White Settler Reserve
In 1875, the Canadian government created a reserve for Icelandic immigrants on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. Hoping for a better life in Canada, many of the New Iceland colonists found only hardship, disappointment, or death. Those who survived scurvy and smallpox faced crop failure, internal dissension, and severe flooding that nearly ende …
Not Fit to Stay
In the early 1900s, panic over the arrival of South Asian immigrants swept up and down the west coast of North America. While racism and fear of labour competition were at the heart of this furor, Not Fit to Stay reveals that public leaders – including physicians, union leaders, civil servants, journalists, and politicians – latched on to unsub …
The Moral Economies of Ethnic and Nationalist Claims
Bringing together international experts on ethnicity and nationalism, this book argues that competing moral economies play an important role in ethnic and nationalist conflict. Its authors investigate how the beliefs and practices that normatively regulate and legitimize the distribution of wealth, power, and status in a society – moral economies …
Points of Entry
Every year, over 1.3 million people apply to visit, work, or settle in Canada and discover that their future rests in visa officers’ hands. How do these officers decide who gets in? Seeking answers to this question, Vic Satzewich gained access to eleven overseas visa offices. Points of Entry reveals immigration officers in action as they determin …
Resettling the Range
The ranchers who resettled BC’s interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on grassland for their cattle, but in this they faced some unlikely competition from grasshoppers and wild horses. With the help of the government, settlers resolved to rid the range of both.
Resettling the Range explores the ecology and history …
Immigration Canada
Beyond the romanticized image of newcomers arriving as a “huddled mass” at Halifax’s Pier 21, understanding the reality and complexity of immigration today requires an expert guide. In the hands of scholar Augie Fleras, this intricate and ever-changing subject gets the attention it deserves with analysis of all aspects, including admission po …
Coping with Calamity
The Jianghan Plain in central China has been shaped by its relationship with water. Once a prolific rice-growing region that drew immigrants to its fertile paddy fields, it has, since the eighteenth century, become prone to devastating flooding and waterlogging. Over time, population pressures and dike building left more and more people in the regi …
Remembering the Samsui Women
Remembering the Samsui Women tells the story of women from the Samsui area of Guangdong, China, who migrated to Singapore during a period of economic and natural calamity, leaving their families behind. In their new country, many found work in the construction industry, while others worked in households or factories where they were called hong tou …
The Muslim Question in Canada
To those who study the integration of immigrants in Western countries, both Muslims and Canada are seen to be exceptions to the rule. Muslims are often perceived as unable or unwilling to integrate, mostly due to their religious beliefs, and Canada is portrayed as a model for successful integration. This book addresses the intersection of these two …
Cultivating Connections
In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For them, the Prairies were a land of opportunity; there, they could open shops and potentially earn enough money to become merchants. The result of almost a decade's research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating C …
Oral History at the Crossroads
Over the span of seven years, hundreds of people displaced by mass violence told their stories to the Montreal Life Stories project. From the outset, the project’s organizers sought to develop an alternative model to traditional oral history practice, one where community members “shared authority” as equal partners. Together, they challenged …
Segmented Cities?
Across the globe, more people are living in cities, be it through the movement of domestic populations from the hinterlands or via international migration. This book offers answers to one of the most pressing questions of our day: Is globalization drawing urban populations together or tearing them apart? Contributors analyze the conditions under wh …
Pinay on the Prairies
For many Filipinos, one word – kumusta, how are you – is all it takes to forge a connection with a stranger anywhere in the world. In Canada’s prairie provinces, this connection has inspired community building and created both national and transnational identities for the women who identify as pinay. This book is the first to look beyond trad …
Building Sanctuary
Canada enjoys a reputation as a peaceable kingdom and a refuge from militarism.Yet Canadians during the Vietnam War era met American war resisters not with open arms but with political obstacles and public resistance, and the border remained closed to what were then called “draft dodgers” and “deserters.”
Between 1965 and 1973, a small but …
The Voyage of the Komagata Maru
Released to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the arrival of the Komagata Maru, this expanded and fully revised edition will stand as the most thoroughly researched account of the notorious Komagata Maru incident. The event centres on the ship’s nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers, who sought entry into Canada at Vancouver in the summe …
Targeted Transnationals
Following 9/11, the securitization of state practices and policies has chipped away at the citizenship and personal rights of all Canadians, particularly those of Arab descent. This book argues that in a securitized global context and through racialized immigration and security policies, Arab Canadians have become “targeted transnationals.” Med …
Photography, Memory, and Refugee Identity
In 1948, a small ship carrying Estonian refugees arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax. In this absorbing work, anthropologist Lynda Mannik analyzes the refugee experience through the photographic record of those who made that harrowing voyage. Drawing on a collection of photographs taken during the voyage and at Pier 21, Mannik asks surviving passengers t …
Canadian Liberalism and the Politics of Border Control, 1867-1967
Since 9/11, Canada’s reputation as an inclusive country that takes in immigrants and refugees has been clouded by restrictive immigration policies, increased interdiction, and the detention of asylum seekers. Moreover, public debate over the arrival of non-citizens -- especially those seeking entry through unofficial channels -- is now often fram …
Becoming Multicultural
During the first half of the twentieth century, Canada's and Germany’s responses to questions of national membership consisted of discriminatory policies aimed at harnessing migration for economic ends. Yet, by the end of the century, both countries were transformed into highly diverse multicultural societies. How did this remarkable shift come a …
Pineros
Although the exploitation of Latino workers in many industries is well known, pineros – Latino forest workers – toil largely in obscurity. Brinda Sarathy investigates how the US federal government came to be one of the country’s largest employers of Latino labour, and documents pinero wages and working conditions in comparison to those of whi …
Feminist Community Research
Feminist community research is a collaborative methodology that holds the promise of building a more just society. But in the absence of critical analysis and responsible use of power, the approach can lead to naive or harmful practices. This interdisciplinary volume acknowledges the challenges that researchers can encounter, and discusses strategi …
Rethinking the Great White North
Canadian national identity is bound to the idea of a Great White North. Images of snow, wilderness, and emptiness seem innocent, yet this path-breaking book reveals they contain the seeds of racism. Informed by the insight that racism is geographical as well as historical and cultural, the contributors trace how notions of race, whiteness, and natu …
Jewels of the Qila
This is a story about a remarkable Sikh family and the communities they lived in and supported in both Canada and India. Kapoor Singh Siddoo arrived in British Columbia in 1912 and overcame racial prejudice and legal discrimination to transform himself from labourer to lumber baron. He and his wife, Besant Kaur, fostered in their daughters a vision …
The Way of the Bachelor
The lives of early Japanese and Chinese settlers in British Columbia have come to define the Asian experience in Canada. Yet many men travelled beyond British Columbia to settle in small Prairie towns and cities. Chinese bachelors opened the region’s first laundries and Chinese cafes. They maintained ties to the Old World and negotiated a place i …
Labour at the Lakehead
In the early twentieth century, the Canadian Lakehead was known as a breeding ground for revolution, a place where harsh conditions in dockyards, lumber mills, and railway yards drove immigrants into radical labour politics.
This intensely engaging history reasserts Northwestern Ontario’s rightful reputation as a birthplace of leftism in Canada b …
