In Our Union, Jason Russell argues that the union local, as an institution of working-class organization, was a key agent for the Canadian working class as it sought to create a new place for itself in the decades following World War II. Using UAW/CAW Local 27, a broad-based union in London, Ontario, as a case study, he offers a ground-level look at union membership, including some of the socia…
Accompanying Elizabeth’s memoir, and offering a counterpoint to it, are the reminiscences of her eldest son, “Eddie.” Born at Norway House in 1869 and nursed by a Cree woman from infancy, Eddie was immersed in local Cree and Ojibwe life, culture, and language, in many ways exemplifying the process of reverse acculturation often in evidence among the children of missionaries. Like those of…
While contemporaries and historians alike hailed the establishment of Buffalo National Park in Wainwright, Alberta as a wildlife saving effort, the political climate of the early twentieth century worked against its efforts to stem the decline of the plains buffalo in North America. However, the branch charged with operating the park, the Canadian Parks Branch, was never sufficiently funded and…
Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet with the expansion of settlers into the First Nations territories that became southern Alberta and BC, liberalism proved to be an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Between 1877 and 1927, government officials, police officers, church representatives, ordinary settlers, and many ot…
Sarah Carter reveals the pioneering efforts of the government, legal, and religious authorities to impose the “one man, one woman” model of marriage upon Mormons and Aboriginal people in Western Canada. This lucidly written, richly researched book revises what we know about marriage and the gendered politics of late 19th century reform, shifts our understanding of Aboriginal history during …
At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and…
An investigation of the meanings and iconography of the Stampede: an invented tradition that takes over the city of Calgary for ten days every July. Since 1923, archetypal “Cowboys and Indians” are seen again at the chuckwagon races, on the midway, and throughout Calgary. Each essay in this collection examines a facet of the experience—from the images on advertising posters to the ritual …
Previously beyond the reach of most North American scholars, the minutes of Procter’s trial offer a wealth of historical detail about British imperial, Canadian pre-Confederation, and American frontier history. Transcribed and annotated here for the first time, they provide engrossing insights into Procter’s retreat from what is now southwestern Ontario in the early autumn of 1813. Interspe…
Vancouver’s municipal government entered into contractual relationships with dozens of private businesses, tendering bids for meals in much the same fashion as for printing jobs and construction projects. As a result, entrepreneurs clamoured to get their share of the state spending. With the emergence of work relief camps, the provincial government harnessed the only currency that homeless me…
Tracing the rise and evolution of Canadian penitentiaries in the nineteenth century, Hard Time examines the concepts of criminality and rehabilitation, the role of labour in penal regimes, and the problem of violence. Linking the lives of prisoners to the political economy and to movements for social change, McCoy depicts a history of oppression in which prisoners paid dearly for the reciprocal…