Law & History

"From Ellen Gabriel to Tantoo Cardinal, many of the faces of Aboriginal people in the media today are women. In the Days of Our Grandmothers is a collection of essays detailing how Aboriginal women have found their voice in Canadian society over the past three centuries. Collected in one volume for the first time, these essays critically situate Aboriginal women in the fur trade, missions, labour and the economy, the law, sexuality, and the politics of representation.

"The Native peoples of Canada have been here since the Ice Age and were already accomplished traders, artisans, farmers, and marine hunters when Europeans first reached their shores. Contact between Natives and European explorers and settlers initially presented an unprecedented period of growth and opportunity. But soon, the two vastly different worlds clashed. From first contact to current Native land claims, Arthur Ray charts the history of Canada's Native peoples.

"The Arapaho traditions chosen for this anthology tell of hunting, scouting, fighting, horse-stealing, capture and escape, friendly encounters between tribes, diplomacy and war, conflict with the U.S. and battles with its troops. They also include accounts of vision quests and religious rites, the fate of an Arapaho woman captured by Utes, and Arapaho uses of the 'Medicine Wheel' in the Bighorn Mountains.

"The most isolated archipelago on the west coast of the Americas, inhabited for at least 10,500 years, Haida Gwaii has fascinated scientists, social scientists, historians, and inquisitive travelers for decades. This book brings together the results of extensive and varied field research by both federal agencies and independent researchers, and carefully integrates them with earlier archaeological, ethnohistorical, and paleoenvironmental work in the region.

"The Dene nation is made up of eighteen thousand people speaking five distinct languages and spread over 1.8 million square kilometers in the western Canadian subarctic. In the 1970s and 1980's, the campaign against the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, support for the leadership of Georges Eramus in the Assembly of First Nations, and land claim negotiations with the federal government put the Dene on the leading edge of Canada's Native rights movement.

"Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which coincided with dramatic social upheaval resulting from European exploration and increased travel and trade among Aboriginal peoples.

"Contact Zones locates Canadian women's history within colonial and imperial systems. As both colonizer and colonized (sometimes even simultaneously), women were uniquely positioned at the axis of the colonial encounter - the so-called "contact zone" - between Aboriginals and newcomers. Some women were able to transgress the bounds of social expectation, while others reluctantly conformed to them. Aboriginal women such as E. Pauline Johnson, Bernice Loft, and Ethel Brant Monture shaped identities for themselves in both worlds.

"While Captain James Cook's South Pacific voyages have been extensively studied, much less attention has been paid to his representation of the Pacific Northwest. In Constructing Colonial Discourse, Noel Elizabeth Currie focuses on the month Cook spent at Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1778 during his third Pacific voyage. Comparing the official 1784 edition of that voyage with Cook's journal account (made available in the scholarly edition prepared by New Zealand scholar J.C.

"The community of Aboriginal groups and fur trade society that had initially developed at Porcupine-Iroquois Falls (c. 1660-1905) was displaced early in the twentieth century by newcomers drawn to the opportunities offered by mining, agriculture, and pulp and paper production. The newcomers came from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, which led to divisions in the towns and villages they created.

"Part of the Daughters of the Country series, this dramatic film features a young Ojibwa girl from 1770 who marries a Scottish fur trader and leaves home for the shores of Georgian Bay. Although the union is beneficial for her tribe, it results in hardship and isolation for Ikwe. Values and customs clash until, finally, the events of a dream Ikwe once had unfold with tragic clarity." -- Provided by publisher