Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction.

Big Bear (1825–1888) was a Plains Cree chief in Saskatchewan at a time when aboriginals were confronted with the disappearance of the buffalo and waves of European settlers that seemed destined to destroy the Indian way of life. In 1876 he refused to sign Treaty No. 6, until 1882, when his people were starving. Big Bear advocated negotiation over violence, but when the federal government refused to negotiate with aboriginal leaders, some of his followers killed 9 people at Frog Lake in 1885. Big Bear himself was arrested and imprisoned. Rudy Wiebe, author of a Governor General’s Award–winning novel about Big Bear, revisits the life of the eloquent statesman, one of Canada’s most important aboriginal leaders.

Early in his writing career, Rudy Wiebe’s imagination was caught by a heroic character of Cree and Ojibwa ancestry whose birthplace was within twenty-five miles of where Wiebe himself was born 110 years later. The man’s name translated into English was Big Bear, and he came to be the subject of one of Wiebe’s most highly praised works of fiction. A modern classic, Wiebe’s fourth novel is a moving epic of the tumultuous history of the Canadian West. The book won the 1973 Governor General's Award, and in the 1990s was made into a CBC television miniseries based on a script co-written by Wiebe and Métis director Gil Cardinal, shot in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. From the early days of North America, European settlers forced Natives aside, taking over their land on which they had lived for thousands of years. Big Bear envisioned a Northwest in which all peoples lived together peaceably, and in the 1880s made history by standing his ground to keep his Plains Cree nation from being forced onto reserves. The buffalo food supply was vanishing, but Big Bear led his people across the prairie, resisting pressure to cede rights to the land and give up freedom in exchange for temporary nourishment. The struggle brought starvation to his followers, tearing apart the community and eventually his own family. The story follows Big Bear’s life as he lives through the last buffalo hunt, the coming of the railway, the pacification of the Native tribes, and his own imprisonment. Wiebe’s magnificent interpretation of Western Canadian history encompasses not only his hero's struggle for integrity and justice but also the whole richness of the Plains culture.

"Written with primal intensity, touched with redeeming compassion, Rudy Wiebe--has explored our history, our roots and the secrets of our hearts with moral seriousness and great feeling." Governor General's Award for Fiction Citation, 1994 A powerful, major work of non-fiction, beautifully written, from the twice winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear. This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence. Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life that led to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children. He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life. How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

In 1876, Big Bear, a Plains Cree, stands alone among the prairie chiefs in his refusal to choose a reserve and acknowledge white ownership of the land. His own vision comprehends a new Canadian Northwest in which all peoples can live together in peace.

Although temptation is a common and well-acknowledged part of the human experience, few realize the truth behind temptation and fewer still know how to defeat it. Tempted and Tried will not reassure Christians by claiming that temptation is less powerful or less prevalent than it is; instead, it will prepare believers for battle by telling the truth about the cosmic war that is raging. Moore shows that the temptation of every Christian is part of a broader conspiracy against God, a conspiracy that confronts everyone who shares the flesh of Jesus through human birth and especially confronts those who share the Spirit of Christ through the new birth of redemption. Moore walks readers through the Devil's ancient strategies for temptation revealed in Jesus' wilderness testing. Moore considers how those strategies might appear in a contemporary context and points readers to a way of escape. Tempted and Tried will remind Christians that temptation must be understood in terms of warfare, encouraging them with the truth that victory has already been secured through the triumph of Christ.

In an entertaining re-examination of Rudy Wiebe's major novels, Penny van Toorn presents a completely new way of reading one of Canada's foremost contemporary writers. She analyzes Wiebe's struggle to control the "socially contested territory" of language, and identifies the principles that underlie his complex narrative structures.