Law & History

"Aboriginal People and Other Canadians discusses a wide variety of issues in native studies including: social exclusion, marginalisation and identity; justice, equality and gender; self-help and empowerment in Aboriginal communities and in the cities; and, methodological and historiographical representations of social relations.

Nine DVDs with movies chronicling the efforts to explore and map the Arctic from land, air and even under water.

Volume 1: Men Against Ice and Steering North
Volume 2: Stefansson: The Arctic Prophet and Memories and Predictions
Volume 3: Henry Larsen and Henry Larsen's Northwest Passages
Volume 4: The Conquered Dream
Volume 5: The Land That Devours Ships
Volume 6: Martin Frobisher's Gold Mine
Volume 7: Across Arctic Ungava and The Aviators of Hudson Strait
Volume 8: Sub-Igloo, Arctic IV
Volume 9: Navy Goes North

“Born in 1912, Mrs. Alice Ahenakew grew up in a traditional Cree community in north-central Saskatchewan. As a young woman, she married Andrew Ahenakew, a member of the prominent Saskatchewan family, who later became a well-known Anglican priest and Cree healer.

"Of the many remarkable histories of Canada's Native peoples, few match the extraordinary historical, social, political, and cultural ups and downs of the James Bay Crees. For some 5,000 years, these remarkable people have inhabited the eastern and interior regions of James Bay, a domain of close to 350,000 square kilometres of subarctic forest, rivers, and lakes. This land that has sustained them both physically and spiritually from ancient to modern times has, in the last century, been subject to radical change.

"A tribute to the courageous chiefs and warriors who fought to protect their people and preserve the Native way of life in the face of European expansion across North America:

"He was a master hunter, a renowned warrior and a dauntless leader of the Métis. At a volatile time in western Canada, Gabriel Dumont stood as the living sword of the Métis, prepared to make war or peace as might be good for his people. Dumont came of age during the era of the great buffalo hunts, when entire communities moved according to the migrations of the herds. A crack shot at an early age, Dumont earned his first rifle when he was 11, a weapon he would put to deadly use against buffalo and Sioux alike.

"New Owners in their Own Land carefully examines the prolonged historical dispute over the land selection process and subsurface rights in Nunavut, starting with the early resource development and oil and gas exploration in Canada's Arctic during the 1960's, through to the battle for Inuit self-determination.

"Between 1922 and 1924, the young Canadian anthropologist T.F. McIlwraith spent eleven months in the isolated community of Bella Coola, British Columbia, living among the people of the Nuxalk First Nation. During his time there, McIlwraith gained intimate knowledge of the Nuxalk culture and of their struggle to survive in the face of massive depopulation, loss of traditional lands, and the efforts of the Canadian government to ban the potlatch.

"For more than a century, government policy towards Aboriginal peoples in Canada was shaped by paternalistic attitudes and an ultimate goal of assimilation. Indeed, remnants of that thinking still linger today, more than thirty years after protests against the White Paper of 1969 led to reconsideration Canada's 'Indian' policy. In A Fatherly Eye, historian Robin Brownlie examines how paternalism and assimilation during the interwar period were made manifest in the 'field', far from the bureaucrats in Ottawa, but never free of their oppressive supervision.

"This book describes the encounter between the common law legal system and the tribal peoples of North America and Australasia. It is a history of the role of anglophone law in managing relations between the British settlers and indigenous peoples. That history runs from the plantation of Ireland and settlement of the New World to the end of the Twentieth century.