Between
Angie Abdou's latest: a novel on the complexities of class, gender, parenthood, and desire.
Vero and her husband Shane have moved out of the sweet suite above his parents' garage and found themselves smack in the middle of adulthood--two kids, two cars, two jobs. They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Sha …
North of California St.
California St. is one of the major thoroughfares in downtown San Francisco, the city where George Stanley was born in 1934, and left at age 37 to move to Vancouver. Associated with the "San Francisco Renaissance" in poetry, moving in circles that included Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, Stanley had won a reputation as an exciting young …
Transmission Difficulties
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 …
Thrum
“To get at turn away.” In Thrum, her second collection of poetry, Natalie Simpson reveals how making sense is not always the same as making meaning. Her supple and agile poems seduce the weary reader away from representation and toward sound, texture, and absence. Here, a sentence is no longer a sentence, but “a word in pieces, plastered, fas …
Lasagna
The events at Oka in 1990 saw the might of the Canadian Armed Forces in the service of the governments of both Quebec and Canada confront some 40 armed Mohawk “Warriors” who were defending their local community’s resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. The events of that summer have etched themselves indelib …
Shattered Images
Fred A. Reed’s fifth book on the Middle East and “the wars of the Ottoman succession” traces the roots of Islamic fundamentalism, as currently enacted by Hezbollah and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, to the iconoclasts of sixth- and seventh-century Damascus.
The emergence of Iconoclasm, as sudden and overwhelming as it was catalyti …
Lost in North America
Lost in North America is a caustic, humourous exploration of a Canada we don’t often talk about-a collective mental creation of great charm and complexity, hovering precariously somewhere in Video North America, in disguise as the most successful colony in the history of the world. Lost in North America is a personal, idiosyncratic tour of the co …
The Carbon Cycle
“Kate Rawles sets out to discover about global warming the hard way …” -- Michael Palin, author of Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole
“A wonderfully rich and insightful narrative ... an extraordinarily revealing series of vignettes. Kate’s workaday belief that the principal purpose of philosophy is ‘to question the assumptions …
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis settlement of Lac St. Anne. Known as Manito Sakahigan in Cree, “Spirit Lake” has been renamed for the patron saint of childbirth. It is here that people journey in search of tradition, redemption, and miracles.
On this harsh and beautiful land, four interconnected people try to make a lif …
We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us
First Nations are the fastest growing population in the country. There are thousands upon thousands of young First Nations people growing up today who, together with the kind of individuals whose stories are told in this book, represent a future for this country that is brighter than it has been for a long, long time.
—from the foreword by Shawn …
Hunger, Horses, and Government Men
Scholars often accept without question that the Indian Act (1876) criminalized First Nations. Drawing on court files, police and penitentiary records, and newspaper accounts from the Saskatchewan region of the North-West Territories between 1870 and 1905, Shelley Gavigan argues that the notion of criminalization captures neither the complexities of …
He Moved A Mountain
Dr. Frank Arthur Calder of BC’s Nisga’a First Nation was the first indigenous person to be elected to any Canadian governing body. For twenty-six years he served as an MLA in the legislature of British Columbia. He was the driving force behind Canada’s decision to grant recognition of indigenous land title to First Nations people throughout t …
Standing Up with G̲a'ax̱sta'las
Standing Up with G̲a’ax̱sta’las tells the remarkable story of Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951), a controversial Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw leader and activist who lived during a period of enormous colonial upheaval. Working collaboratively, Robertson and Cook’s descendants draw on oral histories and textual records to create a nuanced portrait of a …
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 …
Indigena Awry
NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled w …
People of the Deer
"People of the Deer was...a wake-up call, the spark that struck the tinder that ignited the fire from which many subsequent generations of writers and activists have lit their torches, often ignorant of where that spark came from in the first place." -- Margaret Atwood
In 1886, the Ihalmiut of northern Canada numbered 7,000 souls; by 1946, when 25-y …
Breakout from Juno
The ninth book in the Canadian Battle Series, Breakout from Juno, is the first dramatic chronicling of Canada's pivotal role throughout the entire Normandy Campaign following the D-Day landings.
On July 4, 1944, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division won the village of Carpiquet but not the adjacent airfield. Instead of a speedy victory, the men faced a …
The Devil's Curve
"Arno Kopecky's account of his journey through the Peruvian Amazon and into the desplazados' neighbourhoods of Colombia's Medellin is funny, complex, moving, and meticulously researched. Kopecky spends months talking to South American indigenous leaders about the impact of Canadian mining corporations on their communities, digging deep, asking the …
Fronteras Americanas 2nd Edition
Fuelled by equal parts outrage, intelligence and wit, Fronteras Americanas re-creates one person’s struggle to construct a home between two cultures, while exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simón Bolívar and Speedy …
A Geography of Blood
•Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
When Candace Savage and her partner buy a house in the romantic little town of Eastend, she has no idea what awaits her. At first she enjoys exploring the area around their new home, including the boyhood haunts of the celebrated American writer Wallace Stegner, the back roads of the …
The Energy of Slaves
"A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty." -- Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress
A radical analysis of our master-and-slave relationship to energy and a call for change.
Ancient civilizations routinely relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperor …
Reconciliation
This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.
—
In the hundred years since British Columbia joined Confederation, Canada has negotiated only one treaty in the province. A decade after signing the Nisga'a treaty, and despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the BC Treaty Commission process had not finalized a sin …
Five Little Bitches
Five Little Bitches chronicles the rise and fall of the all-woman band, Wet Leather. Each of the women is plagued by her own unique demons, but their devotion to music and the punk lifestyle keeps them pushing on. As the band progresses, they tour Canadian, American and European towns and cities—and all the alleys, gutters, back stages, vans, hot …
Postcolonial Sovereignty?
In 1999 the Nisga’a First Nation in northwestern British Columbia signed a landmark agreement which not only settled their land claim but outlined significant powers that could be exercised by its government. The Nisga’a Final Agreement granted powers over land, resources, education, and cultural policy to the Nisga’a government, a major depa …
Cross-Cultural Caring, 2nd ed.
As North America’s ethnic populations increase, health care and social service workers are recognizing that in order to provide culturally sensitive and effective treatment programs they must be more aware of the particular needs of their ethnic patients. This newly revised edition of Cross-Cultural Caring: A Handbook for Health Professionals des …
Tribal Boundaries in the Nass Watershed
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 …
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 …
Contact and Conflict
Originally published in 1977, Contact and Conflict has remained an important book, which has inspired numerous scholars to examine further the relationships between the Indians and the Europeans – fur traders as well as settlers. For this edition, Robin Fisher has written a new introduction in which he surveys the literature since 1977 and commen …
The Inverted Gaze
François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.
Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of st …
Empire of the Beetle
""A compelling look at what may be the single biggest impact of climate change, and a harbinger of life to come on a warming planet."" -- Jim Robbins, The New York Times
Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of pine beetle (also known as the bark beetle) outbreaks unsettled iconic forests and communities across western North America. An insect the s …
Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788-1920s
The story of the expansion of civilization into the wilderness continues to shape perceptions of how Aboriginal people became part of nations such as Canada. Patricia McCormack subverts this narrative of modernity by examining nation building from the perspective of a northern community and its residents. Fort Chipewyan, she argues, was never an is …
The Cowboy Cavalry
When Native and Métis unrest escalated into the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, white settlers in southern Alberta's cattle country were terrified. Three major First Nations bordered their range, and war seemed certain. In anticipation, 114 men mustered to form the Rocky Mountain Rangers, a volunteer militia charged with ensuring the safety of the op …
Gulf
Gulf explores the nature of longing and belonging in a transient culture. From its opening assertion, 'A neighborhood, no matter / how known, will not slip whole / into your knapsack,' the collection contends home is a portable assortment of minutiae: the taste of dirt, the solace of Home Depot, a pennant of bone. Opening on a child's displacement, …
The Wolves at Evelyn
At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.
Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …
Morgantown
John Dupre, a junior at West Virginia University, is an English major on the Dean's List dressed up as a Beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing resident outsider before nonconformity became a youth uniform.
Morgantown is a masterful ensemble piece centering around John and peopled by his unforgettable friends in the out crowd: Bill Cohen, the sharpshootin …
Aboriginal Title and Indigenous Peoples
Delgamuukw. Mabo. Ngati Apa. Recent cases have created a framework for litigating Aboriginal title in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This book brings together distinguished scholars who show that our understanding of where the concept of Aboriginal title came from – and where it may be going – can also be enhanced by exploring legal develo …
Polaroids
Attila Richard Lukacs is one of Canada's most talented and controversial contemporary artists. He is best known for his epic paintings that depict masculine, homoerotic imagery, featuring figures such as gay skinheads and military cadets. His work has been exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Col …
After Canaan
Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award
After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed Vancouver poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. It riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of sl …
Breakfast at the Exit Cafe
"p class=""book_description"">""Whether it's the sign of a symbiotic marriage or of seasoned writers crafting a seamless travel collage, the narrative in this road trip through America flows as easily as a new car on an empty highway."" -- Globe & Mail
Part travelogue, part exploration-a road trip into the reality behind the cultural myth that is Am …
Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre
John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theatre today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot of the comedy Linc …