Tag: Author Q&A

There are five books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize shortlist and today we’re going to highlight Leo Baskatawang’s Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law: Kinamaadiwin Inaakonigewin and the Treaty Right to Education (University of Manitoba Press).

Here’s a Q&A with Leo Baskatawang.

What were your goals for this book?

My primary goal for Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law was to write a book that would be beneficial to as many Indigenous communities in Canada as possible, but especially to my home nation, the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3. With that being said, I tried to write the book in such a way that it would be of interest to all Canadians, whether they are Indigenous  or not, so that they may learn how Canadian laws and education policies have been harmful to Indigenous communities, as well as to understand that Indigenous nations have their own laws related to education (that need to be recognized and affirmed by the Canadian government), which can serve to help establish their own education systems. I strongly believe that Indigenous education systems can improve educational outcomes of Indigenous youth, which would benefit all of Canada through the development of strong leaders of tomorrow’s generation.

What have you learned about your process while working on this project? Or is every project unique….

While working on this writing project and seeing it through to its completion, the most important thing I learned about the process is that I am not doing it alone – it takes a community of hardworking, dedicated, and caring people to bring a book together. This community first includes my PhD committee (Drs. Peter Kulchyski, Frank Deer, and Aimée Craft) who read and provided recommendations on what was ultimately the first draft of my manuscript, as well as my external examiner (Dr. Bonita Lawrence). Upon making the recommended revisions to the first draft of the manuscript, I then submitted the revised version to the Acquisitions Editor (Ms. Jill McConkey) at the University of Manitoba Press, who then offered further suggestions for revision, which I happily adopted prior to the manuscript being sent to two blind reviewers. I then incorporated the feedback I received from the blind reviewers before the manuscript was given to the Managing Editor (Mr. Glenn Bergen) at the University of Manitoba Press, who also provided some helpful notes for my consideration. From there, the manuscript was passed on to a copy editor, who made more revisions to the manuscript, at which point an index for the book was compiled by yet another person. Most importantly though, none of this would have been possible without the love and support of Elder Fred Kelly, who kindly and very generously shared his knowledge about Anishinaabe legal orders with me, which formed the foundation of the book.

What books were important to you while you were writing this book? Who/what are your influences?

The book I was most inspired by, and tried to model my book after was Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Coulthard. It is one of the few books I have read multiple times, mainly because of its extraordinary contribution to critical political theory, particularly as it relates to the experiences of Indigenous peoples of Canada. His call for place-based education within Indigenous communities was, without doubt, extremely influential in the writing of my book. With that said, I consider John Borrows to be the most important Indigenous scholar in Canada with regard to his knowledge of Indigenous laws and analysis of Canadian case laws that pertain to Indigenous peoples. I am indebted to all the knowledge he has shared in his writings, and am also deeply inspired by his prolific writing ability and his dedication to social justice. It also makes me feel proud that Dr. Borrows and I are both of Anishinaabe heritage.

Tell me a bit about why you write about “Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs.” Why is it important to you?

I write about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs, first of all, because I am Canadian, and I am proud of that fact. With that being said, I endeavored to learn and write about the history of my people (the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3) because I saw from first-hand experience that many of them were struggling, and I wanted to do something to help. During my educational journey, I learned about the processes of colonization and assimilation, and how many unjust laws were imposed against Indigenous peoples in Canada by way of the Indian Act, and that treaties promises were not maintained after they were negotiated. I also learned that Indigenous nations have always had their own laws prior to colonial contact, and became convinced that Indigenous laws need to be recognized and affirmed by the governments of Canada. Thus, in order to help spread that message, I decided to write a book about it, with the hope that it could support efforts towards the reconciliation of Indigenous nations and Canada. At the end of the day, I wholeheartedly agree with what the Honorable Justice Murray Sinclair once said, “education has gotten us into this mess, and education will get us out”.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

The book I am reading right now is Valley of the Birdtail by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson. I picked up this book because I attended a presentation that the authors gave at my place of work, Robson Hall, which is in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba. During the presentation, I learned that Valley of the Birdtail has many common themes and elements within it that are similar to what I wrote about in Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law. Moreover, I was intrigued to learn that the authors of Valley also employed a strategy of offering practical policy suggestions, similar to what I did in my book, as a way to convey hope and further the process of reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and Canada.

My next writing project will be a historical fiction narrative about the point of colonial contact between the Anishinaabe and the French in the early seventeenth century. As a work of historical fiction, it will be a significant departure from how I wrote Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law. My hope is that by telling this story, from an Anishinaabe perspective, that I can demonstrate to youth that Indigenous peoples lived in organized societies, governed by their own laws prior to colonial contact. My goal is to write the book in such a way that it is both educational and entertaining so that it appeals to a wide audience.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, now valued at $12,000, will be named June 10.

There are five books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize shortlist and today we’re going to highlight John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast (Penguin Random House Canada).

Here’s a Q&A with John Vaillant.

What were your goals for this book?

To engage Canadians in their own history, and to connect that history to our petroleum-powered — i.e., fire-powered — civilization and, from there, to the increasing flammability of our country, and our planet.

What have you learned about your process while working on this project? Or is every project unique….

I’m not as fast a writer as I would like to be, but sometimes it can take years for the key ideas and themes to reveal themselves in a recognizable forms.

What books were important to you while you were writing this book? Who/what are your influences?

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire helped push my understanding of fire to the next level required by this book.

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel was inspiring and challenging for its ambition and scope.

Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is a great example of how to turn complex, unfamiliar history into a page-turner.

Rachel Carson and Kathryn Schulz are both masters of science writing who dissolve the barriers between reader and subject.

Tell me a bit about why you write about “Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs.” Why is it important to you?

Because our current policy of expanding fossil fuel production is damaging our country, our democracy, and our climate, which in turn is compromising our national security.

Today, every Canadian knows someone who’s been evacuated due to wildfire. This was not true a decade ago.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Today, I read short pieces by Honore de Balzac, Roisin Kiberd and Eileen Keene

Yesterday, I read the first chapters in Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism.

Lately, I’ve been writing mostly op-eds and keynote speeches.

Officially, I’m “between projects,” but I can feel a novel percolating.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, now valued at $12,000, will be named June 10.

There are five books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize shortlist and today we’re going to highlight Ed Broadbent’s Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality (ECW Press). 

Ed Broadbent died in January 2024, so here’s a Q&A with his collaborators, Jonathan Sas, Luke Savage and Frances Abele.

What were your goals for this book?

Jonathan Sas: One of the many inspirations for undertaking the book was the encouragement of Ed’s late partner, the great social theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood. Ellen wanted to ensure that Ed’s incredible contributions to public life were given their due. So a key goal was to capture those contributions: in the realm of ideas and democratic leadership and engagement.

Luke Savage: Quite simply, to record and capture the astonishing breadth and scope of Ed Broadbent’s thought and to chronicle his remarkable life and career.

Frances Abele: I believed that Canada had come to a moment when it was important that we have a discussion of the goals of social democracy and their relevance to the 21st century. Ed shared this concern, and I think all of us felt a responsibility to contribute in a positive way to public discourse.

What have you learned about your process while working on this project? Or is every project unique…

JS: The dialogical element of this book, the exchanges over many months with Ed that form the basis of the chapters, was tremendously generative. It allowed Ed to look both forward and back, to reflect, to interrogate, to clarify.

LS: One thing this project underscored for me was that the structure of ideas and narratives gradually reveal themselves to you through an intuitive process. You can try to organize your thoughts using templates and other things, but the only means to find your way with something big and complex is to sit with the ideas and the text, talk them over with your collaborators again and again, and keep working away.

FA: I found the collaborative writing process, in which all of us contributed questions and discussed answers, to be deeply satisfying and quite different from any other writing I have done.

What books were important to you while you were writing this book? Who/what are your influences?

JS: Thinking the Twentieth Century by historian Tony Judt was an important template for the form and structure of the book. In each chapter, other key sources were invaluable. Rosemary Brown’s own memoir, for example, and her reflections on Ed and the leadership race she lost to him, helped bring rich and personal analysis to a key moment in time.

LS: Because of the unconventional format used in our book — autobiographical essays from Ed followed by exchanges between him and the three of us — there were few templates available. One inspiration, insofar as the format was concerned, was a book by the late historian Tony Judt called Thinking the Twentieth Century, which in quite an innovative way wove together biography and history.

FA: We were all inspired by the format of Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder’s Thinking the Twentieth Century. I also found myself reading into the history of social democratic thought in Canada, as presented by the political generation before Ed and contemporary writers like Larry Savage, Alan Whitehorn, David McGrane, Roberta Lexier, Stephanie Bangarth, and others. Also important was the substantial work by Canadian labour historians, especially Pamela Sugiman and Carmela Patrias.

Tell me a bit about why you write about “Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs.” Why is it important to you?

JS: Ed Broadbent was a deeply committed internationalist. Not only was he very involved with and influenced by a global alliance of socialist and social democratic parties as vice president of the Socialist International while he was leader of the NDP, but after he left politics, he dedicated his talents to advancing social and economic rights as president of Rights and Democracy. Ed had a sharp vision for the role of Canada in the world that was anchored in clear values about rights, justice, and equality that transcended borders.

LS: For historical reasons, Canadian politics and society are quite unique. I think this fact is often underappreciated by Canadians themselves but, speaking as someone who does a fair bit of writing about the goings on of other English-speaking countries, it’s been my experience that it is wildly underappreciated by those elsewhere. Even many of my most politically informed and engaged friends and colleagues in Britain and America had never heard of Ed Broadbent. Along with much else, I hope this book will change that.

FA: Canada is fairly small, very open economy, prosperous, and dependent upon both immigration and trade for continued well-being. Internationally, we have been able to play a positive and important role at different junctures — for example, in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in negotiating the Law of the Sea Convention, and in the formation of the Arctic Council. These are all measures that advanced peace and an international rules-based order. Ed saw Canada playing such a role, and in his career, also sought to combat the international forces of neoliberalism that were causing much misery in less prosperous parts of the world.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Jonathan Sas: I have just read the brilliant East West Street by Philippe Sands, a masterful political and personal history of the key figures behind the enshrinement of crimes against humanity and genocide in international law. I have just begun Jhumpa Lahiri’s excellent novel The Lowland. I am currently writing about the twin fracturing of 1) the neoliberal consensus around markets, and 2) the liberal “rules-based international order.”

Luke Savage: Reading: Hilary Mantel’s remarkable 1992 novel about Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and the French Revolution — A Place of Greater Safety. Writing: A long-form historical essay about the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike.

Frances Abele: Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century; Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena; Gail Bowen, The Legacy. Oh, and Ed Broadbent, Le temps d’agir — we did not get to it when we were working on the book. Ed wrote a lot! Writing: a grant application and a book chapter on building a third order of Indigenous government in Canada.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, now valued at $12,000, will be named June 10.

There are five books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize shortlist and today we’re going to highlight  Ken McGoogan’s Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery (Douglas & McIntyre).

Here’s a Q&A with Ken McGoogan.

What were your goals for this book?

Urged on by the late Louie Kamookak, the Inuit oral historian, and having already written five books about the north, I decided finally to tackle the best-known figure in Arctic exploration history. Who was John Franklin? What was the root cause of the catastrophe that befell his 1845 expedition? I wanted to remind people of Franklin’s centrality — that the decades-long search for him and his two lost ships established Canada’s claim to the archipelago north of continental North America. But for the Franklin search, and the mapping it entailed, all that territory — what we know as the Canadian Arctic — would belong to Russia or else to the US, which managed to wrest control of Alaska.

What have you learned about your process while working on this project? Or is every project unique….

This book is Exhibit A in a larger project I call Let’s Make History Exciting Again. Canadian History has disappeared as a core subject from our schools and universities. Those who write history can best respond by revitalizing the way we do it. As the most conservative of literary genres, History insists on chronological linearity. Start at the beginning and then and then and then. Contemporary readers, exposed to dazzling narrative techniques in fiction, theatre, and film, find this deadly dull. Enough! I am calling for a creative-nonfiction revolution. In Searching for Franklin, I establish a contemporary frame and cut back and forth between two historical narratives. How is that for radical? Clearly, my process has turned me into a wild-eyed revolutionary.

What books were important to you while you were writing this book? Who/what are your influences?

I recently wrote a longish blogpost entitled The Best Books About What Happened to the Lost Franklin Expedition. I cited Frozen in Time and Unravelling the Franklin Mystery, as well as a collection of letters, an early biography of Jane Franklin, and the journal of Danish explorer Jens Munk. With this book, I am also building on my five previous works about Arctic exploration. My influences? Subject Matter: Pierre Berton, Peter C. Newman. Personal engagement: Jack Kerouac, Farley Mowat, Leonard Cohen. Political vision: Margaret Atwood, George Orwell. Literary craft: James Joyce, Mordecai Richler, Doris Lessing, Julio Cortazar, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan.

Tell me a bit about why you write about “Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs.” Why is it important to you?

I don’t know why I am so passionate about Canada. But, yes, I do see that I have written six books on Arctic exploration and five whose titles or subtitles include the words Canada or Canadian. Maybe I have been trying to figure out what it means to be Canadian and where we fit in the wider world. My roots are mainly Scottish and French. I grew up in a francophone resort town on Lake of Two Mountains and traveled to school by bus with Mohawks from Oka (Kanesatake). I have visited all ten provinces and three territories; lived for three or more years in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, and Guelph; and sojourned for months in Halifax, Dawson City, Nelson, Fredericton, and Banff. I have taken my Canadian self to New York, California, Scotland, Ireland, England, continental Europe, Australia, Tanzania, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka. I am still on the road and looking for answers.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I have been devouring political books about our current predicament. To name a few: Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War; Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor; Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism; Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start. As for writing, I am finishing up a book called Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship. In it, funnily enough, I reference J.W. Dafoe. “When in 1938 [William Lyon Mackenzie} King hailed the Munich Agreement, which ceded to Hitler an important part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), Winnipeg journalist J.W. Dafoe — who had repeatedly warned against Hitler’s hate-filled rhetoric — wrote a scathing editorial in which he denounced the appeasers for validating “the doctrine that Germany can intervene for racial reasons for the ‘protection’ of Germans on such grounds as she thinks proper in any country in the world.” How is that for ringing contemporary?

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, now valued at $12,000, will be named June 10.

There are five books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize shortlist and today we’re going to highlight Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay’s Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity (University of Manitoba Press).

Here’s a Q&A with Burnett and Hay.

What were your goals for this book?

The research began as a community partnership with Indigenous food sovereigntists in northern Ontario who were trying to understand how the current food systems in their communities came to exist, specifically in regards to the monopolistic position of the Hudson’s Bay Company/North West Company (NWC). From there, the project grew to include federal and provincial policies. Our goal was to unsettle the perception that the high cost of food in northern First Nations and Inuit communities is, as the North West Company is so fond of saying, “the cost of doing business.” Importantly, we were able to pass on a copy of Plundering the North to the Minister of Indigenous Services Canada when they met with several Chiefs from Matawa First Nation, a provincial treaty organization in northern Ontario. We hope the book will illustrate to the Minister the harms arising from the ‘solutions’ regarding food insecurity that have been imposed on Indigenous communities.

What have you learned about your process while working on this project? Or is every project unique….

The importance of history in understanding current contexts, responding to popular discourses that situate problems within Indigenous communities rather than in systemic racism and settler colonialism, and the importance of working to support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.

What books were important to you while you were writing this book?Who/what are your influences?

We worked with many knowledge holders and Indigenous food sovereigntists. They had an enormous impact on the ways we came to understand what good research looks like, and that relationships with and responsibility to community were essential. Significantly, we were impressed by the hunting/harvesting expertise people possessed and realized very quickly where we needed to go in the event of a zombie outbreak.

Tell me a bit about why you write about “Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs.” Why is it important to you?

As settler scholars, we see it as our responsibility to challenge the dominant narratives of Canadian history that position the Canadian state as a natural and neutral phenomenon and a benevolent entity. This is particularly true in the post-World War II period where we see the rise of the welfare state and efforts to alter the food that Indigenous peoples could eat. We also wanted to illustrate how the use of food as a tool of settler colonialism was not unique to Canada. Instead, food has served as, and still is, a tool of settler colonialism across geographic spaces – for instance, Cost-U-Less (a grocery store chain owned by the North West Company) in the Caribbean, Pacific, and Hawaiian Islands. The niche business model that the North West Company perfected in northern Canada in Indigenous communities has been transported to Indigenous communities elsewhere. We need to be particularly cognizant of the social and health disparities produced by food insecurity when we think about corporate profit and the high cost of food, and how they translate across regional, national, and international contexts.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Kristin: Currently, I am reading The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan Pearson which looks at the relationship between birth registration, birth certificates, and the rise of the state. I am co-authoring a book that illuminates the barriers people experience trying to register birth and obtain and retain birth certificates in Canada. It will be published by Fernwood Press and arises out of a broader community-based project that works to improve access to state services and supports for people who have been marginalized or are low income. We hold ID clinics in the region, especially in rural and northern First Nations where there are no service centres, and assist people with both the cost of birth certificate applications and navigating the application process. I am also working on a multi-year project with Kiikenomaga Kikenjigewen Employment and Training Services (KKETS), which is an extension of some themes found in Plundering the North. KKETS is seeking to amplify Indigenous food sovereignty in their member communities in northern Ontario.

Travis: Currently, I am reading memoirs, autobiographies, and fictional novels based on or inspired by real life stories. I am working with an Anishinaabe Elder to tell her life story in both video and written format and need to learn the genre better. I am revisiting Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel, and some Asian Canadian memoirs and stories such as Joy Kowaga’s Obasan and Terry Watada’s Mysterious Dreams of the Dead.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, now valued at $12,000, will be named June 10.