When human bones are found in a vat of lye on Steveston’s notorious Cannery Row, John Granville is determined to find out why. In a time of frontier brawls and broken dreams, the fishing industry is vital to the survival of the young province and the people who live there. Tensions from a recent fishing strike abound, and Cannery Row is a tinderbox. Can Granville—with a little help from his fiancée, Emily Turner—identify the victim and find the killer in time to prevent all-out war? The Cannery Row Murders is a sharp-witted and engaging historical mystery, with strong characters set in a unique time and place. This is the fifth book in the John Granville and Emily Turner series. These books can be read in any order.

This book tells the story of Japanese Canadian activist Mary Kitagawa. In the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombing, Mary was one of roughly 22,000 Nikkei uprooted from their homes on the Pacific coast and forbidden to return to western British Columbia until long after World War II had officially ended. In the decades that followed, Mary and her family navigated financial precarity and ostracism, but also found ways to pursue both economic stability and political engagement. Beginning with Mary's grandparents, who were among the earliest immigrants to Canada from Japan, this book tracks the family's experiences—and those of the larger Nikkei Canadian community—from the late 1800s to the present. Concentrating on the interpersonal and intergenerational bonds that shaped Kitagawa, Karen M. Inouye describes the increasingly activist sensibilities that arose from transformative relationships—with family members, other members of the Nikkei Canadian community, Doukhobors, First Nations peoples, and white allies—as well as in response to the anti-Asian racism that Kitagawa encountered in many forms throughout her life. Inouye presents the Nikkei Canadian experience not as a linear triumph over a single adversity, but as a continual process of identity formation in relation to obstacles and opportunities, suffering and joy, isolation and connection.

Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada. The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present. From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

This intriguing scholarly biography examines the important contributions of Canada’s foremost international nurse, Lyle Creelman. Creelman parlayed her experience as a community health nurse in British Columbia into significant international appointments with two organizations undertaking massive responsibility for health tasks in the post-war period – first, as chief nurse of the British Zone of Occupied Germany with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and, from 1954 to 1968, the Chief Nursing Officer of the World Health Organization (WHO). In telling Creelman’s fascinating story, Susan Armstrong-Reid helps readers learn about the transformation of the nursing profession and global health governance in the twentieth century. This story challenges the prevailing portrait of expatriate nurses during this period as agents of Western cultural imperialism. Lyle Creelman: The Frontiers of Global Nursing not only recasts the broader historical narrative of nursing’s legacy to global health, but contextualizes its continuing importance for approaching health care in the twenty-first-century.

Salmon gillnetting in the turbulent waters of the Fraser River at the turn of the last century was dangerous, back-breaking work. Skiffs were equipped with a single sail, but most maneuvering had to be accomplished by oars, an almost impossible task against any current or tide. Once towed to the grounds by a cannery tug, the fishermen were on their own for at least twelve hours, casting their 400-metre long nets out and pulling them back by hand. Their only shelter was a partial tent over the bow. Many came to grief on dark, windy nights as they blew out of the main channel to the mudflats of the estuary, or worse, the open waters of the Strait of Georgia. When the powerful Fraser River Canners’ Association fixed the maximum price per salmon at 15 cents, fishermen united in their determination to win a decent living. Their strike shut down British Columbia’s second-largest export industry and effectively resulted in the imposition of martial law as the canners, frustrated by political deadlock in Victoria, called out the militia without government assent to achieve their ends. The strike has long been understood as a watershed moment in the province’s industrial history. In this revealing chronicle, Geoff Meggs shows it was even more than that. Other strikes in that era may have lasted longer, many were more violent, but none drew such diverse groups—Indigenous, Japanese, white—into an uneasy, short-term but effective coalition. While united by the common goal of economic equality, strikers were divided by forceful social pressures: First Nations fishermen wished to assert their Indigenous rights; Japanese fishermen, having fled poverty in their homeland, were seeking equality and opportunity in a new country; white fishermen were angered by the greed of the tiny clique of wealthy Vancouver industrialists who controlled the salmon industry. This maelstrom came together in Steveston, a ramshackle clapboard and cedar shake cannery boom town that blossomed into one of the province’s largest cities for a few hectic months each summer. In this compelling account, told with journalistic flair and vivid detail, Meggs leaves no room for doubt: this event marked BC’s turn into the modern era, with lessons about inequality, racism, immigration and economic power that remain relevant today.