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Karina Vernon (ed.), The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2020, 594 pages. ISBN 9781771123747, $35.99 (paper) The two-story brick building at 795 Main Street in [...]

This article analyzes the relationship between First Nations housing and reform in British Columbia between 1849 and 1886. Utilizing published and archival evidence drawn from church and government sources, the essay examines reformers' conceptions of First Nations housing and their concrete efforts to improve it. The essay thereby suggests that housing was an important site in the colonial encounter and that the colonial encounter itself was key to honing and disseminating new ideals related to housing, gender, and the family.

John Francis Grant, A Son of the Fur Trade: The Memoirs of Johnny Grant Gerhard J. Ens (editor), Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008, 468 pages. ISBN 978-0-88864-491-6, $34.95 (paper) [...]

Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1998, ISBN 88977-103-0, paper, $29.95 The Royal North West Mounted Police is a staple of English-Canadian popular culture and Prairie historiography alike. William M. Baker's [...]

How can feminist scholarship, postcolonial history and Indigenous Studies prompt historians to reflect on the categories of biography and Confederation? Reflecting on her research on the lives of James Douglas, Amelia Connolly Douglas and nineteenth-century north-western North America more generally, Adele Perry argues that historians need to go beyond biography and Confederation to consider more complicated ways of engaging individual lives and nation states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the particular work that languages of slavery and abolition did in British North American fur-trade territories with an eye to comparing these histories with those of slavery and anti-slavery in Australia. Temporally, it focuses on the two decades following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and geographically it examines the parts of northwestern North America claimed by Britain and administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. Here traders, missionaries and critics wrote of slavery and anti-slavery in the fur-trade in ways that repeated metropolitan patterns but were also arguably distinct, and certainly merit our attention. In British fur-trade space, vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery provided language for the particular unfreedom of Indigenous people, the experience of indentured migrant labourers, and the political arrangements of colonial space. Seeing how the vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery tracked through different colonial spaces reminds us of the uneven and intertwined histories that cut across and through the nineteenth-century world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]