Heather Devine Book order

Pemmican Empire explores the fascinating and little-known environmental history of the role of pemmican (bison fat) in the opening of the British- American West.

Western Canada has figured historically as a focus point for new directions in human thought and action, migrations of the mind and body, and personal journeys of both a substantial and transcendental nature. The essays in Finding Directions West interrogate the meaning of those journeys, their reality, their memory, and their constructed identities within Western Canada itself. The book situates landscapes and peopled places in the West within the larger study of Western Canada and its transborder relationships. It draws scholars from a vareity of disciplines within history, from gender studies, to museum studies, to environmental history, in order to examine afresh Western Canada as a place for finding new directions in the human experience.

The search for a Metis identity and what constitutes that identity is a key issue facing many Aboriginals of mixed ancestry today. The People Who Own Themselves reconstructs 250 years of Desjarlais family history across a substantial area of North America, from colonial Louisiana, the St. Louis, Missouri region, and the American Southwest to Red River and Central Alberta.