Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction WinnersUnpublished

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Dadibaajim narratives are of and from the land, born from experience and observation. Invoking this critical Anishinaabe methodology for teaching and learning, Helen Agger documents and reclaims the history, identity, and inherent entitlement of the Namegosibii Anishinaabeg to the care, use,...

In daily love letters written to her husband and soul companion, Brian, over the year following his death from brain cancer, critically acclaimed author, playwright, and jazz singer Martha Brooks leads us on a journey through grief that is both deeply personal and undeniably universal. By...

Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk (1770-1820), was a complex man of his times, whose passions left an indelible mark on Canadian history. A product of the Scottish Enlightenment and witness to the French Revolution, he dedicated his fortune and energy to the vision of a new colony at the...

With the advent of Aboriginal street gangs such as Indian Posse, Manitoba Warriors, and Native Syndicate, Winnipeg garnered a reputation as the "gang capital of Canada." Yet beyond the stereotypes of outsiders, little is known about these street gangs and the factors and conditions that have...

George Nelson (1786-1859) was a clerk for the North West Company whose unusually detailed and personal writings provide a compelling portrait of the people engaged in the golden age of the Canadian fur trade. Friends, Foes, and Furs is a critical edition of Nelson's daily journals, supplemented with...

In the supposedly enlightened '60s and '70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn't talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973 -- with no statistics, no money and little public support -- five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened...

The treasures of the world's largest public collection of Inuit art are revealed in this seminal history of art from the Arctic. The collection of Inuit art held by the Winnipeg Art Gallery, one of Canada's most important public galleries, is extraordinary by any standard: its...

Raymond Hebert analyses Manitoba's French-language crisis in detail and considers its local and national implications. For nine months in 1983 and early 1984, beginning with a protest by French-speaking Manitobans, who had received parking tickets written only in English and ending with a legal...

Dorise Nielsen was a pioneering feminist, a radical politician, the first Communist elected to Canadaís House of Commons, and the only woman elected in 1940. But despite her remarkable career, until now little has been known about her.From her youth in London during World War I to her burial in 1980...

Part ethnography, part narrative, Like the Sound of a Drum is evocative, confrontational, and poetic. For many years, Peter Kulchyski has travelled to the north, where he has sat in on community meetings, interviewed elders and Aboriginal politicians, and participated in daily life. In Like the...

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. In When the Other...

William Lyon Mackenzie King, twice former Prime Minister of Canada, was a brilliant tactician, was passionately committed to Canadian unity, and was a protector of the underdog, introducing such cornerstones of Canada's social safety net as unemployment insurance, family allowances and old-age...

This is the story of Jake MacDonald’s discovery of some of the last wild places in North America. The Precambrian Shield extends from the Arctic, across much of eastern Canada, and south into the United States. When Jake was still a boy, his father built a cottage in Manitoba. It was here that...

Naamiwan's Drumfollows the story of a famous Ojibwe medicine man, his gifted grandson, and remarkable water drum. This drum, and forty other artefacts, were given away by a Canadian museum to an American Anishinaabe group that had no family or community connections to the collection. Many years...

Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. In September 2008, Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabe resident of Winnipeg, arrived in the emergency room of a major downtown...

Winner of the Kobzar Award Winner of the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award In 2005, Maurice Mierau and his wife, Betsy, travelled to Ukraine to adopt two small boys, age three and five. After weeks of delays while navigating a tangled bureaucracy, they returned to...

From the author of the Julia Child Award-nominated Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary this delightful book includes over 100 mini-essays explaining the origins and historical development of words in our language that pertain to love and sex. Do you know, for example, what a 78 is? Here's a hint...

The life of Seager Wheeler is one of the most significant--albeit nearly forgotten--Canadian success stories. He was North America's most celebrated wheat developer, whose varieties in the 1920s made up 40 percent of the world's wheat exports, and contributed wealth to most facets of the...

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the...

" "Walsh's writings are stunning examples of how to look, how to feel, how to see." For 30 years Meeka Walsh has been the Editor of the Canadian art magazine, Border Crossings A selection of her much-admired essays published in each issue of that magazine have been selected for this...