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Through a detailed analysis of their unique occupational culture, Making the Voyageur World reexamines the French Canadian workers who dominated the fur trade industry and became iconic images of North American lore.
The essays in section 1 consider ethnography's influence on how Europeans represent colonized peoples. Section 2 essays analyze curatorial practices, emphasizing how exhibitions must serve diverse masters rather than solely the curator's own creativity and judgment, a dramatic departure from past museum culture and practice. Section 3 essays consider tribal museums that focus on contesting and critiquing colonial views of American and Canadian history while serving the varied needs of the indigenous communities.
British traders and Ojibwe hunters. Cree women and their metis daughters. Explorers and anthropologists and Aboriginal guides and informants. These people, their relationships, and their complex identities and worldviews were not featured in histories of North America until the 1970s, when scholars from multiple disciplines began to bring new perspectives and approaches to bear on the past. Gathering Places presents some of the most innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to metis, fur trade, and First Nations history being practised today. Whether they are discussing dietary practices on the Plateau, trees as cultural and geographical markers in the trade, the meanings of totemic signat...
Eighteen innovative essays explore not only how the European Renaissance helped form Canada, but also how more significantly the experience of Canada touched the Renaissance and those who first came to the shores of North America.
What does it mean to be Metis? How do the Metis understand their world, and how do family, community, and location shape their consciousness? Such questions inform this collection of essays on the northwestern North American people of mixed European and Native ancestry who emerged in the seventeenth century as a distinct culture. Volume editors Nicole St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall go beyond the concern with race and ethnicity that takes center stage in most discussions of Metis culture to offer new ways of thinking about Metis identity. Geography, mobility, and family have always defined Metis culture and society. The Metis world spanned the better part of a continent, an...
Transforming the Prairies proposes a new understanding of Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), complicating common views of the agency as a model of effective government environmental management. Between 1935 and 2009, the PFRA promoted agricultural rehabilitation in and beyond the Canadian Prairies with mixed and equivocal results. The promotion of strip farming as a soil conservation technique, for example, left crops susceptible to sawfly infestations. The PFRA’s involvement in irrigation development in Ghana increased the local population’s vulnerability to various illnesses. And PFRA infrastructure construction intended to serve the public good failed to account for the interests of affected Indigenous peoples. The PFRA is revealed as being a high modernist state agency that produced varied environmental outcomes and that contributed to consolidating colonialism and racism. This investigation affirms the importance of engaging historical perspectives to help ensure that contemporary environmental management efforts support more just and sustainable futures.
Kinship, as an organizing principle, gives structure to communities and cultures—and it can vary as widely as the social relationships organized in its name. Making Relatives of Them examines kinship among the Great Lakes Native nations in the eventful years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, revealing how these Indigenous peoples’ understanding of kinship, in complex relationship with concepts of gender, defined their social, political, and diplomatic interactions with one another and with Europeans and their descendants. For these Native nations—Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Dakota, Menomini, and Ho-chunk—the constructs and practice...
*#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER *Winner, Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Nonfiction *Winner, Indigenous Voices Awards *Winner, High Plains Book Awards *Finalist, CBC Canada Reads *A Globe and Mail Book of the Year *An Indigo Book of the Year *A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of the Year In this extraordinary and inspiring debut memoir, Jesse Thistle, once a high school dropout and now a rising Indigenous scholar, chronicles his life on the streets and how he overcame trauma and addiction to discover the truth about who he is. If I can just make it to the next minute...then I might have a chance to live; I might have a chance to be something more than just a struggling crackhead. From the Ashes is a re...
First published by Oxford University Press in 1993, Exploration Literature is a groundbreaking collection of early writing inspired by the opening of a continent.With maps, notes, and thumbnail biographies of these early writers, Exploration Literature is an entry point for both the casual reader and the student of Canadian literature into the beginnings of a literate response to the awe and wonder inspired by an unfolding geography and the literary fundamentals of new nationhood.
We think of Métis as having exclusively Prairie roots. Quebec doesn’t recognize a historical Métis community, and the Métis National Council contests the existence of any Métis east of Ontario. Quebec residents who seek recognition as Métis under the Canadian Constitution therefore face an uphill legal and political battle. Who is right? Bois-Brûlés examines archival and ethnographic evidence to piece together a riveting history of Métis in the Outaouais region. Scottish and French-Canadian fur traders and Indigenous women established themselves with their Bois-Brûlé children in the unsurveyed lands of western Quebec in the early nineteenth century. As the fur trade declined, these communities remained. This controversial work, previously available only in French, challenges head-on two powerful nationalisms – Métis and Québécois – that see Quebec Métis as “race-shifting” individuals. The authors provide a nuanced analysis of the historical basis for a distinctly Métis identity that can be traced all the way to today.