Stories, poetry, essays, and biographical pieces from western and northwestern Canadian Native women make available seldom-heard voices of strength, resolution, anger, sorrow, wit, laughter, and tenderness.

Jeanne Perreault is professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is coeditor (with Sylvia Vance) of Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada (1990), and coeditor (with Joseph Bruchac) of Critical Visions: Contemporary North American Native Writing, a special issue of Ariel (1994). She is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography (1995). Other publications include “Memory Alive: An Inquiry into the Uses of Memory in Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Louise Halfe, and Joy Harjo” (Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Renée Hulan, ECW Press, 1999), and “Writing Whiteness: Linda Griffith’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica” (Essays on Canadian Writing, 1996). Currently, she is examining the racializing of whiteness in white women’s texts.

Jeanne Perreault's profile page

Sylvia Vance is a freelance writer and editor in Edmonton. Gloria Bird, author of the introduction, is a native poet and writer now teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Emma LaRocque, author of the preface, teaches Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Sylvia Vance's profile page