Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn’t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public’s fear of the “Black unknown” and racist stereotypes to justify their exclusion.In Flying Fish in the Great White No...

This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy.This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to mos...

A chilling true story of deception and survival set amidst the Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic.In 1922 the Irish-American explorer Robert Flaherty made a film called ‘Nanook of the North’ which captured the world's imagination. Soon afterwards, he quit the Arctic for good, leaving behind his bastard son, Joseph, to grow up Eskimo.Thirty years later a young, inexperienced policeman, Ross Gibson, was asked by the Canadian government to draw up a list of Inuit who wer...

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017" Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new write...

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain’s largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled insight into Jamaica’s vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with a comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diary of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood.Thistlewood’s diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slav...

Ask any Canadian what “Métis” means, and they will likely say “mixed race.” Canadians consider Métis mixed in ways that other indigenous people are not, and the census and courts have premised their recognition of Métis status on this race-based understanding.According to Andersen, Canada got it wrong. Our very preoccupation with mixedness is not natural but stems from more than 150 years of sustained labour on the part of the state and others. From its roots deep in the colonial p...

The style of my book must be in small pieces, as my life has been in pieces. (Jalal Barzanji) From 1986 to 1988 poet and journalist Jalal Barzanji endured imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime because of his literary and journalistic achievements—writing that openly explores themes of peace, democracy, and freedom. It was not until 1998, when he and his family took refuge in Canada, that he was able to consider speaking out fully on these topics. Still, due to economic nec...

In 1946, Viola Desmond was wrongfully arrested for sitting in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 2010, the Nova Scotia Government recognized this gross miscarriage of justice and posthumously granted her a free pardon.Most Canadians are aware of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus in Alabama, but Viola Desmond’s act of resistance occurred nine years earlier. However, many Canadians are still unaware of Desmo...

It has been said that Canada is a country with too much geography and too little history. Afghanistan has too much of both. As the war escalates in Afghanistan, more Canadians are asking what we are doing there. For a country that has specialized in peacekeeping, this war is a shock one that we have not yet comprehended. As the casualties mount, Canadians will want to know why we are there.Canada in Afghanistan introduces readers to Afghans and their culture, gives histori...

In "The Backwoods of Canada," Catharine Parr Strickland Traill presents a vivid and richly detailed account of her experiences in the Canadian wilderness during the mid-19th century. Employing a lyrical yet straightforward prose style, Traill immerses readers in the natural beauty, hardships, and cultural realities of life in the backwoods. Her writing reflects the Romantic literary movement, characterized by a deep appreciation for nature and individual experience, while also providing a ...

‘God is a racist’—so goes a statement published in the literature of the Western Guard, a white-supremacist, anti-semitic group in Toronto. It is one of a number of racist organizations that have sprung up in Canada since the Second World War. Stanley Barrett points out in this disquieting study that although many of the principles of such organizations are offensive to the vast majority of Canadians, they represent a growing part of a broader political phenomenon that has recently surface...

Thousands of children attended summer camps in twentieth-century Ontario. Did parents simply want a break, or were broader developments at play? The Nurture of Nature explores how competing cultural tendencies – antimodern nostalgia and modern sensibilities about the landscape, child rearing, and identity – shaped the development of summer camps and, consequently, modern social life in North America. A valuable resource for those interested in the connections between the history o...