Larry Prochner and Nina Howe reflect the variation within the field by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of experts to address key issues in the field.

This book, the first to be written about the Lake Babine Nation in north-central British Columbia, examines its traditional legal order, self-identity, and their involvement in current treaty negotiations.

Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity.

When Americans migrated west, they carried with them not only their hopes for better lives but their religious traditions as well. Yet the importance of religion in the forging of a western identity has seldom been examined. In this first historical overview of religion in the modern American West, Ferenc Szasz shows the important role that organized religion played in the shaping of the region from the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. He traces the major faiths over that time span, analyzes the distinctive response of western religious institutions to national events, and shows how western cities became homes to a variety of organized faiths that cast only faint shadows back east. While many historians have minimized the importance of religion for the region, Szasz maintains that it lies at the very heart of the western experience. From the 1890s to the 1920s, churches and synagogues created institutions such as schools and hospitals that shaped their local communities; during the Great Depression, the Latter-day Saints introduced their innovative social welfare system; and in later years, Pentecostal groups carried their traditions to the Pacific coast and Southern Baptists (among others) set out in earnest to evangelize the Far West. Beginning in the 1960s, the arrival of Asian faiths, the revitalization of evangelical Protestantism, the ferment of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the rediscovery of Native American spirituality, and the emergence of New Age sects combined to make western cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco among the most religiously pluralistic in the world. Examining the careers of key figures in western religion, from Rabbi William Friedman to Reverend Robert H. Schuller, Szasz balances specific and general trends to weave the story of religion into a wider social and cultural context. Religion in the Modern American West calls attention to an often overlooked facet of regional history and broadens our understanding of the American experience.

This inspiring volume elaborates a new inclusive vision of a global and national order and articulates new approaches for protecting, healing, and restoring long-oppressed peoples, and for respecting their cultures and languages.

This rare, first-hand, ethnographic account of a potlatch from Tsimshian scholar William Benyon reveals the wonderful complexities of the events that took place in Gitsegukla in 1945.

Timely, provocative, and a vital contribution to post-colonial studies, this book questions premises underlying much of present B.C. historical writing, arguing that international literature offers more fruitful ways of framing local historical experiences.

Telling Tales both challenges founding myths of the region and inspires rethinking of how we tell the story of western Canadian colonization and settlement.

Spanish missions in the New World usually pacified sedentary peoples accustomed to the agricultural mode of mission life, prompting many scholars to generalize about mission history. James Saeger now reconsiders the effectiveness of the missions by examining how Guaycuruan peoples of South America's Gran Chaco adapted to them during ...

Drawing on legal records and other archival documents, Jonathan Swainger considers the growth and development of the ostensibly apolitical Department of Justice in the eleven years after the union of 1867.