Search results for ""Author Jean Barman""

Jean Barman was the recipient of the 2014 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.In French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians attracted by the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadiens from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and métis combining Canadien and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers to this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the region was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today’s Canada its Pacific shoreline.

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Constance Lindsay Skinner made a living as a writer at a time when few men, and fewer women, managed the feat. Born in 1877 on the British Columbia frontier, she worked as a journalist in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Chicago, before moving to New York City in 1912, where she supported herself by her pen until her death in 1939. Despite a prolific output - poetry, plays, short stories, histories, reviews, adult and children's novels - and in contrast to her reputation in the United States, she remains virtually unknown in the country of her birth. Reconstructing Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life from her papers in the New York Public Library and from her publications, Jean Barman argues for three bases to her success. As well as a capacity to respond to market forces by moving between genres, she possessed an aura of authenticity by virtue of her Canadian frontier heritage. As a literary device, the frontier gave a freedom to tackle contentious issues of Aboriginal and hybrid identities, gender and sexuality, that might otherwise have been far more difficult to get into print. Third, and very important, was her willingness to subordinate a private self to the life of the imagination. Barman ponders Constance Lindsay Skinner's absence from the Canadian literary canon. She mixed with such twentieth-century personalities as Jack London, Harriet Monroe, Frederick Jackson Turner, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Cornelia Meigs, Long Lance, and Margaret Mitchell, yet was unrecognized in her own country. Her sex mattered, just as it did for fellow Canadian women writers. So did her facility at multiple genres, a talent that, even as it made possible a writing life, prevented her from achieving a major breakthrough in any one of them. Perhaps most responsible was her identification with the frontier of a nation whose centre long shaped literary matters in its own image. Constance Lindsay Skinner makes a significant contribution to Canadian and American history and to literary and gender studies.

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Sophie Morigeau (1836–1916) was a remarkable woman. Of mixed Indian-white heritage, she lived her life on her own terms. She traded in Canadian mining camps and ran pack trains across the Northern Rocky Mountains. For years she maintained a trading post on Tobacco Plains on the border between Canada and the United States. She broke through the accepted roles for women in the nineteenth century to become an Indian entrepreneur. Jean Barman’s biography of Morigeau details the available historical evidence of a woman who cut her own path, was an important trader for the Kootenai Indians, and was a member of both the Indian and white communities in nineteenth-century northwest Montana and southern British Columbia. Sophie Morigeau was a resourceful and courageous woman on the cultural frontier.

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The two volumes comprising Indian Education in Canada present the first full-length discussion of this important subject since the adoption in 1972 of a new federal policy moving toward Indian control of Indian education. Volume 1 analyzes the education of Indian children by whites since the arrival of the first Europeans in Canada. Volume 2 is concerned with the wide-ranging changes that have taken place since 1972.

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