Professor Drout continues to explore humanity's intimate association with language, here delving into the finer points of grammar. The intricacies of grammar, in fact, should not be relegated to the realm of fussy "guardians of the language," but are rather essential clues all can employ to communicate more exactly. In such a light, this course forms an invaluable guide for everyone from all fields of interest.

For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos from the town of Asbestos, Quebec, to produce fire-retardant products. Then, over time, people learned about the mineral’s devastating effects on human health. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community’s survival, the residents of Asbestos developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local-global tensions that defined Asbestos’s proud and painful history to reveal the challenges similar resource communities have faced – and continue to face today.

In A Short History of the Blockade, award-winning writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices to explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, the beaver--or in Nishnaabemowin, Amik. Moving through genres, shifting through time, amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance, as both a negation and an affirmation. Widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation, Simpson's work breaks open the intersections between politics, story, and song, bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. A Short History of the Blockade reveals how the practice of telling stories is also a culture of listening, "a thinking through together," and ultimately, like the dam or the blockade, an affirmation of life.

How do you tell the story of a feminist education, when the work of feminism can never be perfected or completed? In A Sentimental Education, Hannah McGregor, the podcaster behind Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda, explores what podcasting has taught her about doing feminist scholarship not as a methodology but as a way of life. Moving between memoir and theory, these essays consider the collective practices of feminist meaning-making in activities as varied as reading, critique, podcasting, and even mourning. In part this book is a memoir of one person's education as a reader and a thinker, and in part it is an analysis of some of the genres and aesthetic modes that have been sites of feminist meaning-making: the sentimental, the personal, the banal, and the relatable. Above all, it is a meditation on what it means to care deeply and to know that caring is both necessary and utterly insufficient. In the tradition of feminist autotheory, this collection works outward from the specificity of McGregor's embodied experience -- as a white settler, a fat femme, and a motherless daughter. In so doing, it invites readers to reconsider the culture, media, political structures, and lived experiences that inform how we move through the world separately and together.

Romani Women in Canada: Spectrum of the Blue Water is grounded upon Romani women’s lived experience as writers, essayists, visual artists, and activists. Reflecting the panoply of women’s voices, the book links everyday experience and a social critique of the factors that enable and constrain women’s lives. Through incisive creativity, pragmatic action, and affective networks, the book is a consolidation of diverse expressions of agency and collectivity. Sharing a will to advance the dignity of women’s lives, the contributors are as plural as their subject matter. Canadian Romani women are impressively diverse in their attachments, status, beliefs, and identities. The chapters in this book illustrate this multiplicity by traversing creative practices and writing motifs. Contributors are visual artists, fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, scholars, and essayists. Reflecting the breadth of contributors’ creative genres, the book is eclectic in content with multiple forms of writing and images. Photographs of visual art and black-and-white portraits of Canadian Romani women will complement the written textual components.

What is the relationship between migration and politics in Quebec? How did French Canadians' activities in Haiti influence Quebec society? How did Haitian migrants shape debates about language, class, nationalism and sexuality? Breaks new historiographical ground by challenging the traditional tendency to view migrants as peripheral to Quebec history. Mills begins by analyzing French-Canadians' early ideas about Haiti and their forays into the country. Missionaries, nationalist elites, and government officials produced an idea of Haiti as being linked to French Canada, yet fundamentally different from it and in need of its assistance. The second part of the book reverses the perspective, and Haitians' ideas about Quebec take centre stage. Mills engages with the ideas and activities of taxi drivers, exiled priests, aspiring authors and feminist activists. From global political economy to the intimate realm of sexuality, he argues, Haitian migrants opened up new debates and exposed new tensions, along the way playing a key role in transforming Quebec society. 2016.

'I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry.' — Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923) '[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school.' — N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948) For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the 'circle of civilization,' the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.

For much of her adult life, Darlene believed she wouldn't make a good mother: "Besides, I couldn't admit to anyone that I didn't know how to do mother things. So I married someone who didn't want to have children either." Everything seemed fine for twelve years of her marriage, but then Darlene slowly came to realise that she really did want a child. At age forty, things weren't going to be that easy. In this humorous, warm and poignant book, Darlene takes the reader with her as she decides that the most sensible option left to her is adoption. Through narrative and diary excerpts, she details the emotional ups and downs involved in the process. Ideal for potential parents and professionals, this book gives all the factual information needed during the adoption process and prepares the reader for the joys and challenges that may lie ahead.

Left out of the national apology and reconciliation process begun in 2008, survivors of residential schools in Labrador and Newfoundland received a formal apology from the Canadian government in 2017. This recognition finally brought them into the circle of residential school survivors across Canada, and acknowledged their experiences as similarly painful and traumatic.

For years, the story of residential schools has been told by the authorities who ran them. A Long Journey helps redress this imbalance by listening closely to the accounts of former students, as well as drawing extensively on government, community, and school archives. The book examines the history of boarding schools in Labrador and St. Anthony, and, in doing so, contextualizes the ongoing determination of Indigenous communities to regain control over their children’s education.