Books

Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Miriam Toews’s oeuvre and a celebration of fiction’s ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.

Part criticism, part memoir, Making Believe argues that there is no such thing as Mennonite art. At the same time, her close engagement with individual works of art paradoxically leads Redekop to identify a Mennonite sensibility at play in the space where artists from many cultures interact.

The first book of its kind, Self-Determined Stories reads Indigenous-authored YA not only as a vital challenge to stereotypes but also as a rich intellectual resource for theorizing Indigenous sovereignty in the contemporary era.

In the summer of 1990, the Oka Crisis—or the Kanehsatake Resistance—exposed a rupture in the relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada. Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature examines the standoff in relation to film and literary narratives, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America offers a cohesive platform for an interdisciplinary reappraisal of Mennonite literature and literary criticism, as well as a reflection of current conversations in the field about Mennonite literary discourse and cultural identity.

In the 1930s Grey Owl was considered the foremost conservationist and nature writer in the world. Born into a privileged family in the dominant culture of his time, what compelled him to flee to a far less powerful one?

Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric—that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images.

Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters offers the first comprehensive portrait of how the Haudenosaunee of the Grand River region have expressed their long struggle for sovereignty in Canada.

Drawing on recent work in diaspora studies, Rewriting the Break Event offers a historicization of Mennonite literary studies in Canada, followed by close readings of five novels that rewrite the Mennonite break event through specific strains of emphasis, including a religious narrative, ethnic narrative, trauma narrative, and meta-narrative.

A multidisciplinary analysis of the Canadian West.

This groundbreaking anthology features twenty-four contributors who utilize creative and critical approaches to propose that this people’s stories carry dynamic answers to questions posed within Anishinaabeg communities, nations, and the world at large.

A groundbreaking introduction to Inuit literary criticism.

In this long-awaited book from one of the most recognized and respected scholars in Native Studies today, Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdisciplinary study of the Native literary response to racist writing in the Canadian historical and literary record from 1850 to 1990.

Taking Back Our Spirits traces the link between Canadian public policies, the injuries they have inflicted on Indigenous people, and Indigenous literature’s ability to heal individuals and communities.

Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree).

The boundary between an Aboriginal text and the analysis by a non-Aboriginal outsider poses particular challenges often constructed as unbridgeable. Eigenbrod argues that politically correct silence is not the answer but instead does a disservice to the literature that, like all literature, depends on being read, taught, and disseminated.