Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands

Recollecting is a rich collection of essays that illuminate the lives of late-eighteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century Aboriginal women, who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West

Some essays focus on individual women --- a trader, a performer, a non-human woman. Other essays examine cohorts of women --- wives, midwives, seamstresses, nuns. Authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing also on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories. Exploring the constraints and boundaries these women encountered, the authors engage with difficult and important questions of gender, race, and identity. Collectively these essays demonstrate the complexity of "contact zone" interactions, and they enrich and challenge dominant narratives about histories of the Canadian Northwest

Sarah Carter is a professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in both the Department of History and Classics in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Her most recent books are The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada and Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own. Patricia A. McCormack is an associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788-1920s.