Mount Royal

Mount Royal College began in Calgary in 1910 as a small, private residential Methodist institution offering advanced elementary and secondary schooling to students from both the city and the rural hinterland. Today, it is a degree-granting university with over 10,000 students in credit programs and some 40,000 more in continuing education courses. This lively and sensitive history draws on an impressive body of archival sources, oral histories, and interviews as well as sound and current scholarship on the history and theory of post-secondary education.

Respectable Burial also highlights how important a role Montreal played in Canada's history. The cemetery is the final resting place of politician Alexander Galt, poet F.R. Scott, hockey star Howie Morenz, explorer David Thompson, bank presidents, renegades, hangmen, and victims of the Titanic. This history of a model rural cemetery, an innovator in perpetual care and proprietor of the first crematorium in Canada, illustrates changing attitudes to burial and commemoration - including the relationships between Protestantism, Romanticism, and death. Young also shows how the cemetery, a site of great natural beauty that helped inspire Frederick Law Olmsted's adjacent Mount Royal Park, became a much-loved public urban space and examines how the evolution of its landscaping, architecture, and use reflect changing attitudes to the place of women, recreation, heritage, and the environment. Incorporating a rich collection of archival illustrations, walking maps, and a colour photo essay by photographer Geoffrey James, Respectable Burial will appeal to anyone interested in Canadian history, parks, and cities.

With characteristic richness and eloquence, John Borrows explores legal traditions, the role of governments and courts, and the prospect of a multi-juridical legal culture, all with a view to understanding and improving legal processes in Canada. He discusses the place of individuals, families, and communities in recovering and extending the role of Indigenous law within both Indigenous communities and Canadian society more broadly."--Pub. desc.

Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable health care, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of “Aboriginal diabetes” and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes. Hay’s study begins with Charles Darwin’s travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered, setting the imperial context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946–1965). Hay then turns to James Neel’s invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele’s reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community. Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.