The most profound truth in the universe is this: that we are all one drum and we need each other. --Richard Wagamese, One Drum
Fans of Richard Wagamese's writing will be heartened by the news that the bestselling author left behind a manuscript he'd been working on until shortly before his death in 2017. One Drum welcomes readers to unite in ceremony to heal themselves and bring harmony to their lives and communities.
In One Drum, Wagamese wrote, I am not a shaman. Nor am I an elder, a pipe carrier, or a celebrated traditionalist. I am merely one who has trudged the same path many of this human family has--the path of the seeker, called forward by a yearning I have not always understood.
One Drum draws from the foundational teachings of Ojibway tradition, the Grandfather Teachings. Focusing specifically on the lessons of humility, respect and courage, the volume contains simple ceremonies that anyone anywhere can do, alone or in a group, to foster harmony and connection. Wagamese believed that there is a shaman in each of us, and we are all teachers and in the world of the spirit there is no right way or wrong way.
Writing of neglect, abuse and loss of identity, Wagamese recalled living on the street, going to jail, drinking too much, feeling rootless and afraid, and then the feeling of hope he gained from connecting with the spiritual ways of his people. He expressed the belief that ceremony has the power to unify and to heal for people of all backgrounds. When that happens, he wrote, we truly become one song and one drum beating together in a common purpose--and we are on the path to being healed.
Toques, mittens and scarves are all associated with northern climates, but the quintessential garment of Canadian knitting is surely the bulky and distinctly patterned West Coast cardigan. In the early twentieth century, Indigenous woolworkers on southern Vancouver Island began knitting what are now called Cowichan sweaters, named for the largest of the Coast Salish tribes in the region. Drawing on their talents as blanket weavers and basket makers, and adapting techniques from European settlers, Coast Salish women created sweaters that fuelled a bustling local economy. Knitters across the country copied the popular sweaters to create their own versions of the garment. The Cowichan sweater embodies industry and economy, politics and race relations, and is a testament to the innovation and resilience of Coast Salish families.
Sylvia Olsen married into the Tsartlip First Nation near Victoria, BC, and developed relationships with Coast Salish knitters through her family's sweater shop. Olsen was inspired to explore the juncture of her English/Scottish/European heritage and Coast Salish life experiences, bringing to light deeply personal questions about Canadian knitting traditions. In 2015, she and her partner Tex embarked on a cross-Canada journey from the Salish Sea to the Atlantic Ocean with stops in more than forty destinations to promote her books, conduct workshops, exchange experiences with other knitters and, Olsen hoped, discover a fresh appreciation for Canada.
Along the way, with stops in urban centres as well as smaller communities like Sioux Lookout, ON, and Shelburne, NS, Olsen observed that the knitters of Canada are as diverse as their country's geography. But their textured and colourful stories about knitting create a common narrative. With themes ranging from personal identity, cultural appropriation, provincial stereotypes and national icons, to boyfriend sweaters and love stories, Unravelling Canada is both a celebration and a discovery of an ever-changing national landscape. Insightful, optimistic, and beautifully written, it is a book that will speak to knitters and would-be knitters alike.
With gorgeous imagery, visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas brings to life the tumultuous history of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and the early colonization by the Europeans of the northern West Coast.
Yahgulanaas uses a blend of traditional and modern art, eschewing the traditional boxes of comic books for the flowing shapes of North Pacific iconography. The panels are filled with colourful and expressive watercolour paintings. The panels of each page, if removed and assembled into one whole image, form a large image reminiscent of a woven robe.
The story follows several historical figures, including Johan Adrian Jacobsen (JAJ), who comes to the Haida village of Masset to collect specimens for a German museum, through a time span that includes first contact, the devastation of the smallpox epidemic, and the mass resettlement of disenfranchised peoples, both Indigenous and European.
Steve Burgess takes readers around the world as he ponders our right to roam.
In this smart and sharply funny exploration of tourism, Steve Burgess poses the questions that all travelers should pause to consider: why do we travel and should we? In his quest for answers, he reviews studies and interviews experts from many facets of the tourism industry, all the while sharing observations from some of his most personally significant travels, from Rome to Kathmandu.
So, is satisfying our own wanderlust worth the trouble it causes? Is the tourist guilty of the charges--from voyeurism to desecration--levelled against them by everyone from environmentalists to exhausted locals to superior-feeling fellow tourists who have traded in the tour bus for authentic experiences? While posing these ethical questions, Burgess recounts his own travel blunders and epiphanies. Readers will examine ecotourism in Antarctica, cultural voyeurism in Tana Toraja, the tourist versus the traveler in Palermo. Interspersed between chapters like Guilt Trip and Err Bnb is the story of a month Burgess spent in Japan--his first trip outside North America--and the whirlwind cross-cultural romance that brought him there; taking him on a journey around the country in search of wonder and maybe even love.
Whether navigating love in Kanazawa or seeking belonging in Siena, Burgess's passion for travel shines through in these stories. Anyone with itchy feet will enjoy this humorous and contemplative book about one of the greatest joys in life--travel.
A fun and colorful introduction to the Ojibwe language through nature
It's a Mitig! guides young readers through the forest and introduces them to Ojibwe words that describe the natural world. Featuring vibrant and playful artwork, an illustrated Ojibwe-to-English glossary and a simple introduction to the double-vowel pronunciation system, plus accompanying online recordings, It's a Mitig! is one of the first books of its kind.
From sunup to sundown, encounter an amik playing with sticks and swimming in the river, a prickly gaag hiding in the bushes and a big, bark-covered mitig. Using rhyme to help readers predict the Ojibwe pronunciation, It's a Mitig! makes learning new words fun.
Anishinaabe author-illustrator Bridget George created this unique book for young children and their families with the heartfelt desire to spark a lifelong interest in learning language. Whether connecting with one's Ojibwe ancestry or simply opening children's eyes and ears to the cornucopia of North American dialects, It's a Mitig! is a useful tool for exploring language.
A practical guide to self-care and community care, written for helpers--the caregivers, activists, community leaders, mental health and medical professionals who are the first to help others, but the last to seek help themselves.
As an activist, community organizer and social worker, Farzana Doctor has preached self-care to hundreds of people struggling with burnout and exhaustion. But for years she couldn't manage to take her own advice.
Many other helpers she knew were the same: they knew the signs of burnout, and they understood the science of self-care. Maybe they'd taken workshops on vicarious trauma; maybe they'd even taught them. But still they struggled to escape the cycle of overwork, overwhelm and recovery. 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life is a workbook that speaks directly to these people--and anyone who struggles to pause, set boundaries and centre their own needs.
The workbook contains fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year. Each week, readers will find a simple new idea and an experiment for trying it out, with deeper dives into the material provided, but every level of participation celebrated. Throughout, Doctor embraces both community care and self-care at the same time, showing readers the overlap between the two.
Beautifully written, direct and insightful, this workbook is a gentle and practical guide to a more balanced life, written for those who need it most.
Accompanied by award-winning illustrator Bridget George's luminous artwork, this tradition-steeped story from renowned author Richard Wagamese meditates on the unifying powers of wisdom, kindness and respect with all the visionary clarity of our most essential legends.
The unmistakable voice of revered Ojibway author Richard Wagamese returns with this moving tale, beautifully illustrated by original work from Anishinaabe artist Bridget George.
The story unfolds in a Long Ago Time when animals of all kinds share a common language and gather to solemnly consider which of them should be their leader. After hearing boasts about the qualities of the candidates--Horse's fleetness, Buffalo's stamina, Cougar's patience, Wolverine's stealth--the conference decides to settle the matter with a race between the challengers around a foreboding mountaintop lake. And there will be one more contestant of the most unlikely sort: a small, charmingly humble rabbit named Waabooz, whose chances are considered slim by all.
In the action that follows, described with the piercing clarity and richness of any great legend, Wagamese and George gracefully convey the limits of physical force and the quietly irresistible energies of humility, empathy and a loving attachment to the land. Unforgettable for its lyrical power and poignant message, The Animal People Choose a Leader is yet another example of the late author's unique gifts as a storyteller, and a welcome reminder of his honoured place in Canadian writing.
In response to right-wing extremism in the United States and around the world, Ken McGoogan offers lessons from history by looking back at the rise of authoritarianism and the collapse of European democracies in the lead-up to World War II.
In Shadows of Tyranny, historian Ken McGoogan warns against the future by drawing on the past, setting the emergence of alt-right fascism in the US against what happened last century in Europe. Incorporating conventional history, political analysis, biographical sketches and literary criticism--referencing visionary works by Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth--Shadows of Tyranny honors those who defied dictatorship and exposed totalitarianism in all its guises.
McGoogan traces the ways democracy succumbed to paranoia, polarization, scapegoating and demagoguery less than a hundred years ago in the days of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. Taking a biographical approach to history, he highlights the personal stories of those individuals who fought their way through the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He looks at what the authors, journalists and poets of the day were writing, who was listening, and who wasn't.
The book tracks George Orwell, of course, but also journalists like Matthew Halton, Dorothy Thompson and Martha Gellhorn, philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, and such multi-faceted figures as Winston Churchill, Andre Malraux, Norman Bethune and William Stephenson. It follows them from the obliviousness of the 1920s through the stunned awakening of the 1930s, and on into the nightmare horror of the 1940s. McGoogan spotlights heroes of the French Resistance, such as Josephine Baker and Marie Madeleine Fourcade, before shifting the focus to reveal startling similarities between those events of the past and the trajectory of American politics under leaders like McCarthy and Trump.
Shadows of Tyranny aims to revive the words of Winston Churchill when he said, Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Twentieth-century novels such as George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale produced visions of future dystopia that rang with echoes of past tyrannies. Always implied was a warning that history's worst chapters are never truly closed, and that we must not fail--as many of our forebears did--to recognize that the threat of totalitarianism cannot simply be wished away.
A raw and honest, harrowing and humorous journey into the dualities of modern motherhood in graphic memoir form.
New Yorker cartoonist Rachel Deutsch desperately wanted a baby, yet she was fearful of actually being pregnant and having one. She lurched into a new identity and then missed her old one. She loved her new baby fiercely, but yearned for her previous relationship with her partner, as sleepless nights revealed the cracks below the surface of their relationship.
Funny, provocative, visually striking and unabashedly candid, The Mother offers empathy and laughs to new and seasoned parents, encouraging readers to embrace the unexpected depths of feeling, wildness, weirdness and love that comes with the territory.
First published to coincide with the centennial of the National Parks Service, this unique collection by a single photographer has been updated in this second edition to include information on all sixty-three US National Parks.
In 2007, award-winning landscape photographer Andrew Thomas began a quest to travel to and photograph all parks of the US National Park Service. His photographs are collected in this stunning tribute to some of the most spectacular and diverse scenery in the world.
Capturing the peaks of Colorado and the glaciers of Alaska, the volcanoes of Hawaii and the everglades of Florida, the coral reefs of American Samoa and the beaches of the US Virgin Islands, Thomas exhibits every single park, even the de-listed, forgotten three: Mackinac in Michigan, Platt in Oklahoma, and Sullys Hill in North Dakota. The second edition of The National Parks of the United States includes three parks that were added to the system since the US National Park Centennial on August 25, 2016: Gateway Arch in Missouri, New River Gorge in West Virginia, and White Sands in New Mexico.
Every park is represented by several photos, giving a full impression of the varied geographical features and dramatic mood shifts inherent in the changing light and seasons. Thomas also provides useful details for each park--nearest city, topographical coordinates, area size--plus personal reflections on the area quoted from a variety of perspectives: park rangers, explorers, geologists, artists and famous personalities such as Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, Brigham Young and Harry S. Truman. Also featuring a map overview of all the parks and sections dedicated to the wildlife and other protected areas, this book is a complete, breathtaking compilation of the pure splendour the United States park system has to offer.
A Season in Chezgh'un is a work of affirmation and redemption. Most of all, it's a profound exploration of soul-ache: for what was, what might've been and what's still possible. --Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist
A subversive novel by acclaimed Cree author Darrel J. McLeod (Mamaskatch, Peyakow), infused with the contradictory triumph and pain of finding conventional success in a world that feels alien.
1989: James, a talented and conflicted Cree man from a tiny settlement in Northern Alberta, has settled into a comfortable middle-class life in a trendy neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. He is living the life he had once dreamed of--travel, a charming circle of sophisticated friends, a promising career and a loving relationship with a caring man--but he chafes at being assimilated into mainstream society, removed from his people and culture.
The untimely death of James's mother, his only link to his extended family and community, propels him into a quest to reconnect with his roots. He secures a job as a principal in a remote northern Dakelh community but quickly learns that life there isn't the fix he'd hoped it would be: His encounters with poverty, cultural disruption, and abuse conjure ghosts from his past that drive him toward self-destruction. During the single year he spends in northern BC, James takes solace in the richness of the Dakelh culture, the indomitable spirit of the people, and the splendor of nature--all the while fighting to keep his dark side from destroying his life.
In A Season in Chezgh'un, McLeod pairs sorrow and tragedy with pride and strength, heralding a new era of Indigenous survival and re-emergence.
From the author of Indian Horse and Embers, here is a new curated collection of Richard Wagamese's short writings.
Richard Wagamese, one of North America's most celebrated Indigenous authors and storytellers, was a writer of breathtaking honesty and inspiration. Always striving to be a better, stronger person, Wagamese shared his journey through writing, encouraging others to do the same.
Following the success of Embers, which has sold almost seventy thousand copies since its release in 2016, this new collection of Wagamese's non-fiction works, with an introduction by editor Drew Hayden Taylor, brings together more of the prolific author's short writings, many for the first time in print, and celebrates his ability to inspire. Drawing from Wagamese's essays and columns, along with preserved social media and blog posts, this beautifully designed volume is a tribute to Wagamese's literary legacy.
The open-and-shut case of the Fatal Flapper just won't stay closed in this thrilling and immersive 1920s-era murder mystery--the third instalment in the Raincoast Noir series.
Gray brilliantly returns us to his wonderfully vivid, sinuously imagined Vancouver, this time six months before the Crash. Superb. --William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
Miss Dora Decker doesn't look like the sort of young woman capable of stabbing her employer, stockbroker Ralph M. Tucker, twenty-five times with her high-heeled shoe; yet, thanks to a slow news day, she has become internationally famous as the Fatal Flapper, and the police are only too happy to make the arrest.
Meanwhile, Ed McCurdy, former muckraking journalist, has traded his typewriter for a career reading radio news as Mr. Good-Evening, Canada's first radio personality. As a celebrity he draws resentment and paranoia from far and near, and he worries that the next murder victim will be himself.
Inspector Calvin Hook scours the wet, boozy streets of gritty 1920s Vancouver, piecing together a mystery that somehow connects Al Capone, Winston Churchill and Brother Osiris, the leader of a mystical cult on DeCourcy Island.
Mr. Good-Evening joins The White Angel and Vile Spirits as the third in a trilogy Gray calls Raincoast Noir.
Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective and offers a surprising new explanation of an enduring Northern mystery.
Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin's expeditions were monumental failures--the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discover the Northwest Passage.
This book, McGoogan's sixth about Arctic exploration, challenges that vision. It rejects old orthodoxies, incorporates the latest discoveries, and interweaves two main narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy's Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Métis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men to exhaustion, starvation and murder. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin's last expedition?
The well-preserved wrecks of Erebus and Terror--located in 2014 and 2016--promise to yield more clues about what cost the lives of the expedition members, some of whom were reduced to cannibalism. Contemporary researchers, rejecting theories of lead poisoning and botulism, continue to seek conclusive evidence both underwater and on land.
Drawing on his own research and Inuit oral accounts, McGoogan teases out many intriguing aspects of Franklin's expeditions, including the explorer's lethal hubris in ignoring the expert advice of the Dene leader Akaitcho. Franklin disappeared into the Arctic in 1845, yet people remain fascinated with his final doomed voyage: what happened? McGoogan will captivate readers with his first-hand account of travelling to relevant locations, visiting the graves of dead sailors and experiencing the Arctic--one of the most dramatic and challenging landscapes on the planet.
Through extensive research and reporting, this boundary-crossing and highly readable survey of efforts to tackle climate change aims to replace our paralyzing fears with a restored sense of hope and determination.
Climate change is a problem so enormous and complex--with threats so frightening in their implications--that many of us fend off confusion and hopelessness by simply turning away. There are jobs to do, children to raise, bills to pay. Meanwhile, with delayed action, missed targets and increasingly dire reports at the international level, a notion that the crisis is intractable continues to spread.
And the proposed solutions can be just as daunting. They often involve jargon about gigatons of carbon and kilowatt-hours of electricity. In a deeply polarized political environment, any sense of the common purpose required to make these work seems to dissolve into denial or paralysis. With all this fear and conflict, the question must be asked: How do we find the tools and--equally important--the hope we need to tackle such a wickedly difficult issue?
In Climate Hope, journalist David Geselbracht blends in-depth research, expert interviews and on-the-ground reporting in multiple countries, revealing remarkable efforts to identify the causes and impacts of climate change--and devise crucial ways to address them.
Geselbracht brings the reader to the chaotic 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, as well as to giant heating ducts below the city of Copenhagen and to wildfire-scorched landscapes in Western Canada, to name just a few sites. The scale of the challenge is clear in the range of fields he covers, from glaciology and climate science to law and diplomacy. But in drawing these approaches together, he shares stories of hope, awe and wonder that encourage us to confront this long-term, world-warping phenomenon with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.