The authors discuss groups that became especially disadvantaged due to the spread of Colonial dominance, including Indigenous Peoples in Canada, women, persons with disabilities, the LGBTQ community, persons of visible ethnic heritage, historically enslaved groups, and persons adhering to non-dominant world belief systems
A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby's story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas and beyond come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine, concepts that were unimaginable and shocking to Euro-western peoples at contact.
Unsettling Canada is built on a unique collaboration between two First Nations leaders, Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ron Derrickson. Both men have served as chiefs of their bands in the B.C. interior and both have gone on to establish important national and international reputations. But the differences between them are in many ways even more interesting.
First Nations, First Thoughts brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars who cut through the prevailing orthodoxy to reveal Indigenous thinkers and activists as a pervasive presence in diverse political, constitutional, and cultural debates and arenas, including urban spaces, historical texts, public policy, and cultural heritage preservation.
An advocate for Indigenous worldviews, the author discusses the fundamental issues—the terminology of relationships; culture and identity; myth-busting; state violence; and land, learning, law and treaties—along with wider social beliefs about these issues.
Analysing archival material and interviews with former students, politicians, bureaucrats, church officials, and the Chief Commissioner of the TRC, Miller reveals a major obstacle to achieving reconciliation – the inability of Canadians at large to overcome their flawed, overly positive understanding of their country's history.
For over a century, generations of Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and raised in overcrowded, underfunded, and often unhealthy residential schools across Canada. They were commonly denied the right to speak their language and told their cultural beliefs were sinful. Some students did not see their parents for years. Others, the victims of scandalously high death rates, never made it back home. Even by the standards of the day, discipline often was excessive. Lack of supervision left students prey to sexual predators. To put it simply the needs of tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were neglected routinely. Far too many children were abused far too often. But this story is about more than neglect and abuse. Those painful stories rightfully have captured national headlines. They are central to the story this book tells. But there is more to tell.
"I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry." -- Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923)"... For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the "circle of civilization," the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.
"It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer." So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term "recognition" shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment.
This book fills a gap in postcolonial political critique by serving as an introduction to theorists who struggled with the question of how to found a new political order when the existing ideas and institutions were implicated in a history of domination. Looking at the writings of Gandhi, Ngugi, al-Afghani, and Mariategui, among several others, the book aims to explain how the work of these thinkers engage in thematic continuities—constituting “postcolonial political thought”—and add to liberal democratic understandings of political power, as well as illuminate how many of the central questions of political theory are imaginatively explored by postcolonial writers.
"Adopting a materialist-semiotic approach, Emberley explores the ways in which representational technologies - film, photography, and print culture, including legal documents and literature - were crucial to British colonial practices. Many indigenous scholars, writers, and artists, however, have confounded these practices by deploying aboriginality as a complex and enabling sign of social, cultural, and political transformation..."
This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.
Canada has never had an "Indian problem"-- but it does have a Settler problem. But what does it mean to be Settler? And why does it matter?
An inclusive and interdisciplinary exploration of current issues involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada - with a view to the future.
The contributors to this volume explore Aboriginal politics and representation, health, education and other social issues, and look at how contemporary Aboriginals find voice in literature, art, print media and film.
Blending legal analysis with insights drawn from political theory and philosophy, A Reconciliation without Recollection is an ambitious and timely intervention into one of the most pressing concerns in Canada.
"It's about the European fascination with the Indigenous peoples of North America and includes Indigenous responses to that phenomenon."
"Through research and case studies, Indigenous and non-Indigenous food scholars and community practitioners explore the concepts, practices, and contemporary issues of various Indigenous food systems across Canada, including Anishinaabeg, Asatiwisipe, Cree, Métis, Migmag, and Tsartlip Nations."
Canada's Indigenous Constitution
Museum Pieces: toward the indigenization of Canadian museums
Our Knowledge Is Not PrimitiveExamples of subjects in the library catalogue:
Content warning: Our collection contains items that were written many years ago. These can often include offensive and derogatory language which are recognized as unacceptable today.
Books are shelved by call number; books about indigenous studies are generally found in a variety of locations in the library:
| In Chilliwack | In Abbotsford | |
| E 75 - E 99 | E 75 - E 99 | First Nations |
| FC 1 - FC 9999 | FC 1 - FC 9999 | Canadian History |
| GE 1 - GE 350 | GE 1 - GE 350 | Environmental Sciences |
| GF 1 - GF 900 | GF 1 - GF 900 | Human ecology. Anthrogeography |
| GF 75 | GF 75 | Human Influences on the Environment |
| GF 125 | GF 125 | Cities. Urban Geography |
| GN 1 - GN 9999 | GN 1 - GN 9999 | Anthropology |
| KE 1 - KE9999 | KE 1 - KE9999 | Law of Canada |
To find and request books from other libraries, try the following:
