Longitude and Empire
Before Captain Cook’s three voyages, to Europeans the globe was uncertain and dangerous; after, it was comprehensible and ordered. Written as a conceptual field guide to the voyages, Longitude and Empire offers a significant rereading of both the expeditions and modern political philosophy. More than any other work, printed accounts of the voyage …
Do Glaciers Listen?
Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which …
Good Government? Good Citizens?
Three forces are at work in reconstituting the citizen in this society: courts, politics, and markets. Many see these forces as intersecting and colliding in ways that are fundamentally reshaping the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other. How has Canadian society actually been transformed? Good Government? Good Citizens? examin …
A Breach of Duty
In the 1950s, Indian Affairs concealed the lease terms of more than one-third of the Musqueam’s reserve land to the Shaughnessy Heights Golf Club in Vancouver, BC. Justice for the Musqueam was finally achieved in 1984 with the release of Guerin v. the Queen, where the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that Canada has a duty to act in the best int …
First Nations Sacred Sites in Canada's Courts
The sacred sites of indigenous peoples are under increasing threat worldwide as a result of state appropriation of control over ancestral territories, coupled with insatiable demands on lands, waters, and natural resources. Of late, First Nations in Canada have taken their fight for these sites to the courts. Informed by elements of a general theor …
In Defence of Multinational Citizenship
At the beginning of the 21st century, there is a pressing need to develop new forms of citizenship to meet demands for self-determination advanced by substate nations and indigenous peoples. In Defence of Multinational Citizenship responds to this challenge by making a compelling case for a new form of multinational citizenship. Such a conception w …
Between Justice and Certainty
The BC treaty process was established in 1992 with the aim of resolving the outstanding land claims of First Nations in British Columbia. Two discourses have since become prominent within the treaty negotiations between First Nations and the governments of Canada and British Columbia. The first, a discourse of justice, asks how we can remedy the pa …
Advancing Aboriginal Claims
Can Aboriginal values be reconciled with Canadian jurisprudence, and what is the role of Aboriginal jurisprudences in the development of treaty and Aboriginal rights? The combination of policy, philosophy, strategy, and legal arguments are valuable as a resource for thoughtful discussion and action on the future of Aboriginal claims. With the persp …
Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation
Australia and Canada have each sought international reputations as humanitarian do-gooders, especially in the area of refugee admissions. This book traces the connections between the nation-building tradition of immigration and the challenge of admitting people who do not reflect the national interest of the twenty-first century. In a detailed cons …
Tsawalk
Western philosophy has long held scientific rationalism in a place of honour. Reason, that particularly exalted human quality, has become steadily distanced from the metaphysical aspects of existence, such as spirit, faith, and intuition.
In Tsawalk, hereditary chief Umeek introduces us to an alternative indigenous worldview -- an ontology drawn fr …
Intercultural Dispute Resolution in Aboriginal Contexts
In the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in alternative dispute resolution (ADR), as scholars and practitioners seek more effective, context-sensitive approaches to conflict. Where formerly conflict was tackled and “resolved” in formal legal settings and with an adversarial spirit, more conciliatory approaches – negotiation …
Governing Ourselves?
Given the pressures of integration and assimilation, how are people within communities able to make decisions about their own environment, whether individually or collectively? Governing Ourselves? explores issues of influence and power within local institutions and decision-making processes using numerous illustrations from municipalities across C …
The Red Man's on the Warpath
“The red man’s on the warpath! The time has come for him to dig up the hatchet and join his paleface brother in his fight to make the world safe for the sacred cause of freedom and democracy.” -- Winnipeg Free Press, May 1941
During the Second World War, thousands of First Nations people joined in the national crusade to defend freedom and de …
Shaped by the West Wind
Along the east shore of Ontario’s Georgian Bay lie the Thirty Thousand Islands, a granite archipelago scarred by glaciers, where the white pines cling to the ancient rock, twisted and bent by the west wind -- a symbol of a region where human history has been shaped by the natural environment. Over the last four centuries, the Bay has been visited …
Our Box Was Full
For the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en peoples of northwest British Columbia, the land is invested with meaning that goes beyond simple notions of property or sustenance. Considered both a food box and a storage box of history and wealth, the land plays a central role in their culture, survival, history, and identity. In Our Box Was Full, Richard Daly e …
Legislatures
Legislatures, and the men and women who serve in them, form the very heart of Canadian democracy. After all, with the very rare exception of nationwide referendums, Canadians speak collectively only when voting for the people who will be representing their interests in Ottawa. The same is true provincially. But how “democratic” are legislative …
Imagining Difference
Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC – a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations o …
From UI to EI
Established in 1940 in response to the Great Depression, the original goal of Canada’s system of unemployment insurance was to ensure the protection of income to the unemployed. Joblessness was viewed as a social problem and the jobless as its unfortunate victims. If governments could not create the right conditions for full employment, they were …
Paddling to Where I Stand
The Kwakwakawakw people and their culture have been the subject of more anthropological writings than any other ethnic group on the Northwest Coast. Until now, however, no biography had been written by or about a Kwakwakawakw woman. Paddling to Where I Stand presents the memoirs of Agnes Alfred (c.1890-1992), a non-literate noble Qwiqwasutinuxw wom …
CCF Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan
Often remembered for its humanitarian platform and its pioneering social programs, Saskatchewan’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) wrought a much less scrutinized legacy in the northern regions of the province during the twenty years it governed.
Until the 1940s churches, fur traders, and other wealthy outsiders held uncontested control …
Fight or Pay
Our slogan has always been ‘Fight or Pay.’ We call upon the people to enlist or help others enlist. We sometimes say: ‘If you cannot put the "I" into fight, put the "pay" into patriotism,’ and that serves as a slogan on any platform.
– Sir Herbert Ames, founder of the Canadian Patriotic Fund
Unlike the Second World War, the Great War exis …
Common Sense on Weapons of Mass Destruction
In our post-9/11 world of shoe bombers and cyberterrorism, a crude nuclear device no larger than a baseball could devastate a major city. As we live in fear of attacks of unknown proportion, why do people remain confused and complacent in the face of potential disaster? Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. believes that a tide of misinformation has led to …
Hometown Horizons
In Hometown Horizons, Robert Rutherdale considers how people and communities on the Canadian home front perceived the Great War. Drawing on newspaper archives and organizational documents, he examines how farmers near Lethbridge, Alberta, shopkeepers in Guelph, Ontario, and civic workers in Trois-Rivières, Québec took part in local activities tha …
Masculinities without Men?
Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man’s identity and a man’s right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evide …
People and Place
The collection represents a rich array of interdisciplinary expertise, with authors who are law professors, historians, sociologists and criminologists. Their essays include studies into the lives of judges and lawyers, rape victims, prostitutes, religious sect leaders, and common criminals. The geographic scope touches Canada, the United States an …
“Real” Indians and Others
In this pioneering book, Bonita Lawrence draws on the first-person accounts of thirty Toronto residents of Aboriginal descent, as well as archival materials, sociological research, and her own urban Native heritage and experiences to shed light on the Canadian government’s efforts to define Native identity through the years. She describes the dev …
Aboriginal Conditions
Aimed at three main constituencies - Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal social scientists, government and Aboriginal policymakers, and Aboriginal communities - the book has multiple purposes. First, it presents findings from recent research, with the goal of advancing research agenda, and stimulating positive social development. Second, it encourages gr …
Shifting Boundaries
Canada is often called a pluralist state, but few commentators view Aboriginal self-government from the perspective of political pluralism. Instead, Aboriginal identity is framed in terms of cultural and national traits, while self-government is taken to represent an Aboriginal desire to protect those traits. Shifting Boundaries challenges this vie …
Frigates and Foremasts
The first comprehensive study of naval operations involving North American squadrons in Nova Scotia waters, Frigates and Foremasts offers a masterful analysis of the motives behind the deployment of Royal Navy vessels between 1745 and 1815, and the navy’s role on the Western Atlantic.
Interweaving historical analysis with vivid descriptions of piv …
Hunters and Bureaucrats
Based on three years of ethnographic research in the Yukon, this book examines contemporary efforts to restructure the relationship between aboriginal peoples and the state in Canada. Although it is widely held that land claims and co-management – two of the most visible and celebrated elements of this restructuring – will help reverse centurie …
Musqueam Reference Grammar
The Musqueam peoples’ territory includes much of the Fraser Delta and the city of Vancouver. Halkomelem, one of the twenty-three languages that belong to the Salish Family, is spoken in three distinct forms: Upriver, by the Stó:lo‘ of the Fraser Valley; Downriver, of which Musqueam is the only surviving representative; and Island, spoken by th …
Training the Excluded for Work
In recent years job training programs have suffered severe funding cuts and the focus of training programs has shifted to meet the directives of funders rather than the needs of the community. How do these changes to job training affect disadvantaged workers and the unemployed?
In an insightful and comprehensive discussion of job education in Canada …
Tough on Kids
Canada’s current, punishment-oriented system for dealing with young offenders does not work; it simply ensures that we jail more youth than any other country, including the United States. Green and Healy argue that a new approach is needed and offer ample local and global evidence to make the case for a shift to restorative justice. Tough on Kids …
Game in the Garden
The shared use of wild animals has helped to determine social relations between Native peoples and newcomers. In later settlement periods, controversy about subsistence hunting and campaigns of local conservation associations drew lines between groups in communities, particularly Native peoples, immigrants, farmers, and urban dwellers. In addition …
Tales of Ghosts
The years between 1922 and 1961, often referred to as the “Dark Ages of Northwest Coast art,” have largely been ignored by art historians, and dismissed as a period of artistic decline. Tales of Ghosts compellingly reclaims this era, arguing that it was instead a critical period during which the art played an important role in public discourses …
Being a Tourist
What is meaningful about the experience of travelling abroad? What feeds the impulse to explore new horizons? In Being a Tourist, Harrison analyzes her conversations with a large group of upper-middle-class travellers. Why, she asks, do these people invest their resources -- financial, emotional, psychological, and physical -- in this activity? Har …
Reclaiming Aboriginal Justice, Identity, and Community
In his analysis of justice issues facing urban Aboriginals, Proulx pays particular attention to the situation of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, and how the current justice system has failed them. He looks at alternatives to the current system, examining in detail the Community Council Project (CCP), an Aboriginal-run diversion program in Toronto. Th …
