The central aim of "The West and Beyond" is to evaluate and appraise the state of Western Canadian history, to acknowledge and assess the contributions of historians of the past and present, to showcase the research interests of a new generation of scholars, to chart new directions for the future, and stimulate further interrogations of our past.-- The book is broken into five sections and contains articles from both established and new scholars that broadly reflect findings of the conference "The West and Beyond:-- Historians Past, Present and Future" held in Edmonton, Alberta in the summer of 2008.-- The editors hope the collection will encourage dialogue among generations of historians of the West and among practitioners of diverse approaches to the past.-- The collection also reflects a broad range of disciplinary and professional interests suggesting a number of different ways to understand the West.

Study of how a resolution of issues that give rise to and result from comprehensive claims by native peoples might affect the economic, political and environmental dimensions of natural resources-centred activities. The natural resource sectors examined are: fishery, forestry, and non-renewable resources.

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

What does it mean to be Metis? How do the Metis understand their world, and how do family, community, and location shape their consciousness? Such questions inform this collection of essays on the northwestern North American people of mixed European and Native ancestry who emerged in the seventeenth century as a distinct culture. Volume editors Nicole St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall go beyond the concern with race and ethnicity that takes center stage in most discussions of Metis culture to offer new ways of thinking about Metis identity. Geography, mobility, and family have always defined Metis culture and society. The Metis world spanned the better part of a continent, and a major theme of Contours of a People is the Metis conception of geography—not only how Metis people used their environments but how they gave meaning to place and developed connections to multiple landscapes. Their geographic familiarity, physical and social mobility, and maintenance of family ties across time and space appear to have evolved in connection with the fur trade and other commercial endeavors. These efforts, and the cultural practices that emerged from them, have contributed to a sense of community and the nationalist sentiment felt by many Metis today. Writing about a wide geographic area, the contributors consider issues ranging from Metis rights under Canadian law and how the Library of Congress categorizes Metis scholarship to the role of women in maintaining economic and social networks. The authors’ emphasis on geography and its power in shaping identity will influence and enlighten Canadian and American scholars across a variety of disciplines.

In this social and economic history of the Metis of the Red River Settlement, specifically the parishes of St Francois-Xavier and St Andrew's, Gerhard Ens argues that the Metis participated with growing confidence in two worlds: one Indian and pre-capitalist, the other European and capitalist.

The Red River Colony was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first planned settlement. As a settler-colonial project par excellence, it was designed to undercut Indigenous peoples’ “troublesome” autonomy and curtain the company’s dependency on their labour. In this critical re-evaluation of the history of the Red River Colony, Susan Dianne Brophy upends standard accounts by foregrounding Indigenous producers as a driving force of change. A Legacy of Exploitation challenges the enduring yet misleading fantasy of Canada as a glorious nation of adventurers, showing how autonomy can become distorted as complicity in processes of dispossession.

In the late nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers and Canada?s North-West Mounted Police were formed to bring the resource-rich hinterlands at either end of the Great Plains under governmental control. Native and rural peoples often found themselves squarely in the path of this westward expansion and the law enforcement agents that led the way. Though separated by nearly two thousand miles, the Rangers and Mounties performed nearly identical functions, including subjugating Indigenous groups; dispossessing peoples of mixed ancestry; defending the property of big cattlemen; and policing industrial disputes. Yet the means by which the two forces achieved these ends sharply diverged;øwhile the Rangers often relied on violence, the Mounties usually exercised restraint, a fact that highlights some of the fundamental differences between the U.S. and Canadian Wests. Policing the Great Plains presents the first comparative history of the two most famous constabularies in the world.

Eleven essays explore the dichotomy of "civilizing" and "wilderness" in 1850s Euro-British North America.

Melonville. Smokey Hollow. Bannock Town. Fort Tuyau. Little Chicago. Mud Flats. Pumpville. Tintown. La Coule. These were some of the names given to Métis communities at the edges of urban areas in Manitoba. Rooster Town, which was on the outskirts of southwest Winnipeg endured from 1901 to 1961. Those years in Winnipeg were characterized by the twin pressures of depression, and inflation, chronic housing shortages, and a spotty social support network. At the city’s edge, Rooster Town grew without city services as rural Métis arrived to participate in the urban economy and build their own houses while keeping Métis culture and community as a central part of their lives. In other growing settler cities, the Indigenous experience was largely characterized by removal and confinement. But the continuing presence of Métis living and working in the city, and the establishment of Rooster Town itself, made the Winnipeg experience unique. Rooster Town documents the story of a community rooted in kinship, culture, and historical circumstance, whose residents existed unofficially in the cracks of municipal bureaucracy, while navigating the legacy of settler colonialism and the demands of modernity and urbanization.

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West. Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue's account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the "world's longest undefended border."