Reading List: Canada Day 2023

This year for Canada Day, we’ve compiled a reading list that continues our new yearly tradition of reflecting on the many ways the day affects different communities in Canada. The titles below highlight and celebrate unique histories and experiences in Canada.

Happy reading!

The Boundaries of Ethnicity

German Immigration and the Language of Belonging in Ontario

By Benjamin Bryce

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers made up almost ten per cent of the province’s population and the German language was spoken in businesses, public schools, churches, and homes. German speakers in Ontario – children, parents, teachers, and religious groups – used their everyday practices and community institutions to claim a space for bilingualism and religious diversity within Canadian society.

Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter

By Laura Goodman Salverson

Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose.

 The Eye of the Master

Figures of the Québécois Colonial Imaginary

By Dalie Giroux, translated by Jennifer Henderson

In the Québécois political vision of the twentieth century, sovereignty became synonymous with mastery. French Canadians sometimes claimed solidarity with racialized and Indigenous peoples, yet they saw their liberation as a matter of taking their rightful place in the seat of the oppressors. The idea of mastery has prevented the Québécois from seeing that their liberation is bound up with that of other groups oppressed by colonial powers.

Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire

French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed

By Scott Berthelette

The fur trade was the heart of the French empire in early North America. The French-Canadian (Canadien) men who traversed the vast hinterlands of the Hudson Bay watershed, trading for furs from Indigenous trappers and hunters, were its cornerstone.

The Holy Spirit and the Eagle Father

The Struggle for Indigenous Pentecostalism in Canada

By Aaron A.M. Ross

Pentecostalism is one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the world. In Canada, it is the most rapidly growing Christian group among Indigenous people, with approximately one in ten Pentecostals in the country being Indigenous. Pentecostalism has become a religious force in many Indigenous communities, where congregations are most often led by Indigenous ministers – an achievement that took many decades.

Ukrainian Rituals on the Prairies

Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity

By Natalie Kononenko

While Canada is home to one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world, little is known about the life and culture of Ukrainians living in the country’s rural areas and their impact on Canadian traditions.