Book Reviews
Results (1834)
Book Review
Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia
The revised third edition of Kilian Crawford’s ground-breaking book on BC’s Black pioneers is timely and essential reading. It is a critical corrective to omissions and erasure in both academic histories and in popular understandings,...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 131-132
Book Review
Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story
The text of Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story extends well beyond its own parameters, both literal and figurative. Syilx, Tsilhqot’in, Ktunaxa, and Dakelh playwright Kim Senklip Harvey offers a thoughtful, funny, and compelling exploration of...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 132-133
Book Review
Inalienable Properties: The Political Economy of Indigenous Land Reform
In Inalienable Properties: the political economy of Indigenous land reform (2020), Jamie Baxter presents his readers with a puzzle surrounding the inalienability of Indigenous land tenure systems. Baxter asks, ‘why does inalienable property persist in...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 133-135
Book Review
Captain Cook Rediscovered: Voyaging to the Icy Latitudes
On 12 July 1776 Captain James Cook, Royal Navy, sailed from Plymouth, England, in the three-master collier, Resolution, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. It was a voyage that swept Cook and the crews...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 135-136
Book Review
A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada
Historical geographer Cole Harris, professor emeritus at UBC, has in his latest book brought together a number of his articles, some previously published, to focus on the subject of settler colonialism in Canada. It is...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 136-138
Book Review
Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies
“There is no single historiography of internment” in Canada, write Rhonda L. Hinter and Jim Mochoruk in the introduction of this ambitious collection of essays (9-10). Siloed histories of particular internments, they suggest, convey episodic...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 138-139
Book Review
Unmooring The Komagata Maru: Charting Colonial Trajectories
From food (Valenze, 2012) to crops (Ali 2020, Rappaport 2019) to commodities (Curry-Machado, 2013) to digital cultures (Punathambekar and Mohan, 2019) and to empires (Bayly, 2003; Hopkins, 2003) there has been a steady scholarly commitment to...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 139-142
Book Review
Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw
In 2013 the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Charles Edenshaw exhibition brought together three argillite platters made in the late 1880s by Da.a. xiigang, Charles Edenshaw – one from the Field Museum in Chicago, one from the...
BC Studies No. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 142-145
Book Review
The Object’s the Thing: The Writings of Yorke Edwards, a Pioneer of Heritage Interpretation in Canada
When we visit a nature park or a museum, do we consider how interpretation contributed to our experience? For Yorke Edwards, “the father of nature interpretation in Canada,” interpreting the object is “the thing.” As...
Book Review
Big Promises, Small Government: Doing Less with Less in the BC Liberal New Era
George Abbott was a cabinet minister for twelve years in the BC Liberal governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark. In Big Promises, Small Government, he reflects on his tenure in the first Campbell government...
Book Review
Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet
In Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet, David R. Gray – with a Foreword from his long-time friends and colleagues, Nancy J. Turner and Robert D. Turner – sets out to illuminate...
Book Review
Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation
As Hannah Turner points out in the introduction to her timely book, Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation, “Museum records are often taken to be neutral or privileged sources of knowledge, but they...
Book Review
Decolonizing Discipline: Children, Corporal Punishment, Christian Theologies, and Reconciliation
Decolonizing Discipline is a direct response to the sixth call of action made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to repeal Section 43 of Canada’s criminal code, which allows corporal punishment “to correct what is...
Book Review
Book Review
Spirits of the Coast: Orcas in Science, Art and History
As I write, the world has received news that Talequah (or J35), the Southern Resident killer whale who carried her dead newborn for two weeks in 2018, is pregnant again. Spirits of the Coast: Orcas...
BC Studies no. 208 Winter 2020/21 | Page(s) 143-144
Book Review
Complicated Simplicity: Island Life in the Pacific Northwest
Complicated Simplicity is a collection of essays, personal and expository, that explore the nature of living on secluded (non-ferry-serviced) islands within the Southwestern part of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (and further abroad too)....
BC Studies no. 208 Winter 2020/21 | Page(s) 144-145
Book Review
In Nature’s Realm: Early Naturalists Explore Vancouver Island
In Nature’s Realm, a third tome from Michael Layland that focuses on the (mostly) colonial histories of Vancouver Island, is an artistic and literary achievement. Layland’s hybrid of chronological and thematic descriptions of Vancouver Island-related...
BC Studies no. 208 Winter 2020/21 | Page(s) 145-147
Book Review
He Speaks Volumes: A Biography of George Bowering
The Canadian writers who rose (or leapt) to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, and who are sometimes thought to be synonymous with Canadian literature itself, are now venerable. Although Margaret Atwood remains a formidable...
BC Studies no. 208 Winter 2020/21 | Page(s) 147-148
Book Review
Postsecondary Education in British Columbia: Public Policy and Structural Development, 1960-2015
As distinct from previous historical accounts of postsecondary education in BC, Cowin makes it clear that he will cover the development of the “entire” postsecondary system in BC (3). For Cowin, this means the whole...
BC Studies no. 208 Winter 2020/21 | Page(s) 148-149
Book Review
Book Review
Northwest Voices: Language and Culture in the Pacific Northwest
What, if anything, is the socio-linguistic glue that binds together the region often referred to as the Pacific Northwest? When it comes to language and culture, do the peoples of Washington and Oregon in the...
BC Studies no. 207 Autumn 2020 | Page(s) 133-134
Book Review
The Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples
Gregory Younging’s (1961-2019) The Elements of Indigenous Style is a testament to how prioritizing listening to Indigenous peoples, instead of merely writing about them, can both change the way settlers view their relationship with Indigenous peoples...
BC Studies no. 207 Autumn 2020 | Page(s) 134-145
Book Review
Solemn Words and Foundational Documents: An Annotated Discussion of Indigenous-Crown Treaties in Canada, 1752-1923
When the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report in 2015 it drew attention to the importance of treaty making in the history of Crown-Indigenous relations in Canada. Treaty making, the...
BC Studies no. 207 Autumn 2020 | Page(s) 136-137
Book Review
Towards a New Ethnohistory: Community-Engaged Scholarship Among the People of the River
This book purports to represent a ‘New Ethnohistory’ as community-engaged research in First Nations communities. It consists primarily of essays written by graduate students who participated in the Ethnohistory Field School run since 1997 by...