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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The essays in Beyond the City Limits, all published here for the first time, decisively break this silence and challenge traditional readings of B.C. history. In this wide-ranging collection, R.W. Sandwell draws together a distinguished group of contributors who bring expertise, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives taken from social and poli …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The popular image of the Klondike is of a rush of white, male adventurers who overcame great physical and geographical obstacles in their quest for gold. Young, white, single American men carried forward the ideals and structures of the western frontier. It was a man's world made respectable only after the turn of the century with the arrival of wh …

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 …

Historically, Aboriginal people have had little influence on the development of Native policy from within government; as a result political organizations have been established to lobby government on Native peoples’ issues. Using his experience as director of land claims for the Métis Association of Alberta, Joe Sawchuk explains how these Aborigi …

Anthropologists have traditionally studied Europe’s “others” and the marginalized and excluded within Europe’s and North America’s boundaries. This book turns the anthropologist’s spyglass in the opposite direction: on the law, the institution that quintessentially embodies and reproduces Western power.

The Pleasure of the Crown offers a …

Betty Issenman examines all aspects of winter and summer Inuit clothing, going back 4000 years, with particular emphasis on northern Canadian Inuit. She also describes the kinds of material and tools used to make the clothing. The focus is on on Inuit clothing as protection, identity, and culture bearer, roles it has played for thousands of years. …

Skookum, cultus, hyack, saltchuck, klahowya, tillicum: It is in words like these that the last vestiges of a lost British Columbian language remain. It was known as "Chinook." Its use today is mainly confined to colloquialisms, and place names like Boston Bar, Canim Lake, Illahee Mountain, Snass Creek, and Skookumchuck. It began as a trading jargon …

On December 11, 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its decision in the historical aboriginal title action known a Delgamuukw versus The Queen. The decision vindicated the fifty-two Gitkan and We'suwe'en chiefs named as the plaintiffs in the court case, and completely rewrites the rules for resolving Native title in Canada. Epic battles with …

A decade ago, a nearly complete elasmosaur skeleton was found near Courtenay on Vancouver Island, in rocks dating from 80 million years ago, and it caused a sensation. Finds like this remind us that British Columbia is home to some of the richest marine fossil beds in the world, most of them on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands which lie along …

Where land meets sea, strange things happen, and most of them end up as stories. Like new driftlogs on a gravel beach, nine of the best are gathered here in issue number eighteen of the bestselling Raincoast Chronicles series. From a study of log barging on the BC coast to a controversial essay on who really shelled the Cape Estevan lighthouse in 1 …

If you're just starting out playing hockey, let the stars, coaches, and strategists of the NHL show you how to master goaltending and play the game the way the pros do it. See how the great goaltenders have mastered all aspects of defending the net. On every page you get full-color close-up action photos of goalies in game situations--both the pros …

The Yellow Pear is a brave and moving document, using words and art, of what it means to be Canadian.
Co-published with the Burnaby Art Gallery, this is a collection of deeply moving narratives (in both English and Mandarin) and illustrations about the artist's transition to a new life in a new land; his life in Canada resonates with the memories …

As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that …

Walking in Indian Moccasins is the first work to offer a different view of the Tommy Douglas provincial government in Sakatchewan: their policies, their applications, and their shortcomings. Much more than that, however, it is a careful account of the development of Indian and Metis people in Saskatchewan in the post-war period. The goal of the CCF …

This book describes the dramatic economic and spatial transformation in China’s Pearl River Delta region over the past decade. Reforms introduced by the Chinese government since 1978 were the cause of this transformation. The Pearl River Delta has had the highest recorded rate of economic growth in East Asia and has done so through a pattern of d …

This book is the first complete descriptive grammar of Lillooet, an Indigenous Canadian language spoken in British Columbia, now threatened with extinction. The author discusses three major aspects of the language – sound system, word structure, and syntax – in great detail. The classical structuralism method of analysis, as developed in North …

Like the renowned American writer Edmund Wilson, who began to learn Hungarian at the age of 65, Richard Teleky started his study of that difficult language as an adult. Unlike Wilson, he is a third-generation Hungarian-American with a strong desire to understand how his ethnic background has affected the course of his life. "Exploring my ethnicity …

A much-loved Canadian classic, Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver was first published in 1911 and has been in print ever since. Through her poetic, romantic retelling of these Native legends, Pauline Johnson takes the reader back to a time long ago, before the city of Vancouver was built, when the land belonged to the Squamish people. These leg …

A Stake in the Future is a comprehensive study of the Whitehorse Mining Initiative, which was first conceived by the leaders in the Canadian mining industry. The goal was to revitalize the mining industry, attract new investment and forge an alliance with major stakeholders such as government, environmental groups, First Nations, the mining industr …

Jack Shaw spent a lifetime studying trout and the insects they feed on, with the aim of creating fly designs that would attract the wiliest of fish. In this edition of his bestselling book, he tells fly fishers how they too can challenge trophy trout with homemade flies. Jack provides information on basic equipment and materials and gives instructi …

Before he passed away, the Haida artist Bill Reid was internationally renowned for his totem poles and other large pieces, as well as for his work on a small scale in silver and gold. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, is a bronze canoe six metres (20 feet) long, filled to overflowing with the creatures of Haida mythology. Two copies of th …

For more the 200 years, controversy has simmered over the subject of cannibalism on the Pacific Northwest Coast. So heated has the topic become that many scholars have hesitated to engage in the debate. Now, using an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach, historian Jim McDowell offers a comprehensive study of cannibalism on the coast. Beginnin …

In conventional histories of the Canadian prairies, Native people disappear from view after the Riel Rebellions. In this groundbreaking study, Frank Tough examines the role of Native peoples, both Indian and Metis, in the economy of northern Manitoba from Treaty 1 to the Depression. He argues that they did not become economically obsolete but rathe …

Autobiography of a Tattoo is an investigative literary work about the education and pursuit of homosexual desire. Its mixture of serial stories and modernist meditations invites readers on a journey that rangers from post?Wall Berlin to Plato's Athens. Stan Persky, the author of Buddy's and Then We Take Breaks, here breaks through the current impas …