Josephine Caplin (Jo) was born into a world marred by maternal abandonment, alcoholism and traumatic epileptic seizures. In grade three, she was apprehended by child services and separated from her protective brother and her early caregivers, her father and uncle, who were kind men with drinking problems. Placed into many alienating and lonely fost …

An exhilarating mix of natural history and personal exploration Whale in the Door is a passionate account of a woman’s transformative experience of her adopted home.

For thousands of years, Howe Sound, an inlet in the Salish Sea provided abundant food, shelter, and stories, for the Squamish Nation. After a century of contamination from pulp mills, …

Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds gathers the voices of poets from across Canada, the US and the UK who write of water. Bottled, clouded, held in rain, in river, estuary and lake, sweet water is the planet's life force and the poets here examine it from every angle--the pitcher plant, the beaver and the American Bull Frog, rain, clouds, smog, t …

On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmer's face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shoc …

Andy and Phyllis Chelsea met during their years spent at the St. Joseph’s Mission School in Williams Lake, BC. Like the thousands of others forced into the church-run residential school system, Andy and Phyllis are no strangers to the ongoing difficulties experienced by most Indigenous peoples in Canada. The couple married in 1964 but brought the …

Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn't fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection on/me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margi …

When Amy Wilson accepted the job of field nurse for the Indigenous Peoples in the Yukon and Northern British Columbia in 1949, she was told that the north was a fine country for men and dogs but that it killed women and horses. Undaunted, Wilson travelled the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse (Mile 916) to Mile Zero. She served Indigenous Peoples in t …

Born of Indigenous grandmothers and white grandfathers, Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her heritage. Her local community in British Columbia's Fraser Valley treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and Indigenous descent was beyond the bounds of acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to n …

How do you establish trust and meaningful connection with a sibling who suffers from schizophrenia? In an attempt to rekindle her relationship with her estranged brother Steve, Joan meets him at the Art Studios in Vancouver, where he takes part in art classes for individuals with a mental illness in a safe, supportive environment. This marks the be …

Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake community where her family has vacationed for over one hundred years, author Shelley O’Callaghan starts researching and writing about the area. But what begins as a personal journey of one woman’s relationship to the land and her desire to uncover the history of her family’s remote cabin, soo …

Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake where her family has spent the summer for over one hundred years, author Shelley O'Callaghan starts researching and writing about the area. But what begins as a personal journey of one woman's relationship to the land and her desire to uncover the history of her family's remote cabin turns into an …

Jane Byers' Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator's coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement.

The "parade" poems such …

When author Kay Johnston first met Mazie Baker, she came to know her as the reigning queen of bannock, selling out batch after batch of fluffy, light frybread at local powwows. She soon learned that Mazie, a matriarch and an activist, had been nurturing and fiercely protecting her community for a lifetime.

In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squ …

In 1945, Alfred Adams, a respected Haida elder and founding president of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC), was dying of cancer. After decades of fighting to increase the rights and recognition of First Nations people, he implored Maisie Hurley to help his people by telling others about their struggle. Hurley took his request to bot …

In 1858, gold was discovered in the Fraser River. News of this discovery travelled to the Pearl River Delta, where, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, many Chinese sought to escape the poverty, overcrowding, political unrest and even slavery—invaders from western Asia captured and shipped many Chinese to South America as “piglets.” This tumu …

"Wanted: lesbian couple to foster wonderful eleven-year-old African American boy with gender identity issues."

Meet Antwan. Not only has he got gender issues, he's severely emotionally disturbed, severely demanding and, as he puts it, "born to argue."

In the late nineties, Nicola Harwood and her girlfriend moved to San Francisco in order to be at the …

Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie—as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her—believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on Chauncey’s cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town tw …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …

On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people living in the house on Melville …

In 1954, when Florence Kaefer was just nineteen, she accepted a job as a teacher at Norway House Indian Residential School of Manitoba. Not fully aware of the difficult conditions the students were enduring, Florence and her fellow teachers nurtured a school full of lonely and homesick young children.

Edward was only five when he was brought to the …

In 1926, Lillian Alling, a European immigrant, set out on a journey home from New York. She had little money and no transportation, but plenty of determination. In the three years that followed, Alling walked all the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing the North American continent on foot. She walked across the Canadian landscape, weathering the ba …

Throughout the world, food provides the essence of connection to traditions, culture, family and community. It offers comfort in times of trial, sustenance in lean times and richness in times of celebration. Whether it be harvesting or preserving, preparing or sharing, food provides a vital connection to homeland and heritage, nourishing bodies and …

In 1895 Scottish entrepreneur, engineer, and outdoor adventurer Henry Ogle Bell-Irving built the Good Hope Cannery in Rivers Inlet, BC. There was a fortune to be made and Bell-Irving was determined to make one, both for the shareholders of the Anglo-British Columbia Packing Company, and for himself. As sole agent for ABC, he effectively controlled …

In the spring of 2007 the Canadian Forces and the Canadian Rangers, the regiment responsible for providing a military presence in isolated communities, set out on a treacherous journey across jagged sea ice and over steep and hostile terrain. Their mission was to travel over two thousand kilometres by snowmobile from Resolute to the Canadian Forces …

With stunning photographs and the Elders' stories, author Wim Tewinkel records the lives lead by twenty-one elders of the Interior Salish people. They share with the author the highlights of their lives -- from being a bomber in World War II to being a great-grandmother and master bead worker. Tewinkel's photographic portraits capture both the dept …

Cree Adelaide McCauley and her two children witness the shooting of their Metis husband/ father by a crazed white miner. She attempts to nurse him back to life but he dies after several painful days. This tragedy takes place in the Robson Valley and the nearest court of justice is 300 miles away, over treacherous mountain trails, in Golden, BC. Ade …

These wildly funny articles, observations of life in the tiny village of Nazko in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, were first published in the Quesnel Cariboo Observer. Just about everyone in the Cariboo started out as babies when they were quite young, which gives Kishkan a lot of material right there. The other subjects of these real-life stories range fro …