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 …

In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swant …

Increasingly, Indigenous people are being drawn into global networks. In the long term, cultural isolation is unlikely to be a viable – even if sometimes desired – option, so how can Indigenous people protect and advance their cultural values in the face of pressure from an interconnected world?

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 images in the pages of this book -- animal, human and spirit faces -- evoke the powerful cultural legacy of the inhabitants of the Northwest Coast. Spirits of the Water presents 110 examples of the art produced by the Native peoples of a region of great linguistic, cultural and geographical diversity. Six essays by leading experts Paz Cabello, …

In Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney debunks claims that a networked society will provide the infrastructure for a political revolution and shows that the resources we need for understanding and making sound judgments about this new technology are surprisingly close at hand. By looking to thinkers who grappled with the relationship of society and tech …

This handbook describes the traditional uses by aboriginal people of more than 200 different plants from Canada's boreal forest. It is the result of original ethnobotanical fieldwork in 29 communities across the boreal forest region of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Natural resources of the boreal forest have always been essential to the diet …

In Feminists and Party Politics, the author examines the effort to bring feminism into the formal political arena through established political parties in Canada and the United States.

Two major sets of questions lie at the heart of this book. First, how have movement organizations approached partisan and electoral politics? To what extent have they …

The growing popularity of the broad, landscape-scale approach to forest management represents a dramatic shift from the traditional, stand-based focus on timber production. Ecology of a Managed Terrestrial Landscape responds to the increasing need of forest policy developers, planners, and managers for an integrated, comprehensive perspective on ec …

Canada and the United States exchange the world’s highest level of bilateral trade, valued at $1.4 billion a day. Two-thirds of this trade travels on trucks. Heavy Traffic examines the way in which the regulatory reform of American and Canadian trucking, coupled with free trade, has internationalized this vital industry.

Before deregulation, rest …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 subordination …

Over the last fifty years the nature of work and work injury has changed dramatically. Since the 1980s, workers’ compensation claims have grown steadily and insurance institutions are feeling the crunch. In Injury and the New World of Work, Terrence Sullivan emphasizes the precarious line between the expansion of needs-based justice and the prese …

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, …

In April 1999, the Inuit dream of a self-governing territory in the eastern Arctic - Nunavut (Our Land) - became a reality. In celebration of this historic event comes a new edition of Inuit Journey, a firsthand account of another turning point in Inuit history: the establishment in the early 1960s of member-owned, member-run Inuit co-operatives, w …

It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917, that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that Boas was doing with Tate’s stories? It is this q …

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 …

Originally published under the title La Voie des masques, Sylvia Modelski has translated Claude Levi-Strauss' explanation of the tribal masks of coastal British Columbia with reference to kinship ties, incest prohibition and myths.

In this lavishly produced volume, Joseph Plaskett has created a prose "life in art" as colourful and vital as his finest paintings. He begins with his early life in New Westminster, BC, at a time when there were no private galleries.

Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald were among his early mentors, and they helped him to win the first Emily Carr schola …

This important contribution to the study of Canadian elections forcefully argues that knowledge of the dynamics at the local level is essential to a full understanding of Canadian polity, its underlying social basis, and the factors that determine successful election campaigns. As such, Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian El …

Painting the Maple explores the critical interplay of race and gender in shaping Canadian culture, history, politics and health care. These interdisciplinary essays draw on feminist, postcolonial, and critical theory in a wide-ranging discussion that encompasses both high and popular forms of culture, the deliberation of policy and its execution, a …

Using postmodern and postcolonial conceptions of the body and the power relations of colonization, Kelm shows how a pluralistic medical system evolved among Canada’s most populous Aboriginal population. She explores the effect which Canada’s Indian policy has had on Aboriginal bodies and considers how humanitarianism and colonial medicine were …

Positioning the Missionary examines Anglican missionary work in nineteenth-century British Columbia. Its chief protagonists are John Booth Good, an agent of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the Nlha7kapmx poeple of southwestern B.C. Asking why the Nkha7kapmx embraced Good, how he sought to evangelize and civilize them, and how the …

“No one tradition alone offers a sufficient respect for other species. Taken together, they may offer a prospect for saner human-animal relations.” – From the book

Western conceptions of objectivity and individuality have resulted in a readier appreciation of the worth of the animals and nature than has been recognized. This provocative book …

This small, comprehensive guide offers practical advice on how to collect, dry and store plant specimens for botanical study. Intended for plant collectors who do not have access to herbarium equipment, this book describes how to use common household items to dry, press and store plants.

The Mountain Is Moving describes postwar Japanese society and the roles that women are expected to play within it. Based on interviews with hundreds of women, the book examines the education of women, marriage and child rearing, work outside the house, caring for the elderly, political power or lack of it, and volunteerism. Morley also examines a d …

Living on the banks of the turbulent Fraser River, the Nlaka'pamux people of Spuzzum have a long history of contact with non-aboriginal peoples. They watched as Hudson's Bay Company employees hacked a path through the mountains for the fur brigades, and over time they found themselves in the path of the Cariboo road, the CPR, and virtually every co …

Whales, although among our most important and interesting animals, have been little studied until recently. Almost a third of about seventy living cetacean species have been recorded in North American Pacific coast waters.

Our word whale describes glimpses of surfacing cetaceans; its Old English root hvael means "a wheel." A large whale's rolling ba …

In this book, the Gitksan and Gitanyow present their response to the use of the treaty process by the Nisga’a to expand into Gitksan and Gitanyow territory on the upper Nass River and demonstrate the ownership of their territory according to their own legal system. They call upon the ancient oral history (“adaawk”) and their intimate knowledg …

The creative world of a northern Native community is revealed in this innovative book. Once semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Dene Tha of northern Canada today live in government-built homes in the settlement of Chateh. Their lives are a distinct blend of old and new, in which more traditional forms of social control, healing, and praying ent …

Historians have not usually identified British Columbia as a rural province. B.C. historiography has been dominated by mining, logging, and fishing, and theorized within the context of large-scale, laissez-faire capitalism and economic individualism. Silences in the historical record have exacerbated this situation and lent tacit support to the dom …

In this age of globalization many legal experts see evidence of swift global movement toward an eventual single "world legal system." Yet, the trend to political and economic integration in some parts of the world is matched by the trend to disintegration in others, where strong cultural and political resistance to external influences exists. Asia- …

First Fish, First People brings together writers from two continents and four countries whose traditional cultures are based on Pacific wild salmon: Ainu from Japan; Ulchi and Nyvkh from Siberia; Okanagan and Coast Salish from Canada; and Makah, Warm Springs, and Spokane from the United States remember the blessedness and mourn the loss of the wild …

Hidden Dimensions is a collection of essays drawn from papers presented at an international conference in Vancouver, British Columbia in April 1995. Scholars from around the globe examine several aspects of wetland archaeology in North America, Mexico, Europe, eastern Siberia, and New Zealand. Some of the essays in this volume explore environmental …

Combining qualitative research, personal experience, and scholarly literature Ross Green looks at the evolution of the Canadian criminal justice system and the values upon which it is based against the Aboriginal concepts of justice. Using his personal experiences as a defence lawyer, case studies of several communities, as well as interviews with …

In the last two decades there has been positive change in how the Canadian legal system defines Aboriginal and treaty rights. Yet even after the recognition of those rights in the Constitution Act of 1982, the legacy of British values and institutions as well as colonial doctrine still shape how the legal system identifies and interprets Aboriginal …

This book is a photo journal of the special relationship between the horse and the Okanagan people. Included are stories from Okanagan oral tradition, Okanagan Elders' statements, and stories about the people and events depicted in the photographs.Photographs date from the late 1800s to the 1990s; most date from the first half of the twentieth cent …

In The Lifeline of the Oregon Country, James Gibson compellingly immerses the reader in one of the most intractable problems faced by the Hudson's Bay Company: how to realize wealth from such a remote and formidable land. The personalities, places, obstacles, and operations involved in the brigade system are all described in fascinating detail, str …

This important and timely book is a balance of the most gruesome elements of assimilation: church-run schools, the child welfare system, survivors of sexual abuse, and Foetal Alcohol Syndrome counter-balanced against heroic stories of children who survived, fought back, and found their way home.

Harrrowing stories are presented wherever possible i …