The Great Canadian Woman: She is Strong and Free


Book Description

The Great Canadian Woman is all of us. She is the single mother who provides for her children come hell or high water. She is the woman who has a dream, and musters up enough courage to go after it. She is the woman who has quarreled in the depths of pain and grief and finds her way back home to herself. She is the woman who says "no" to what does not serve her. She is the woman who says "enough is enough", and commits to a new way of living. She is the woman who finds the strength to leave toxic relationships. She is the woman who knows unconditional love. She is the woman who takes the lead and lights the torch. She is the woman who refuses to accept the limits that someone else placed before her. She is the woman who knocks down doors, and shatters glass ceilings. She is the woman who finds a way out of no way then turns around, extends her hand, and brings as many people as she can along with her. The following women all co-authored this book: Sarah Swain Margot Gaudet Jessica De Castro Megan Harmony Olivia Shwetz Falon Malec Rose Finlay Sarah Swain Barbara McBryer Patricia Coulter Brenda Wiese Shannon Miller Susan Ruhe Koa Hughes Stephanie Goudreault The women who have shared their sacred stories in this book are warriors of light. They are some of the most resilient women we have ever encountered and we are humbled by their courageous journeys. They exemplify what it means to be The Great Canadian Woman, Strong and Free. Their voices give hope to other women, that they too can change the trajectory of their lives, if the course they are travelling doesn't serve them. Their expertise and insight inspire women to make better choices for themselves and take empowered action towards their lives with intention. Their stories grant us all the permission to live fully, love deeply and to fight like hell in the name of happiness. We are so proud of each and every one of them.




Midnight At the Dragon Cafe


Book Description

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.




Along a River


Book Description

French-Canadian explorers, traders, and soldiers feature prominently in this country's storytelling, but little has been written about their female counterparts. In Along a River, award-winning historian Jan Noel shines a light on the lives of remarkable French-Canadian women — immigrant brides, nuns, tradeswomen, farmers, governors' wives, and even smugglers — during the period between the settlement of the St. Lawrence Lowlands and the Victorian era. Along a River builds the case that inside the cabins that stretched for miles along the shoreline, most early French-Canadian women retained old fashioned forms of economic production and customary rights over land ownership. Noel demonstrates how this continued even as the world changed around them by comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in France, England, and New England.Exploring how the daughters and granddaughters of the filles du roi adapted to their terrain, turned their hands to trade, and even acquired surprising influence at the French court, Along a River is an innovative and engagingly written history.




The Great Canadian Oligarchy


Book Description

THE GREAT CANADIAN OLIGARCHY deals with the future of freedom in Canada. The text focuses on the redefinition of our freedoms as our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is being applied to our culture? How is our nation an oligarchy? How are the following six concepts being redefined? Will this redefinition produce a free people? 1. The role the Supremacy of God as understood in our history has been negated. 2. The historic concept of the rule of law is being subjected to secular redefinition. 3. The guarantee of freedom of religion and speech is being subjected to redefinition. 4. Our historic property rights have been effectively abolished. 5. Our historic guarantee to right to life has been subjected to secular redefinition. 6. The Charter binds our nation to multiculturalism which is a failed social model. We as Canadians are faced with one of two choices. We can either return to the founding concept of a recognition of the supremacy of God or succumb to the destructive consequences of a culturalized religious atheism. The future of freedom lies in the choice made.




Great Canadian War Stories


Book Description

Canada is renowned today for its role as a world peacekeeper. However, the country also played an important role in the wars of the twentieth century. Great Canadian War Stories shows how Canada at war captured the imagination of fiction writers across the country. The stories in this collection chronicle the scope of the Canadian war efforts in the twentieth century, from Vimy Ridge to the plains of the Spanish Civil War to the skies over North Africa during World War II. This collection includes selections from Timothy Findley, Henry Kreisel, Colin McDougall, Thomas Raddell, Joy Kogawa, Earle Birney and 16 others At once terrible and uplifting, memorable and harrowing, the stories in this collection describe a seminal period in Canadian history. Great Canadian War Stories show us how Canada became a nation in the twentieth century.




Joyce Wieland


Book Description

Joyce Wieland triumphed over what she called “obscene poverty” to achieve international celebrity as a painter, collagist, quiltmaker, and filmmaker, celebrated as Canada’s most important woman artist next to Emily Carr. Her art portrays strikingly Canadian themes of environmental issues, historical passages, and aboriginal rights in buoyant, satirical images. To make her distinctive, highly personal art, Wieland uses toys, paper cut-outs, wood, glass, and pieces of her panties and dresses just as boldly and felicitously as she uses oils, watercolors, and pencils. Some of her most famous works are quilts, such as Reason Over Passion and Confedspread. She made underground films long before Andy Warhol did, producing a total of 16. Joyce Wieland achieved acclaim through unstinting courage, vivacity, and her off-the-wall humor. She was known for tucking away her secrets in her work. Author Iris Nowell has uncovered some of these secrets through primary sources, such as Joyce’s friends and family, and through her own perspective of having known Joyce for many years. This intimate, rollicking, poignant biography uncovers Joyce Wieland’s life as she lived it, intimately and fully—through the 1950s “Dark Ages of Art” in Toronto, for much of the 1960s in New York’s grungy artist’s loft community and the underground film scene, and back to Toronto for the most productive, stunning years of her life.







The Great Canadian Book of Lists


Book Description

Chronicles a century of achievements, trends, important and influential people, and events that have shaped this country.




The Strength of Women


Book Description

Women are the unsung heroes of their communities, often using minimal resources to challenge oppressive structures and create powerful alternatives in the arts, education, and the workplace. The stories included here are by women with vision, who inspire and lead those who have lived in their midst. Stories are a means of transmitting vital information from within community as well as to outside communities. Relations are something fundamental to Indigenous communities the world over. Besides human relationships, there is a bigger set of relationships that keeps some people marginalized and others in positions of power. This book tells the stories of both sets of relationships. Some women tell powerful personal stories and others describe institutional relationships that keep Indigenous women in Canada – along with women generally, people of colour, indigenous peoples and youth around the world – in the margins. In both cases, the clarity of vision that comes from the margins is astounding and compelling.