Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement

W.J.C. Cherwinski is a professor of history at the Memorial University
of Newfoundland and the co-author of Lectures in Canadian Labour and
Working-Class History.

This volume of nine essays sets out to challenge conventional
interpretations of the development of the region west of the Lakehead.
The notion of a hardworking group of pioneers who risked all

to bring order and stability to a virgin hinterland is set aside in
favor of an emphasis on those forgotten or marginalized by settlement
and colonization: the First Nations people who bravely resisted the
submersion of their culture and way of life, the bachelor workers who
served exploitative employers, their industrial brethren who sought
socialist solutions to the plight of the working class, and ethnic
groups who struggled against white-supremacist thinking. The volume’s
most accessible essay, by editor Jeremy Mouat, shows how this
revisionist thinking is reflected in the artistry of novelist Rudy
Wiebe, singer–songwriter James (“Take a walk under my skies”)
Keelahan, and filmmaker Anne Wheeler of Bye Bye Blues fame. Social
theory and historiographic debates between traditional interpretations
and social historians are the focus of the other essays, all of which
make considerable demands on the reader.

While this book provides a necessary antidote to traditional
historiography, the perspective that informs it is as much a fabrication
as the one it is challenging. The book’s principal audience will be
found among those involved in women’s, Native, and working-class
studies.