Böcker i Social and Economic Studies-serien

A poignant and comprehensive study of the Newfoundland Forestry Companies of the First World War, as told through letters sent home from Scotland.

Phebe Florence Miller was a poet and postmistress who lived in Topsail, Newfoundland and Labrador from 1889-1979. Despite her success as a poetic voice in the 1920s and '30s, Miller is an obscure figure for today's readers. This book brings her life and her contributions to Newfoundland and Labrador culture back into focus through the lens of her most personal writing. Mistress of the Blue Castle: The Writing Life of Phebe Florence Miller is an evocative exploration of the ways that identity and place are created together through the diaries, journals, poems and letters that this mercurial artist left behind.

At the end of World War I, after four years of unimaginable man-made destruction, a swiftly killing virus travelled the planet. Up to one hundred million people perished in the most lethal pandemic in recorded history, the so-called "Spanish" influenza. More than half those who died were young adults aged between twenty and forty. Nowhere on earth was the flu more deadly than in isolated settlements on the far northeastern coast of North America. In We All Expected to Die: Spanish Influenza in Labrador, 1918-1919 Anne Budgell reconstructs the horrific impact of the pandemic in hard-hit Labrador locations, such as the Inuit villages of Okak and Hebron where the mortality rate was 71%. Using the recollections of survivors, diaries kept at the time, Hudson's Bay Company journals, newspaper reports, and government documents, this powerful and uncompromising book tells the story of how the flu travelled to Labrador and wreaked havoc there. It examines how people dealt with the emergency, when all were sick and few were well enough to care for others, and how authorities elsewhere refused to provide assistance. The story We All Expected to Die reveals is both devastating and haunting. It is a story of great loss, but also of human endurance, heroism, and survival.

A vividly crafted portrait of a challenging yet rewarding life spent on the Naskaupi River, from Nunatsiavut Elder Louie Montague.

Was Robert Bond really "Newfoundland's only statesman"? First elected to Newfoundland's House of Assembly in 1882, Robert Bond served as a member of government and opposition--and notably as prime minister--in an era filled with challenges that still resonate today. During three turbulent decades, St. John's burned down, the banks failed, and the drive for economic diversification caused difficult problems (and included railway building, the century's favoured mega-project). As for external affairs--Bond struggled to negotiate reciprocity with the United States, to navigate tricky issues concerning the French Shore and to deal successfully with imperial powers in London whose priorities could vary greatly from those in Newfoundland. In this in-depth examination of Bond's political activity, James Hiller explores the stakes, the rivalries and the competing visions at play during the period, and he highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the man who was often at or near centre stage: Robert Bond, politician, leader and Newfoundland patriot.

In 1965, the classically trained musician and composer Kenneth Peacock published a three-volume work, Songs of the Newfoundland Outports, based on six years of collecting folksongs in that province on behalf of the National Museum of Canada. Folksongs and Folk Revivial provides a critical review of Peacock's Newfoundland fieldwork to better understand his motivations for creating Outports and his treatment of the materials he collected. The study considers the cultural politics of the day, such as National Museum policies and directions, and, in particular, how the growth of the Canadian folk revival during the 1950s and 1960s influenced his work. It considers the dynamic relations between Peacock and other individuals who had a vested interest in documenting and presenting Newfoundland culture. New knowledge regarding Peacock's life and times facilitates our understanding of this man's immense contribution to both Newfoundland and Canadian folklore scholarship while at the same time allowing researchers to make greater use of the materials he so diligently collected.

"We've come a long journey." -- Sarah Anala (Nunatsiavut Elder), 2017 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.

"We were like human animals in one of the old-style zoos." Shaped by Silence brings together the powerful stories of five women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and other institutions operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teenager's experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Canada; another story of a child who was born in a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls held in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. In these institutions, women and girls became a coerced workforce. Hard, unpaid and relentless physical toil, isolation, enforced silence, and prayer constituted the nuns' strategy for converting their "fallen" charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. Within this regime, girls and women suffered physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. While intimately capturing the dark and enduring after-effects of ill-treatment, the stories recounted in Shaped by Silence also describe survivors' efforts to heal and rebuild their lives. This important book shines a light on a pervasive and systemic pattern of cruelty and exploitation. It reveals the unwarranted confinement of generations of girls and women in Good Shepherd institutions around the world and constitutes a call for full acknowledgement of their suffering. RIE CROLL is an associate professor of sociology in the social/ cultural studies programme at Memorial University, Grenfell Campus, and a former therapist who worked with abused girls and women.

While well-known songs such as "The Badger Drive" and "Tickle Cove Pond" provide glimpses into the hard labour and rich culture of woods work in early twentieth-century Newfoundland and Labrador, little has been written about the lives of woods workers and the extent of their enduring cultural legacies. Songs, stories, recitations, poems, and instrumental tunes flourished in the woods camps. Many of them were created locally and reflect the people and experiences of woods work. Passed down by oral tradition in bunkhouses and at work sites, in family kitchens and at community concerts, these songs and stories address a gap in our understanding of this occupational culture and its history. This book is the first comprehensive collection of musical compositions, recitations, poems, and narratives written by, for, and about twentieth-century woods workers in Newfoundland and Labrador. It analyzes their significance--as both grassroots social history texts and creative and musical contributions--and creates a portrait of a culture shaped by the harvesting of timber. Inside you will find: a history of lumbering and logging; an exploration of the place of song and story in woods work and culture; musical transcriptions of 76 locally composed songs and tunes, with analysis of this musical tradition; complete song lyrics with contextual discussion; more than 70 archival photos; and a glossary of occupational words.

The remarkable memoirs of Mi'kmaw elder John Nick Jeddore, who recounts a lifetime of following in his ancestors' footsteps.

An insightful study of gendered civil society perspectives, with a focus on the Moyle Women's forum of Northern Ireland.

"[Tanner's] lively writing provides the reader with a very rewarding experience..." -- Claude Lévi-Strauss, L'Homme "... A first-rate study.... thought-provoking and provocative..." -- Charles A. Bishop, Ethnohistory "... breaks new ground..." -- Edward S. Rogers, American Ethnologist Bringing Home Animals is an ethnography detailing what the author learned as a result of travelling and working with Iinuu (Cree) hunters and their families in Northern Quebec. The study was conducted from 1969-1971, and is a rich example of subsistence hunting in an Indigenous territory. The second edition revisits and updates contextual material following the construction of the James Bay hydroelectric project in the region, while preserving the original argument. Bringing Home Animals explores the way of life of the Mistissini Iinuu hunters, their understanding of and adaptation to the ecology of their hunting grounds, their subsistence-based economy and its relation to market production, their land tenure system, the impact of external agencies on them, and their rich spiritual and symbolic life, particularly the rituals that show respect for the animals before, during, and following the hunt. Adrian Tanner was born in the UK and came to Canada as a young farm worker. He went on to work on weather stations in the Arctic, where he gained some familiarity with Inuit hunters. He attended UBC and McGill University, before earning a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He has been with the Anthropology Department at Memorial University since 1972, where he is now Honorary Research Professor. His current research interests are on the Indigenous peoples of Quebec, Labrador, and Northern Ontario, on such topics as social suffering, community healing, forestry, land tenure, politics, and the documentation of local knowledge. He has also conducted research outside Canada, especially on the people of the Colo Navosa region of Vitilevu, Fiji.

Edward Feild, Newfoundland's second Anglican bishop, was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in April 1844 and departed shortly thereafter to take up his duties. The private diary he began at that point documents his crossing of the Atlantic, his two-week sojourn in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his arrival in St. John's. Throughout the diary, Feild reveals his reflections about his new challenge, details of his voyage, descriptions of Halifax and Windsor and his final public reception. During the months documented in this volume, he is preoccupied with the architecture and arrangement of Newfoundland churches, colonial practices for church ritual and the building of a new cathedral. Additionally, Feild records his opinions of public figures and clergy alike and does not hesitate to pass judgement.

Thirty years after its original publication, a special anniversary edition of Barbara Rieti's iconic work Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland.

Kay Burns and David Eso's edition of Leo Ferrari's The Earth Is Flat! introduces us to a long-forgotten satirical work, which, in an age of fake news, possesses renewed relevance. Ferrari, a philosopher by training, draws on his extensive knowledge of classical thought to present a history of ideas that is sometimes accurate, but more frequently speculative. He traces the conflict between "Globularist" and "Planoterrestrial" beliefs from antiquity to his contemporary moment of the early 1970s. He also charts the tongue-in-cheek activities of the Flat Earth Society of Canada, which he co-founded in 1970 with celebrated authors Alden Nowlan and Raymond Fraser. Other notable members included literary luminaries Al Pittman, Farley Mowat, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Patrick Lane. The author blurs the line between seriousness and humour in the interests of exploring philosophical concepts such as the nature of belief and the implications of technological modernity.

The very human story behind the post-war growth of St. John's and the creation of Churchill Park