Book Reviews
Results (1877)
Book Review
Okanagan Women’s Voices: Syilx and Settler Writing and Relations, 1870s – 1960s
The “truth” of British Columbia’s history has yet to be fleshed out, with many active participants’ voices un-accounted for. This is particularly true regarding certain facts of Indigenous-settler relations that can be best understood through...
Book Review
Standoff: Why Reconciliation Fails Indigenous People and How to Fix It
Given the failure of constitutional negotiations to define the meaning of Aboriginal rights and title recognized in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution – a failure that marks the recalcitrance of provincial and federal governments...
Book Review
To Be a Warrior: The Adventurer Life and Mysterious Death of Billy Davidson
To Be A Warrior chronicles the life of wilderness adventurer Billy Davidson (1947-2003), a rock climbing mountaineer and ocean kayaker who spent the last thirty years of his life alone on various small islands in...
Book Review
Deadly Neighbours: A Tale of Colonialism, Cattle Feuds, Murder and Vigilantes in the Far West
Deadly Neighbours opens a window into the relationship between immigrant settlers and the Sema:th (Sumas) and Sto:lo people residing in British Columbia’s Sumas Prairie and Nooksack Valley during the 1870s and 1880s. Several conflicts are...
Book Review
For Freedom We Will Fight, the Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia 1905-1990
More than a hundred years after losing its prominence, the fabled Industrial Workers of the World continues to resonate as a union without parallel in the annals of labour history in North America. Besides the...
Book Review
The York Factory Express: Fort Vancouver to Hudson Bay, 1826-1849
The York Factory Express was an integral part of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trans-continental trade network in the nineteenth century. It carried men and mail from the Pacific coast to Hudson Bay, linking the Columbia...
Book Review
Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983
This is a book in search of a genre. As history, the curtain comes down on this story after a disappointing first night. But as theatre, it would undoubtedly have a longer and more satisfying...
Book Review
Unvarnished, Autobiographical Sketches by Emily Carr
Just like painting and sketching, writing came as second nature to Emily Carr – a gifted and self-aware woman in more respects than one. In 1895, at the age of twenty-three, she recorded a ten-mile...
Book Review
Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent: The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842-1898
In Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent, historian Jack Little asks what can be learned from the diaries of a settler who “failed to adapt” to the transformations of the Victorian era and whose life,...
Book Review
Mischief Making: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Art and the Seriousness of Play
Celebrated contemporary Haida artist, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has produced a diverse body of work ranging from ink drawings to large scale mixed media sculptures to totem poles. The artist is best known for inventing a...
Book Review
Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America
This provocative book does many things: it conceptualizes the larger spatial and historical processes of settler colonialism, it examines and critiques social movements in the context of enduring Indigenous sovereignties, and it unpacks the affective...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 149-150
Book Review
Beyond Rights: The Nisga’a Final Agreement and the Challenges of Modern Treaty Relationships
Most Canadians are aware of the existence of treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. Phrases like “treaty rights” and “treaty relationships” form part of the everyday political vocabulary at every level of our federal...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 150-151
Book Review
Joseph William McKay: A Métis Business Leader in Colonial British Columbia
In 2003, the Canadian Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of R. v. Powley, triggering significant new public interest in Métis identity and history outside of the familiar geography of the Canadian...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 152-153
Book Review
What Was Said to Me: The Life of Sti’tum’atul’wut, a Cowichan Woman
Stories are a gift. When someone shares their story with us, it is an offering to know them, to know what it means to be them, to know ourselves and our society. Ruby Peter’s book...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 153-154
Book Review
Following the Good River: The Life and Times of Wa’xaid
Following the Good River: the Life and Times of Wa’xaid is a triumph of storytelling. As a companion to Cecil Paul’s Stories from the Magic Canoe of Wa’xaid, Following the Good River acts as an...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 154-155
Book Review
Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story
Sam McKegney’s Carrying the Burden of Peace seeks to bridge the gap in between the “insistence that neither individual Indigenous men nor concepts of Indigenous masculinity are irredeemable” and the recognition that some forms of...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 155-156
Book Review
Book Review
A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith
Biographies offer such tantalizing opportunities. Readers can generally look forward to either delving into the details of a fascinating life – the accomplishments and setbacks, the loves and losses – or they can be encouraged...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 158-160
Book Review
A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia
A core rationale for this book series, Lara Campbell explains, is the necessity to “tell regional stories” about the women’s suffrage movement (13). Campbell demonstrates, for example, that the absence of a party system in...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 160-162
Book Review
Kropotkin and Canada
In this translated monograph, Alexey Gennadievich Ivanov depicts the travels of the famous anarchist theoretician Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) in Canada during 1897. Drawing on a recently uncovered archive, Ivanov details Kropotkin’s impressions of Canada,...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 162-163
Book Review
The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada
John O’Brian’s recent book on the photographic representation of the nuclear age focuses on the Canadian context and readers with an interest in photography, atomic age culture, and Canadiana will not be disappointed. The Bomb...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 163-164
Book Review
Quietly Shrinking Cities: Canadian Urban Population Loss in an Age of Growth
Growth is good and small is beautiful. These two mid-twentieth century mottos continue to influence thinking about cities. On balance, Queen’s University geographer Maxwell Hartt would say that the former continues to hold sway more...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 164-166
Book Review
Luschiim’s Plants: Traditional Indigenous Foods, Materials and Medicines
This is a beautiful collaboration between Drs. Luschiim Arvid Charlie and Nancy Turner. The book is an album and encyclopedia which identifies the different plants located within the Quw’utsun territory. After a brief introduction to...
BC Studies no. 213 Spring 2022 | Page(s) 166-167
Book Review
The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land
Many British Columbians today want to learn more about the history and ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. The news of unmarked graves being located at former residential school sites across Canada has prompted people to...