Georges Sioui’s Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy promises to retell the history of Canadian democracy by tracing its origins back to Indigenous confederations that pre-existed the arrival of Europeans. It’s an exciting promise. Closely related to this effort is a second goal, which is to challenge the Canadian textbook histories that he finds grant an outsized role to the Hodenosaunee Confederacy and ignore the Wendat Confederacy almost completely.
Throughout modern history, the concept of hygiene has shifted, going from mere outward appearance (distinguishing the rich who had time and money to get their clothes washed from the poor who didn’t) to the idea of cleanliness for health (with the discovery of germs) before becoming an easily purchased sign of beauty and a daily routine.
My friend picked up Jan Zwicky’s The Experience of Meaning for me on the morning I had what I thought might be the first signs of labour. Were these period-like cramps early contractions, I wondered? What is labour and how do you know when are you in it? It’s a question thick with meaning; reading Zwicky’s book in this liminal time changed the way I thought about and sought to answer this question.
Does nationalism make us small, even if we try to confine it to coffee, football, and grilled meat? Why didn’t Communism make us better? Why is ownership fatal while belonging is salvific? Who exactly is supposed to forgive you when you leave home? Do all children more or less consciously live out an allegiance to their parents’ beliefs? And are the contradictions between the remembered past and the necessary present impossible to reconcile?
The journalist/academic/overqualified intellectual who takes a service job and writes a mildly politicized memoir about it has become a genre unto itself. Walmart’s well-publicized crappy labour practices and hokey bluster make it an obvious choice for this kind of project (Barbara Ehrenreich also worked at Walmart for 2001’s Nickel and Dimed, the gold standard of real-work-sucks literature).
"You’ve got to legalize it,” sang Peter Tosh in his famous song. On October 17, 2018, Canada took Tosh’s advice and did exactly that, legalizing cannabis throughout the country. High Time is a book that thinks about what might happen as a result of this fundamental change in Canada’s regulatory regime, when a drug that was widely available on the black market moves to being widely available by legal means.
"Daughters, wives, mothers, French Canadians, Roman Catholics, workers.” The millions of women who worked in Quebec’s textile industry for more than a hundred years were sometimes all of these things, sometimes only one. Their bodies were the backbone of Quebec’s industrialization, enlisted in the national project both at home and in the factory. This new study brings them and their voices to light.
Villages in Cities: Community Land Ownership, Cooperative Housing, and the Milton Parc Story tracks the community resistance and solidarity that scuppered Concordia Estates, alongside looking at the efforts and achievements of cooperative housing movements worldwide. It’s an academic guide for communities that want to protect their neighbourhoods from the claws ofreal estate speculation and gentrification, a toxic pollutant that discharges urban renewal at the cost of displacing original inhabitants, according to editors Joshua Hawley and Dimitrios Roussopoulos.
Kent Nagano, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s music director since 2006, is more than just a conductor; he’s an outreach worker, constantly trying to win over new audiences to classical music, from hockey fans to street kids to Inuit communities in the Far North. He puts this mission in writing with Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected (co-written with Inge Kloepfer) – part manifesto, part impassioned plea, part sincere sales pitch for classical music as a whole
Frédérick Lavoie’s For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone, translated by Donald Winkler, provides a portrait of Ukraine in the pivotal months surrounding the unseating of President Viktor Yanukovych and the subsequent division of Ukraine into a pro-Europe west and a pro-Russia east. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 led to outright war between Russian separatist forces (a combination of Ukrainian rebels and imported Russian troops) in the Donbas region and the Ukrainian government.
It’s amazing to learn, from this compelling and comprehensive book, that there are as many Americans claiming French-Canadian ancestry today as there are Canadians, about ten million on each side of the border. Those in Canada are descendants of French colonists who settled in the St. Lawrence Valley (and elsewhere) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those in the United States are the heirs of nearly a million French-Canadians, mostly from Quebec, who relocated in the period from 1865 to 1930 to work in the shoe factories and paper plants and especially the cotton mills in dozens of New England towns and cities.
In analyzing the writing, art, film, fiction, and facts surrounding the so-called Oka Crisis of the 1990s in Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature, Isabelle St-Amand shows that history is explored via many winding, complex, and at times contradictory paths and not the broad boulevards historic winners stroll in their victory parades.
