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Building a Special Relationship examines an under-appreciated time in foreign relations between the United States and Canada during the 1950s, when North American officials formed a culture of bilateral cooperation under the shadow of a growing Cold War.

This work asserts that the Eisenhower era was critical to the evolution of diplomatic dealings between Canada and America. Under President Eisenhower and Prime Ministers St. Laurent and Diefenbaker, policy makers collaborating in Ottawa and Washington achieved what authors Asa McKercher and Michael D. Stevenson deem to be “tolerant accommodation” on significant issues of the day. Despite often disagreeing on their path forward but by embracing shared political ideologies and goals, both nations found common ground on matters such as defence, foreign policy, economic growth, and natural resource management.

Building a Special Relationship is a significant contribution to the scholarly understanding of Canadian diplomacy during a formative era for Ottawa. Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, this book presents a vital new interpretation of how North American diplomacy in the Eisenhower years continues to influence what is often characterized as the “special relationship” between Canada and the United States.

Historians, scholars, and readers of diplomacy, political history, and international relations will find keen new insights in Building a Special Relationship’s analysis of an integral period in North American history.

Since Confederation, Canadian prime ministers have consciously constructed the national story. Each created shared narratives, formulating and reformulating a series of unifying national ideas that served to keep this geographically large, ethnically diverse, and regionalized nation together. This book is about those narratives and stories.

Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity offers a unique telling of Canada’s post–Second World War political history. Raymond B. Blake shows how prime ministers were identity entrepreneurs: regardless of political stripe, they worked to build national unity, forged a citizenship based on inclusion, and defined a place for Canada in the world. They created for citizens an ideal image of what the nation stands for and the path it should follow. Through their differences and similarities, they collectively told a national story of Canada as a modern, progressive, liberal state, and portrayed a strong commitment to inclusion coupled with a deep respect for diversity and difference, and a fundamental belief in universal rights and freedoms.

This definitive analysis of prime ministerial speeches and rhetoric is grounded in meticulous archival, primary document, and secondary literature research, and utilizes the latest theoretical approaches in the study of rhetoric, nationalism, and identity. Ultimately, Raymond Blake provides readers with a new way to see and understand what Canada is, and what holds us together as a nation.

This incredibly thorough analysis of the words of prime ministers will find an appreciative audience among scholars and students in Canadian and political history, and political science and rhetoric studies – and readers of Canadian history will discover a new take on Canada’s development as a nation.

The totem pole forms the foundation for this unique and important oral history of Canada. Its goal is both toweringly ambitious and beautifully direct: To tell the story of this country in a way that prompts readers to look from different angles, to see its dimensions, its curves, and its cuts. To see that history has an arc, just as the totem pole rises, but to realize that it is also in the details along the way that important meanings are to be found.  To recognize that the story of the past is always there to be retold and recast, and must be conveyed to generations to come. That in the act of re-telling, meaning is found, and strength is built.

When it comes to telling the history of Canada, and in particular the history of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, we need to accept that the way in which our history has traditionally been told has not been a common or shared enterprise. In many ways, it has been an exclusive and siloed one. Among the countless peoples and groups that make up this vast country, the voices and experiences of a few have too often dominated those of many others.

Reconciling History shares voices that have seldom been heard, and in this ground-breaking book they are telling and re-telling history from their perspectives. Born out of the oral history in True Reconciliation, and complemented throughout with stunning photography and art, Reconciling History takes this approach to telling our collective story to an entirely different level.

In this ground-breaking book, Crystal Gail Fraser draws on Dinjii Zhuh (Gwich’in) concepts of individual and collective strength to illuminate student experiences in northern residential schools, revealing the many ways Indigenous communities resisted the institutionalization of their children.

After 1945, federal bureaucrats and politicians increasingly sought to assimilate Indigenous northerners—who had remained comparatively outside of their control—into broader Canadian society through policies that were designed to destroy Indigenous ways of life. Foremost among these was an aggressive new schooling policy that mandated the construction of Grollier and Stringer Halls: massive residential schools that opened in Inuvik in 1959, eleven years after a special joint committee of the House of Commons and the Senate recommended that all residential schools in Canada be closed.

By Strength, We Are Still Here shares the lived experiences of Indigenous northerners from 1959 until 1982, when the territorial government published a comprehensive plan for educational reform. Led by Survivor testimony, Fraser shows the roles both students and their families played in disrupting state agendas, including questioning and changing the system to protect their cultures and communities.

Centring the expertise of Knowledge Keepers, By Strength, We Are Still Here makes a crucial contribution to Indigenous research methodologies and to understandings of Canadian and Indigenous histories during the second half of the twentieth century.

Crystal Gail Fraser is Gwichyà Gwich’in and has Scottish and English ancestry. Originally from Inuvik and Dachan Choo Gę̀hnjik (Tree River), Northwest Territories, Crystal works as a historian and Indigenous studies scholar in the amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) region, on Treaty 6 and Métis Lands.

The John Wesley Dafoe Foundation is happy to introduce the jurors for 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

This year, Patricia Bovey, Dale Barbour, and Greg C. Mason will be selecting a longlist, shortlist, and winner.

A ten-book longlist and five-book shortlist will be announced in the coming weeks, with the winner announced October 14th. We can’t wait to share these outstanding titles with you!

Patricia Bovey, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Director Emerita, is a Winnipeg-based art historian, arts advocate, museologist, author, and professor. She served as a member of the Senate of Canada (2016-2023) and is a former Director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Founder of St. Boniface Hospital’s Buhler Gallery. She has lectured and published extensively on western Canadian art, her most recent book being Western Voices in Canadian Art. She has received a number of publishing and community awards. 

She is currently representing Manitoba on the Boards of the Confederation Centre for the Arts, the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, and the Roberta Bondar Foundation. She is a national Advocacy and Awareness committee member for Type 1 Diabetes and Ambassador for the Pan African Heritage Museum in Ghana currently under construction.

Dale Barbour grew up in Manitoba’s Interlake and worked in journalism and communications before getting into history. He has degrees from the University of Manitoba, (BA. (HON), MA) and the University of Toronto (PhD) and served as the University of Winnipeg’s H. Sanford Riley Postdoctoral Fellow in Canadian History in 2021.

Over the past seven years Dale has worked as a course instructor at the University of Winnipeg, University of Manitoba, and Brandon University teaching courses on Manitoba,Canada, and the world.

Dale has published two books: Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935 (UofM Press, 2021) and Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967 (UofM Press, 2011). Currently Dale is working on a collaborative historical atlas focused on Winnipeg.

Specializing in economic policy, the basic annual income, health economics, and Indigenous economics, Greg C. Mason joined the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1974. Recently he has written on the economics of COVID, telemedicine, electronic health records, the modern annuity, and urban reserves. 

Greg’s  research encompasses the implementation of basic annual income (he served as an advisor to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot), health economics, and indigenous economic development.His teaching focuses on program evaluation, economic research and communication and creating viable online courseware in economics.