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Explores how Shingwaukonse and other Native leaders of the Great Lakes Ojibwa sought to establish links with new government agencies to preserve an environment in which Native cultural values and organizational structures could survive.
In ten original studies, former students and colleagues of Maurice Careless, one of Canada's most distinguished historians, explore both traditional and hitherto neglected topics in the development of nineteenth-century Ontario. Their papers incorporate the three themes that characterize their mentor's scholarly efforts: metropolitan-hinterland relations; urban development; and the impact of 'limited identities' -- gender, class, ethnicity and regionalism -- that shaped the lives of Old Ontarians. Traditional topics -- colonial-imperial tension and the growth of Canadian autonomy in the Union period, the making of a 'compact' in early York, politics in pre-Rebellion Toronto, and the social v...
The Midewiwin is the traditional religious belief system central to the world view of Ojibwa in Canada and the US. It is a highly complex and rich series of sacred teachings and narratives whose preservation enabled the Ojibwa to withstand severe challenges to their entire social fabric throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It remains an important living and spiritual tradition for many Aboriginal people today.The rituals of the Midewiwin were observed by many 19th century Euro-Americans, most of whom approached these ceremonies with hostility and suspicion. As a result, although there were many accounts of the Midewiwin published in the 19th century, they were often riddled with misinterpretations and inaccuracies.Historian Michael Angel compares the early texts written about the Midewiwin, and identifies major, common misconceptions in these accounts. In his explanation of the historical role played by the Midewiwin, he provides alternative viewpoints and explanations of the significance of the ceremonies, while respecting the sacred and symbolic nature of the Midewiwin rituals, songs, and scrolls.
Much of the ground on which Canada’s largest metropolitan centre now stands was purchased by the British from the Mississauga Indians for a payment that in the end amounted to ten shillings. Sacred Feathers (1802–1856), or Peter Jones, as he became known in English, grew up hearing countless stories of the treachery in those negotiations, early lessons in the need for Indian vigilance in preserving their land and their rights. Donald B. Smith’s biography of this remarkable Ojibwa leader shows how well those early lessons were learned and how Jones used them to advance the welfare of his people. A groundbreaking book, Sacred Feathers was one of the first biographies of a Canadian Aboriginal to be based on his own writings – drawing on Jones’s letters, diaries, sermons, and his history of the Ojibwas – and the first modern account of the Mississauga Indians. As summarized by M.T. Kelly in Saturday Night when the book was first published in 1988, “This biography achieves something remarkable. Peter Jones emerges from its pages alive. We don’t merely understand him by the book’s end: we know him.”
Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites’ beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its “manifest destiny” of westward expansion. Over time, the attempts of whites to communicate with Indians gave rise to theories linking language and race. Scholars maintained that language was ...
In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction--with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. They present a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire's power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth, particularly ...
The Mi’kmaq of eastern Canada were among the first indigenous North Americans to encounter colonial Europeans. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, they were trading with French fishers, and by the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Mi’kmaq had converted to Catholicism. Mi’kmaw Catholicism is perhaps best exemplified by the community’s regard for the figure of Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus. Every year for a week, coinciding with the saint’s feast day of July 26, Mi’kmaw peoples from communities throughout Quebec and eastern Canada gather on the small island of Potlotek, off the coast of Nova Scotia. It is, however, far from a conventional Catholic celebration. In ...
Intersperses close analysis of the 1726 treaty with discussions of the Marshall case, and shows how the inter-cultural relationships and power dynamics of the past, have shaped both the law and the social climate of the present.