Seniors of the pulp and paper town of Powell River, BC remember two major events in their lives, the Great Depression and WWII. Some have lived 80 + years in the community, others recall events from other Canadian provinces. The were children during the Great Depression and young adults during WWII. A collection of 70 stories.

Nestled on the British Columbia coast, the community of Powell River sent several Canadian men and women overseas to fight in the World War II. When all was said and done, more than forty war bride families made their home in Powell River and the nearby town of Stillwater. War Brides and Rosies compiles these families amazing stories and artfully captures the history of Powell River and Stillwater, British Columbia, during World War II. Barbara Ann Lambert recounts how the Powell River Company became a major player in war production as local girls became Rosies of the north, assembling planes for Boeing of Canada as well as running the largest pulp and paper mill in western Canada. Through their monthly newsletter, the company also became a social network. It included correspondence from Powell Rivers service men and women stationed around the world and news on overseas marriages. Using this resource, as well as accounts from war brides and their families, Lambert shows how these women influenced the communities and helped change the perspective of womens roles in Canadian society. Full of vivid detail, War Brides and Rosies is an important contribution to the local history of these Canadian communities.

Imagine obtaining one hundred and sixty acres of land for FREE! Then comes the real payment: the sweat and toil of living in a remote wilderness and clearing a landscape where the stumps left behind are so large and so numerous the best bet is to use dynamite to remove them. Beginning in 1859 such homesteading typified the arrival of white settlers in British Columbia. The Land Act set out rules by which British subjects could, for agricultural purposes only, pre-empt land. Along the Upper Sunshine Coast, of those who took up the challenge, only some succeeded in carving a life out of this wild land, while many failed. Through prodigious research and the careful cultivation of interviews, Barbara Ann Lambert tells the stories of those resourceful arrivals. Employing the day journals of homesteaders and interviews with their descendants, Lambert conveys the rich history of the Sunshine Coast. From Saltery Bay to Lund, she evokes the struggles and triumphs of those who once lived in this place Lambert calls “paradise”.

Dreams of steady employment in the mining sector led thousands of Ukrainian immigrants to northern Ontario in the early 1900s. As a child, Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her baba’s stories about Sudbury’s small but polarized Ukrainian community and what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression. According to Baba grew out of those stories, out of a fledgling historian’s desire to capture the experiences of her grandparents’ generation on paper. Eighty-two interviews conducted by Stacey and her grandmother laid the groundwork for this insightful and personal social history of Sudbury’s Ukrainian community. The interviews also brought to light the challenges of doing oral history, particularly as Stacey lost authority to her Baba, wrestled it back, and eventually came to share it. By disclosing the hard work that goes into making communities partners in research, Zembrzycki offers a new paradigm for writing oral history and for studying the politics of memory.

Long before vacationers discovered BC’s Sunshine Coast, the Sliammon, a Coast Salish people, called the region home. In this remarkable book, Sliammon elder Elsie Paul collaborates with a scholar, Paige Raibmon, and her granddaughter, Harmony Johnson, to tell her life story and the history of her people, in her own words and storytelling style. Raised by her grandparents who took her on their seasonal travels, Paul spent most of her childhood learning Sliammon ways, teachings, and stories and is one of the last surviving mother-tongue speakers of the Sliammon language. She shares this traditional knowledge with future generations in Written as I Remember It.