small interior BC city – Williams Lake – at the height of land claims conflicts and tensions. Furniss analyses contemporary colonial relations in settler societies, arguing that “ordinary” rural Euro-Canadians exercise power in maintaining the subordina …
Once Upon an Oldman
Once Upon an Oldman is an account of the controversy that surrounded the Alberta government's construction of a dam on the Oldman River to provide water for irrigation in the southern part of the province. Jack Glenn argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the governments of Canada and Alberta are not dedicated to protecting the environment an …
Another Kind of Justice
Another Kind of Justice is the first historical survey of Canadian military law, providing insights into military justice in Canada, the purpose of military law, and the level of legal professionalism within the Canadian military. After delving into the British roots of Canadian military law, Chris Madsen brings his discussion up to date with analy …
Huron-Wendat
In this book, Georges Sioui, who is himself Wendat, redeems the original name of his people and tells their centuries-old history by describing their social ideas and philosophy and the relevance of both to contemporary life. The question he poses is a simple one: after centuries of European and then other North American contact and interpretation, …
Privileging the Past
What makes Northwest Coast Native American art authentic? And why, when most of art history is a history of the avant-garde, is tradition so deeply valued by contemporary Native American artists and their patrons? In Privileging the Past Judith Ostrowitz approaches these questions through a careful consideration of replicas, reproductions, and cre …
Pacific Empires
A new interest in European maritime exploration was aroused with the publication of the first volume of J.C. Beaglehole's edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook in 1955. In the forty-odd years since then, our knowledge of this exploration -- and of the imperialism of which it was a part -- has expanded enormously. We now recognise that the s …
A History of Domestic Space
This is a history of domestic space in Canada. Peter Ward looks at how spaces in the Canadian home have changed over the last three centuries, and how family and social relationships have shaped – and been shaped by – these changing spaces. A fundamental element of daily life for individuals and families is domestic privacy, that of individuals …
Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600-1945
In Japanese Historians and the National Myths, John Brownlee examines how Japanese historians between 1600 and 1945 interpreted the ancient myths of their origins. Ancient tales tell of Japan's creation in the Age of the Gods, and of Jinmu, a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess and first emperor of the imperial line. These founding myths went unch …