BC Books From Vancouver Island & the Coast

Winner, 2016 Lane Anderson Award for Best Canadian Science Writing
Shortlisted, Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia.

An illustrated narrative that interweaves the shifting seasons of the Northwest Coast with the experiences of a conservation biologist surveying thousands of kilometres of open ocean in order to uncover the complex relationships between humans, marine birds and the realities of contemporary biodiversity.

At Sea with the Marine Birds of the Ra …

On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Native community took on the local hospital, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, provincial and federal ministries of health and national media, becau …

Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed here in A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs and Native informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this book a comprehensive survey of myth collecting in B.C. The aim is to reveal the true extent of this neglected body of world literature, and to begin to sort out the more valua …

Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, Swanton, Jenness, the luminaries of field research in British Columbia, are discussed here in A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend, and their work in Indian folklore evaluated. Other scholars, amateurs and Native informants of the past and present are given ample consideration, making this book a comprehensive survey of myth collecting in B.C. The aim is to reveal the true extent of this neglected body of world literature, and to begin to sort out the more valua …

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps into the wilds of politics, philosophy, economics and her slim books speak volumes. If there is a sense of abandoned projects ho …

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps into the wilds of politics, philosophy, economics and her slim books speak volumes. If there is a sense of abandoned projects ho …

The Comox Valley on Vancouver Island is home to a spectacular watershed, the culmination of snowcap and glacier-fed rivers that flow into the Courtenay River and out onto one of the richest estuaries on the West Coast. Along with the long history of K'ómoks First Nation inhabitation, the community of Courtenay and the surrounding regions have been settled by a variety of people from different cultures and nations. The watershed geography encapsulates these groups' diverse relationships with the …

Billy Proctor, resident legend of Echo Bay, BC, recounts almost a century's worth of experience with this collection of stories, memories and local knowledge of the central BC coast region around Blackfish Sound. Situated in the beautiful Broughton Archipelago between northern Vancouver Island and the mainland coast, this region boasts a history and culture as engaging as its stunning locale--and nobody tells its story quite like Proctor.

A lifelong fisherman, trapper, logger and, in later life, …