Over a decade ago, he set out to write a biography on the former premier. What started as a small part of his thesis work as a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto later became a project Gerald pursued after finishing his forty-year teaching career at the University of Manitoba.

The Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history and retired St John’s College fellow expressed relief as the long-awaited Norquay book arrived and was ready for launch this month. The book has been published by UM Press, located in St John’s College

“The immediate research took about five to seven years, the writing two to three years, and preparing for the topic began decades ago. It is a happy moment to have the book in my hands after such a long time.”

In an interview Dr. Friesen mentioned the book’s connection with the late John Bovey, then the provincial archivist and husband of Patricia Bovey, recent recipient of an honorary doctorate at the College:

“Fifty years ago, having decided that John Norquay would make an ideal subject for a biography, I consulted John Bovey, a family friend who was then the provincial archivist of Manitoba. He urged me not to undertake the project. I swallowed my disappointment, knowing that he knew the archive better than I did. I came to appreciate only later that he was saving me from the disaster of doing a lot of research and publishing a flawed book that failed to employ a crucial resource. Bovey could not tell me, for fear it might ruin a potential transaction, that practically all the letters received in and sent from Norquay’s office in the 1880s rested in a trunk in the home of historian Ellen Cooke. He was negotiating to obtain this collection, between five and seven thousand documents. It eventually reached the shelves of the provincial archives and I relied on them. John Bovey can take some responsibility – and credit — for the delay in delivery and the consequent depth of this biography.”

With the book ready for launch, Gerald will have busy months ahead, with book launches in McNally Robinson, a Lieutenant Governor’s evening at Government House, the Selkirk Heritage Fund Evening of History, and visits to Saskatoon, Calgary, and Banff.

To learn more about the book, visit the UM Press website. 

In Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law Leo Baskatawang traces the history of the neglected treaty relationship between the Crown and the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3, and the Canadian government’s egregious failings to administer effective education policy for Indigenous youth—failures epitomized by, but not limited to, the horrors of the residential school system.

Rooted in the belief that Indigenous education should be governed and administered by Indigenous peoples, Baskatawang envisions a hopeful future for Indigenous nations where their traditional laws are formally recognized and affirmed by the governments of Canada. Baskatawang thereby details the efforts being made in Treaty #3 territory to revitalize and codify the Anishinaabe education law, kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin. Kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin considers education wholistically, such that it describes ways of knowing, being, doing, relating, and connecting to the land that are grounded in tradition, while also positioning its learners for success in life, both on and off the reserve.

As the backbone of an Indigenous-led education system, kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin enacts Anishinaabe self-determination, and has the potential to bring about cultural resurgence, language revitalization, and a new era of Crown-Indigenous relations in Canada. Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law challenges policy makers to push beyond apologies and performative politics, and to engage in meaningful reconciliation practices by recognizing and affirming the laws that the Anishinaabeg have always used to govern themselves.

What: Launch of Recipes and Reciprocity. Event details can be found online.
Where: Indigenous Student Centre, 114 Sidney Smith St, Fort Garry campus
When: Thursday, Oct. 27, 2-3:30 p.m.

Recipes and Reciprocity considers the ways that food and research intersect for researchers, participants, and communities, demonstrating how everyday acts around food preparation, consumption, and sharing can enable unexpected approaches to reciprocal research and fuel relationships across cultures, generations, spaces, and places.

The collection is edited by Hannah Tait Neufeld and Monica Cyr, one of the UM’s 2022 Indigenous Doctoral Program Fellows, was a contributing author. Both will be at the launch to discuss the book and Indigenous food knowledge. Following their presentation, we will be providing catered refreshments by Feast Café Bistro.

But wait, there’s more

University of Manitoba Press and McNally Robinson Booksellers are also hosting two events in November:

Labour studies professor Julia Smith is hosting the forthcoming book launch for For a Better World, a collection on the Winnipeg General Strike, on Saturday, Nov 19. More information can be found on the events page.

And English professor Alison Calder is hosting the launch for Lives Lived, Lives Imagined by Sabrina Reed, a monograph on the work of Miriam Toews, on Friday, Nov 25. More info for that event coming soon.

In no particular order, here are the Top 10 recommendations:  

1. Rekindling the Sacred Fire: Métis Ancestry and Anishinaabe Spirituality by Chantal Fiola, University of Manitoba Press  

“This book presents interesting examples of how several Métis people are exploring their relationships with spirituality in different ways.”
-Dr. Todd Duhamel, Métis
 Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management

2. @NativeLoveNotes on Instagram, created by Amy Jackson

“Native Love Notes is a place of belonging to spread love and laughter among neechies. It’s hard to put just one sentence. Amy is truly an inspiration to all Indigenous entrepreneurs.”
-Katherine Davis, Métis
Change management and project services, Human Resources

3. Walking Eagle News by Editor-in-Grand-Chief Tim Fontaine

“Created in 2017 by Editor-in-Grand-Chief Tim Fontaine, Walking Eagle News exposes truth through satire.”
-Ruth Shead, member of Peguis First Nation
Director, Indigenous Engagement and Communications

4. Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq, Penguin Random House Canada

“Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth is just simply amazing. The way she shares her stories and poems in this book was so awe-inspiring. It absolutely blew me away and touched my heart and soul on so many different levels.”
-Brittany Laplante, Saulteaux
Student assistant, Indigenous Engagement and Communications

5. This Place: 150 Years Retold, multiple editors, Portage & Main Press

“I recommend this because it showcases Indigenous perspectives and storytelling from all over Canada, on topics like war and psychic battles, as well as featuring beautiful illustrations. There is a story to connect to for everyone.”
-Deanna Garand, Métis
Student, University 1

6. Firekeepers Daughter by Angeline Boulley, Henry Holt and Co.

“Powerful story of a young woman’s brilliance and strength that is rooted in culture; heart-pounding, mainstream fiction that is woven with Anishinaabemowin and ancestral teachings.”
-Christine Cyr, Métis
Associate Vice-President (Indigenous), Office of the Vice-President (Indigenous)

7. The work of Architect Douglas Cardinal

“Douglas Cardinal is a world-famous First Nation Architect that incorporates Indigenous knowledge into architecture.”
-Randy Hermann, Métis
Director, Engineering Access Program

8. @NotoriousCree on Instagram, created by James Jones

“@NotoriousCree’s stories and reels are inspiring and they promote a respectful way to become informed AND I watch it for the traditional dancing!”  
-Cathy Lund, Métis
Indigenous career consultant, Career Services

9. The Land Back Issue from Briarpatch Magazine

“The Land Back Issue is a collection of historical timelines, essays and poetry by inspiring Indigenous writers paired with stunning art pieces that provides a glimpse into the powerful Land Back movement.”
-Nickita Longman, Saulteaux
Communications coordinator, Indigenous Engagement and Communications

10. Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga, House of Anansi Press

“Both heartbreaking and eye-opening, this book takes the reader on a journey of exploring relevant themes experienced by Indigenous peoples such as systematic racism, but instills within its story a call for action.”
-Zoe Quill, member of Sapotaweyak Cree Nation
Student, Faculty of Science

Participants are asked to register in advance.

About the Book

Words of the Inuit is an important compendium of Inuit culture illustrated through Inuit words. It brings the sum of the author’s decades of experience and engagement with Inuit and Inuktitut to bear on what he fashions as an amiable, leisurely stroll through words and meanings.

Inuit words are often more complex than English words and frequently contain small units of meaning that add up to convey a larger sensibility. Dorais’s lexical and semantic analyses and reconstructions are not overly technical, yet they reliably evince connections and underlying significations that allow for an in-depth reflection on the richness of Inuit linguistic and cultural heritage and identity. An appendix on the polysynthetic character of Inuit languages includes more detailed grammatical description of interest to more specialist readers.

Organized thematically, the book tours the histories and meanings of the words to illuminate numerous aspects of Inuit culture, including environment and the land; animals and subsistence activities; humans and spirits; family, kinship, and naming; the human body; and socializing with other people in the contemporary world. It concludes with a reflection on the usefulness for modern Inuit—especially youth and others looking to strengthen their cultural identity —to know about the underlying meanings embedded in their language and culture.

“Professor Dorais once again provides expert information and insight into the Inuit language and culture as only he can,” says Alana Johns, Professor Emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. “This book is written so that academics, Inuit and the public can all learn more about the people who live in Canada’s most northern region. By examining the rich meanings contained within words of Inuktitut, Dorais details social nuances and core aspects of both traditional and modern Inuit culture.”

About the Presenters

Louis-Jacques Dorais is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, Université Laval. Since the mid-sixties, a period of time when he became fluent in Inuktitut, he has travelled almost yearly to Inuit communities in Canada, Alaska and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), in order to conduct research and teach Inuit linguistics to local students.

Christopher Trott has conducted research with Inuit on Baffin Island focussing on the areas of kinship and social organization. He currently teaches in the Native Studies Department at the University of Manitoba, and is the Warden and Vice-Chancellor of St John’s College.

Injichaag: My Soul in Story: Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words

When: Monday, Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers (4000-1120 Grant Ave.). And a special event co-hosted by the UM’s Institute for the Humanities will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 28 from 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.in the St. John’s College Common Room and will feature professor Warren Cariou, director of the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

About the book:

Injichaag shares the life story of Anishinaabe artist Rene Meshake in stories, poetry, and Anishinaabemowin “word bundles” that serve as a dictionary of Ojibwe poetics. Meshake was born in the railway town of Nakina in northwestern Ontario in 1948, and spent his early years living off-reserve with his grandmother in a matriarchal land-based community he calls Pagwashing. He was raised through his grandmother’s “bush university,” periodically attending Indian day school, but at the age of ten Rene was scooped into the Indian residential school system, where he suffered sexual abuse as well as the loss of language and connection to family and community.

This residential school experience was life-changing, as it suffocated his artistic expression and resulted in decades of struggle and healing. Now in his twenty-eighth year of sobriety, Rene is a successful multidisciplinary artist, musician and writer. Meshake’s artistic vision and poetic lens provide a unique telling of a story of colonization and recovery.

The material is organized thematically around a series of Meshake’s paintings. It is framed by Kim Anderson, Rene’s Odaanisan (adopted daughter), a scholar of oral history who has worked with Meshake for two decades. Full of teachings that give a glimpse of traditional Anishinaabek lifeways and worldviews, Injichaag: My Soul in Story is “more than a memoir.”

About the authors:

Rene Meshake is an Anishinaabe Elder, visual and performing artist, award-winning author, storyteller, flute player, new media artist and a Recipient of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Kim Anderson is a Cree/Métis writer, a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Relationships, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph. She has published six books, including Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine, and Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration.

Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West

When: Friday, Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers (4000-1120 Grant Ave.) And a special event co-hosted by the UM’s Institute for the Humanities will be held Friday, Jan. 31 in Rm. 409 of the Tier Building from 2-4 p.m.

About the book:

While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism.

Although such cities have been denigrated as “ordinary” or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional sites to study Indigenous resurgence. The urban centres of the continental plains have featured Indigenous housing and food co-operatives, social service agencies, and schools. The American Indian Movement initially developed in Minneapolis in 1968, and Idle No More emerged in Saskatoon in 2013.

The editors and authors of Settler City Limits, both Indigenous and settler, address urban struggles involving Anishinaabek, Cree, Creek, Dakota, Flathead, Lakota, and Métis peoples. Collectively, these studies showcase how Indigenous people in the city resist ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and create spaces for themselves and their families.

Working at intersections of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, urban studies, geography, and sociology, this book examines how the historical and political conditions of settler colonialism have shaped urbandevelopment in the Canadian Prairies and American Plains. Settler City Limits frames cities as Indigenous spaces and places, both in terms of the historical geographies of the regions in which they are embedded, and with respect to ongoing struggles for land, life, and self-determination.

About the authors:

Heather Dorries is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning and the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.

Robert Henry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.

David Hugill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University.

Tyler McCreary is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University.

Penashue led the Innu campaign against NATO’s low-level flying and bomb testing on Innu land during the 1980s and ’90s, and was a key respondent in a landmark legal case in which the judge held that the Innu had the “colour of right” to occupy the Canadian Forces base in Goose Bay, Labrador.

Her book Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive began as a diary written in Innu-aimun, in which she recorded day-to-day experiences, court appearances, and interviews with reporters.

“Here is the diary of a living legend,” says Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Innu poet and actress. “It is also a diary for today, an invitation to follow the steps of our ancestors through a single Innu woman whose love for the land never falls apart even within the biggest struggle storms of our time. The Innu people always believed in dream and imagination to travel through lands if physically we couldn’t. We can walk now with Tshaukuesh Penashue.”

Her book launches on Nov. 10, 2019, at 3 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers

Darryl Leroux is an associate professor in the Department of Social Justice and Community Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). He has been working on the dynamics of racism and colonialism among fellow French descendants for nearly two decades and his book Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined “Indigenous” identity.

This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational efforts to reconnect that occur in response. Rather, it is about white, French-descendant people discovering an Indigenous ancestor born 300 to 375 years ago through genealogy and using that ancestor as the sole basis for an eventual shift into an “Indigenous” identity today.

After setting out the most common genealogical practices that facilitate race shifting, Leroux examines two of the most prominent self-identified “Indigenous” organizations currently operating in Quebec. Both organizations have their origins in committed opposition to Indigenous land and territorial negotiations, and both encourage the use of suspect genealogical practices. Distorted Descent brings to light to how these claims to an “Indigenous” identity are then used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples, exposing along the way the shifting politics of whiteness, white settler colonialism, and white supremacy.

“Distorted Descent is a brave, original piece of scholarship, offered in the context of a politically sensitive and socially controversial subject of Indigenous identity,” says Pamela Palmater, Chair in Indigenous Governance, Department of Politics and Public Administration, at Ryerson University. “His research exposes the extent to which white settler colonialism undermines Indigenous rights through the theft of Indigenous identity. It’s a real wake-up call.”

Leroux’s book launches on Nov. 13, 2019, at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers

We travelled with authors to Dene territory in the North West Territories to talk about land claims and to experience something of what it means to live on the land. We visited Stó:lō communities in BC to co-create a new decolonized approach to history.

Our authors looked at the Kanehsatake Resistance through the lens of literary criticism and type 2 diabetes in Indigenous youth in a history of medicine.

As the year draws to a close, we’re also looking ahead to spring 2019 titles—including the memoir of an Innu elder and a social justice-tinged history of the Jewish community in Winnipeg—but we thought we’d offer a few highlights from a busy yet fulfilling year in publishing. And, as a bonus, if you leave a comment on this story, you will be entered to win one of these book’s of your choosing. Two winners will be selected at random by U of M Press by Dec. 21, 2018. 

Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace by Kayanesenh Paul Williams

Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace by Kayanesenh Paul Williams

Several centuries ago, the five nations that would become the Haudenosaunee—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—were locked in generations-long cycles of bloodshed. When they established Kayanerenkó:wa, the Great Law of Peace, they not only resolved intractable conflicts, but also shaped a system of law and government that would maintain peace for generations to come. This law remains in place today in Haudenosaunee communities: an Indigenous legal system, distinctive, complex, and principled. It is not only a survivor, but a viable alternative to Euro-American systems of law. With its emphasis on lasting relationships, respect for the natural world, building consensus, and on making and maintaining peace, it stands in contrast to legal systems based on property, resource exploitation, and majority rule.

In Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace, Kayanesenh Paul Williams, counsel to Indigenous nations for forty years, with a law practice based in the Grand River Territory of the Six Nations, brings the sum of his experience and expertise to this analysis of Kayanerenkó:wa as a living, principled legal system. In doing so, he puts a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous and settler communities.

• Recommended readers: Law students and legal scholars. People working in the legal system—laywers and judges. People inside and out of Haudenosaunee communities. People interested in Ontario history. People interested in Six Nations history or transnational history.

Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice: Begade Shutagot’ine and the Sahtu Treaty by Peter Kulchyski

A Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice chronicles Peter Kulchyski’s experiences with the Begade Shutagot’ine, a small community of a few hundred people living in and around Tulita (formerly Fort Norman), on the Mackenzie River in the heart of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Despite their formal objections and boycott of the agreement, the band and their lands were included in the Sahtu Treaty, a modern comprehensive land claims agreement negotiated between the Government of Canada and the Sahtu Tribal Council, representing Dene and Métis peoples of the region. While both Treaty 11 (1921) and the Sahtu Treaty (1994) purport to extinguish Begade Shutagot’ine Aboriginal title, oral history and documented attempts to exclude themselves from treaty strongly challenge the validity of that extinguishment.

Structured as a series of briefs to an inquiry into the Begade Shutagot’ine’s claim, this book documents the negotiation and implementation of the Sahtu Treaty and amasses evidence of historical and continued presence and land use to make eminently clear that the Begade Shutagot’ine are the continued owners of the land by law: they have not extinguished title to their traditional territories; they continue to exercise their customs, practices, and traditions on those territories; and they have a fundamental right to be consulted on, and refuse or be compensated for, development projects on those territories. Kulchyski bears eloquent witness to the Begade Shutagot’ine people’s two-decade struggle for land rights, which have been blatantly ignored by federal and territorial authorities for too long.

• Recommended readers: Social justice warriors. Poets. Indigenous Studies students. Dene people. People interested in traditional life in the North. Activists. People travelling to the NWT in 2019.

Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961 by Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner

Rooster Town was a Métis community of on the outskirts of southwest Winnipeg that endured from 1901 to 1961.

Those years in Winnipeg were characterized by the twin pressures of depression and inflation, chronic housing shortages, and a spotty social support network. At the city’s edge, Rooster Town grew without city services as rural Métis arrived to participate in the urban economy and build their own houses while keeping Métis culture and community as a central part of their lives.

In other growing settler cities, the Indigenous experience was largely characterized by removal and confinement. But the continuing presence of Métis living and working in the city, and the establishment of Rooster Town itself, made the Winnipeg experience unique.

Rooster Town documents the story of a community rooted in kinship, culture, and historical circumstance, whose residents existed unofficially in the cracks of municipal bureaucracy, while navigating the legacy of settler colonialism and the demands of modernity and urbanization.

• Recommended readers: Winnipeggers. Métis people. Descendants of people who lived in Rooster Town. Anyone who’s ever gone to Grant Park Mall, Pan Am Pool, or Grant Park High School. Mapmakers, aspiring GIS analysts, and data miners. Indigenous studies students and faculty.

Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City by Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry.

Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. At the heart of this story is a thirty-four-hour period in September 2008. During that day and half Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Manitoba’s capital city, arrived in the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg’s major downtown hospital, was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection. His death reflects a particular structure of indifference born of and maintained by colonialism.

McCallum and Perry present the ways in which Sinclair, once erased and ignored, came to represent diffuse, yet singular and largely dehumanized ideas about Indigenous people, modernity, and decline in cities. This story tells us about ordinary indigeneity in the city of Winnipeg through Sinclair’s experience and restores the complex humanity denied him in his interactions with Canadian health and legal systems, both before and after his death.

Structures of Indifference completes the story left untold by the inquiry into Sinclair’s death, the 2014 report of which omitted any consideration of underlying factors, including racism and systemic discrimination.

• Recommended readers: Winnipeggers. Healthcare professionals—nurses, doctors, administrators. Urban Indigenous people. Policy analysts.

Towards a New Ethnohistory: Community Engaged Scholarship among the People of the River by Keith Thor Carlson, John Sutton Lutz, David M. Schaepe, Naxaxalhts’i – Albert “Sonny” McHalsie

Towards a New Ethnohistory engages respectfully in cross-cultural dialogue and interdisciplinary methods to co-create with Indigenous people a new, decolonized ethnohistory. This new ethnohistory reflects Indigenous ways of knowing and is a direct response to critiques of scholars who have for too long foisted their own research agendas onto Indigenous communities. Community-engaged scholarship invites members of the Indigenous community themselves to identify the research questions, host the researchers while they conduct the research, and participate meaningfully in the analysis of the researchers’ findings.

The historical research topics chosen by the Stó:lō community leaders and knowledge keepers for the contributors to this collection range from the intimate and personal, to the broad and collective. But what principally distinguishes the analyses is the way settler colonialism is positioned as something that unfolds in sometimes unexpected ways within Stó:lō history, as opposed to the other way around.

This collection presents the best work to come out of the world’s only graduate-level humanities-based ethnohistory fieldschool. The blending of methodologies and approaches from the humanities and social sciences is a model of twenty-first century interdisciplinarity.

• Recommended readers: Anyone doing research on/with Indigenous communities. Stó:lō people. People interested in BC history. People interested in decolonizing universities.

We celebrated our 50th anniversary and mounted an exhibit at the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections while also putting out 14 books, several of which received national media attention.

 Here are a few highlights from a festive year in publishing. (We might be biased but we think books—printed or electronic—make smart gifts…)

No Man’s Land: The Life and Art of Mary Riter Hamilton by Kathryn A. Young & Sarah M. McKinnon

Western Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton (1868–1954) was determined to be a professional artist. Her story moves from homestead beginnings to genteel drawing rooms in Winnipeg, Victoria, and Vancouver to art schools in Paris and Berlin. But what drove a female artist with a comfortable life to one of hardship and loneliness, documenting the battlefields of France and Belgium after World War One?

Mary Riter Hamilton’s work can be found in galleries and museums throughout Canada and her early shows in Winnipeg were part of what started the discussion about establishing what would become the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

No Man’s Land is the first biography of Riter Hamilton. Ten years in the making, Young & McKinnon talk about Riter Hamilton’s life, her art, and the importance of female networks.

We knew we had to publish this book because it manages to trace the trajectory of an early Winnipeg artist, a female artist in an era dominated by male artists, from china painting to battle zones.

• Recommended readers: artists, military history buffs, readers of Manitoba histories.

The North End Revisited by John Paskievich

We published John Paskievich’s The North End in 2007 and it quickly became one of our most critically-acclaimed and best-selling books.

Paskievich came to Canada from a refugee camp in Austria and settled with his parents in Winnipeg’s North End. As a child and then as a young man, he walked the North End’s streets, where Indigenous peoples and Old World immigrants crossed the boundaries of ethnicity, class, and culture.

As an adult, Paskievich went away to study photography in Montreal, and, when he came home, picked up a camera and started walking the streets of his old neighbourhood.

John is probably best known as an award winning documentary filmmaker—his most recent of which was Special Ed (2013)—but he always returned to the North End with his camera.

And when our 50th anniversary appeared on the event horizon, we knew we wanted to re-issue The North End. But we didn’t just want to hit print again—we wanted to do something a little different. So we asked Paskievich for new photographs and wound up including 80 of them, selected from the four decades of images Paskievich had amassed. Add to that an interview by the always-interesting Alison Gillmor and a new essay by North End ex-pat George Melnyk, and we had The North End Revisited.

• Recommended readers: Anyone who thinks that every birthday needs a Jeannie’s cake and that the only real bagels are from Gunn’s, street photography nuts, people who love a good coffee table book, aspiring filmmakers.

Snacks: A Canadian Food History by Janis Thiessen

How could you not like a history of junk food? (How could you not want to read a book by a historian whose favourite flavour of chip is dill pickle?)

In her book Snacks, University of Winnipeg historian Janis Thiessen profiles several iconic Canadian snack food companies, including Old Dutch Potato Chips, Hawkins Cheezies, and chocolatier Ganong. These companies have developed in distinctive ways, reflecting the unique stories of their founders and their intense connection to specific places.

Along the way Thiessen uncovers the roots of our deep loyalties to different snack foods, what it means to be an independent snack food producer, and the often-quirky ways snacks have been created and marketed.

• Recommended readers: People interested in the local food movement, people who eat/make snacks, CSA farmers and the people who buy shares, both sides of the Cheezies vs. Cheetos debate, members of the Facebook group devoted to the Cuban Lunch.

Two Years Below the Horn: Operation Tabarin, Field Science, and Antarctic Sovereignty by Andrew Taylor, edited by Daniel Heidt & P. Whitney Lackenbauer

Andrew Taylor (1907–1993) was Scotland-born but Manitoba-bred. He attended the University of Manitoba and before World War Two broke out, he was the town engineer in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

In the years that followed, Taylor became one of Canada’s foremost polar explorers. Given his extensive pre-war surveying experience, once war was declared Taylor was asked to join Operation Tabarin, a landmark British expedition to the Antarctic to establish sovereignty and conduct science. When mental strain caused the operation’s commander to resign, Taylor became the first and only Canadian to lead an Antarctic expedition.

Brought out of the archive by military historians Daniel Heidt & P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Taylor’s diary of this fascinating era on the world stage is well worth reading.

• Recommended readers: People interested in polar exploration, history of science people, military history buffs, everyone that’s ever cruised to Alaska, the Antarctic, or trained to Churchill, winter campers.

The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River by Susan M. Hill

At University of Manitoba Press, we’ve specialized in telling the stories of life on the prairies. We’ve published pioneering books about the Metis, Cree, Anishinaabe, and Dene people of this region. We’ve told the stories of early Winnipeg, of Red River, and any number of small communities and reserves.

In 1999, we published one of the first detailed examinations of the inner workings of Canada’s residential school system. In 2017, we published an essential history of residential schools from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

As we begin our second 50 years, we wanted to broaden our scope. And so we’ve started to publish books about the Six Nations that stretched from Canada to the United States. Susan Hill’s The Clay We Are Made Of is a great addition to that small but growing list.

Hill is a Haudenosaunee citizen (Wolf Clan, Mohawk Nation) and a long-time resident of Ohswe:ken (Grand River Territory) who now teaches at the University of Toronto. She’s a scholar writing out of and to her community and so provides a unique perspective on Haudenosaunee land tenure on the Grand River.

• Recommended readers: Members of the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations. Canadian historian buffs who want a new and compelling Indigenous perspective on the history of a dynamic First Nation. The Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene people. Members of the Métis Nation.

University of Manitoba Press is publishing Ma-Nee’s memoir via its Critical Studies in Native History Series, which is edited by Robin Jarvis Brownlie, professor of history at the U of M.

The book starts:

“My earliest memories are of gathering kindling, making snowshoes, and hunting and trapping in my isolated Canadian community, where alcoholism was widespread in the 1950s. In 2013, more than half a century later, I performed a healing ceremony and then helped lead the first gay pride parade in my city, Thunder Bay, Ontario. This book describes the extraordinary path that led me to this place.”

A Two-Spirit Journey

Ma-Nee Chacaby marching in the 1989 Boston Pride parade

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.

As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.

Raised by her Cree grandmother in a remote Ojibwa community near Lake Nipigon, Ont., Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

Two-Spirit

As Two-Spirited People of Manitoba Inc. says: Two-Spirit  is a term used to describe Aboriginal people who assume cross-, or multiple gender roles, attributes, dress and attitudes for personal, spiritual, cultural, ceremonial or social reasons. These roles are defined by each cultural group and can be fluid over a person’s lifetime. Modern terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and intersected (in combination with, or exclusive to, Two-Spirit) may be adopted by some Aboriginal people to define who they are.