Reprint. Originally published by Dillon Press in 1966.

“He was a man who had a purpose when he came among our people. He was very gentle with his purpose. He had a vision. He saw we had something that nobody else did. He gave us gifts which we remember to this day and still use. He changed us. He changed us for the better.” —Raymond Yakeleya, residential school survivor, filmmaker, Dene Elder Alone one winter night in a log cabin in the late 1940s, Jean-Marie Mouchet was waiting for his water to boil and started thinking about why he was there and how he could make a difference that mattered. He was a Catholic missionary in Canada’s North and could see the negative effect the Europeans were having on the Indigenous population. Wanting to do something about it, he resolved to help Indigenous youth reconnect with the land and their traditional values yet provide them with a means to adapt to the social and cultural change that was on the horizon. He started something simple – a skiing program. The individual and snow in harmony. Jean-Marie’s Territorial Experimental Ski Training (TEST) program yielded multiple Olympians, made cross-country skiing the fastest-growing winter sport in Canada, and placed both Northern and Canadian skiers on the cross-country skiing world stage. Over the next 60 years it also produced many leaders who helped guide Northern First Nations into the 21st Century and is credited with saving the lives of many residential school survivors. Firth paints a comprehensive and grounded portrait of the man behind the legacy, all upon a backdrop of a Northern landscape in the midst of transition that will appeal to anyone interested in Canadian and Indigenous history.

There is a season for all things. . . For Barnaby Skye, legendary guide and man of the borders, it is time to start a new life. For Skye's younger wife, the beautiful Shoshone woman he calls Mary, it is time to find the beloved son she has not seen in seven years. For Skye's half-blood son, North Star, it is time to discover who he is. And for Skye's older Crow wife, Victoria, the whole world is spinning out of control. In this sweeping novel of the early West, Skye and his wives and son cope with radical change as the wilderness vanishes, the buffalo are slaughtered, and the government puts the tribes on reservation lands. How can people born and bred to tribal life learn to live another way? Their struggle takes the Skyes from the Crazy Mountains in Montana to St. Louis and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, wrestling with the tide of settlers and the new settlements that dot the western plains and mountains - a tide that leaves no good place for a veteran borders man with two Indian wives and a mixed-blood son. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

North Star Country is the story of the remarkable transformation of Upstate New York's famous 'Burned over District;' where the flames of religious revival sparked an abolitionist movement that eventually burst into the conflagration of the Civil War. Milton C. Sernett details the regional presence of African Americans from the pre-Revolutionary War era through the Civil War, both as champions of liberty and as beneficiaries of a humanitarian spirit generated from evangelical impulses. He includes in his narrative the struggles of great abolitionists—among them Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Loguen, and Samuel May—and of many lesser-known characters who rescued fugitives from slave hunters, maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad, and otherwise furthered the cause of freedom both regionally and in the nation as a whole. Sernett concludes with a compelling examination of the moral choices made during the Civil War by upstate New Yorkers—both black and white—and of the post-Appomattox campaign to secure freedom for the newly emancipated.

"More than a century ago, one man with deep convictions and a country with benign ideals combined to create a place where black self-emancipation, black freedom, could flourish. The man was William King, a slaveowner and Presbyterian minister educated to the stern moralities of Edinburgh. The country was Canada and Look to the North Star is a vivid account of Buxton, the community in western Ontario which the Reverend Mr. King and his slaves founded in 1849 as a haven for black fugitives, both slave and free, in the harsh years before the Civil War."--Jacket.