Books

The terrifying Wîhtikow Rex takes centre stage in this exciting second book in the Lukas Encounters. The mysterious creature, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton that Lukas and his cousin KC accidentally bring to life, is described in Cree mythology as a ravening monster that grows as it consumes its victims.

Author: Stuart Adams

The journal of Father Léon Doucet presents a rare account of the changes that occurred in what is today Saskatchewan and Alberta in the last half of the 19th century. These changes included the spread of devastating disease epidemics, the decline of bison populations, the end of the fur trade economy, the establishment of Canadian sovereignty, the signing of treaties, the creation of First Nations reserves, and the transformation of the landscape into an agricultural west. A keen observer, Doucet recorded significant ethnographic, geographic, genealogical, faunal, floral, and meteorological details and events.

Margaret Fleming was a Canadian mountaineer, traveller, field naturalist, and teacher whose life spanned the twentieth century of alpine culture. She was the first woman editor of the celebrated Canadian Alpine Journal, but her own stories remained unpublished until now.

Editors: PearlAnn Reichwein & Karen Fox

This book is a fibre artist's dream! It makes it easy to dye your own fabric and yarn with plants you will find in your own back yard.

Author: Carol Snyder

"Old Strathcona: Edmonton's Southside Roots" by Monto is an extensively researched chronological history of southside Edmonton, once the separate city of Strathcona, from its start as a scattering of Métis/Indian pioneer cabins in the 1870s to a bustling commercial/industrial/residential section of the City of Edmonton prior to the downturn of the 1930s. Bound together with "Métis Strathcona" by Lawrence, a ground-breaking essay on the roots of Strathcona, which delineates the Métis identity of many of its earliest pioneers and the Métis pioneers' connection with the area's Papaschase First Nations, which was subsequently thoroughly dispossessed.

Author: Tom Monto

Fort George and Buckingham House and the early fur trade on the North Saskatchewan River, 1792 to 1800.

Through meticulous research and careful historiographical analysis, historians Douglas Babcock and Michael Payne paint a vivid portrait of a foundational period of social and economic interaction in Alberta's early fur trade history. While the British Crown claimed ownership and control through a charter granted to the Hudson s Bay Company over a vast territory known as Rupert's Land, in reality it was the Indigenous nations of the continent who held uncontested sovereign dominion over their ancestral lands. It wasn't until 1869 that these territories were absorbed into Canada after which treaties were fashioned, and western provinces established.

Author: Douglas R. Babcock with Michael Payne

Gordon T. Auger provides a compelling and honest report on his experiences as a Chief of Bigstone Cree Nation. Gordon was the only Bigstone Cree Nation Chief to be elected four terms, serving between 1991 - 2018.

Gordon's story breathes life into politics, the ups and downs of life on reserve, and the constant battle to do better than the generation before us.

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay, Margaret Crang... three Edmontonians who stood up and fought for the working people of their city through the dark days of the World Wars, the fragile prosperity of the 1920s, the grinding poverty of the Dirty Thirties and Cold War repression.

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay and Margaret Crang did not win all their battles but they made a difference in the history of the city, the province and the country.

Author: Tom Monto

Survival in Paradise: A Century of Coal Mining in the Bow Valley is both a story of how coal was mined in the region for nearly 100 years and a story of its four coal-mining towns.

Engineers and miners will be interested in the specifics of how coal was mined in the Rocky Mountains. General readers and those with a passion for history will appreciate how this book explores the development of each community and why three died and Canmore survived.

Author: Walter J. Riva

In an approach that allows the writers of letters, reports, proposals and policy to speak for themselves, this book covers the critical decade of the 1930s in which the first definitive provincial Métis policy in Canada was produced. The review includes:

Alberta Métis-provincial (intergovernmental) policy relationships.

The first years of the Métis Association of Alberta.

The initial development of the Alberta Métis Settlements.

Roles of Alberta Métis leaders (Dion, Brady, Norris, Tomkins), politicians and bureaucrats in provincial Métis policy development.

Author: Denis Wall

This book is an assortment of stories about the glass milk bottle era and the home delivery of milk. It was inspired by the author's research of Western Canadian dairies and milk bottles from his own collection.

Author: Bob Snyder

Drawing on historic newspaper accounts, books and PR organization newsletters, and on recent secondary references, historian Tom Monto has pulled together an overview of the use of proportional representation in Canada.

This chronological history describes the drive for PR starting in the 1880s and its eventual success when by 1923, Single Transferable Voting had been adopted by 19 cities and two provincial governments.

This book presents an overview of STV's use in 17 provincial elections and 150 city elections in Canada. And how despite its effectiveness, it was successively discontinued, with the last Canadian STV government election happening in Calgary in 1971.

With increasing sentiment in favour of electoral reform, this affordable book is bound to provide speaking points and inspiration for today's debates on the subject.

Self-published by Tom Monto, of Edmonton. Monto, a published author, is creator of the electoral reform blogsite Montopedia.