Northern Canadian Life Stories Series
Series Editor: P. Whitney Lackenbauer
The Trent Northern Canadian Life Stories series aims to publish and make available, in free, open access format, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries and letter collections, and biographies that contribute to our understandings of the history of the Canadian North. In so doing, our goal is to help enrich understandings of the region in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for scholars, Northern community members, genealogists, and the reading public.
We embrace life stories covering all aspects of Northern Canadian history, including:
- Indigenous peoples’ experiences, including transitions to settlement life
- cross-cultural encounters between Indigenous peoples and non-indigenous people
- diverse Northern economies, such as hunting and gathering, mining (placer and hard rock), whaling, the fur trade, and work in the public sector
- religious and spiritual life, including the work of missionaries
- public service, including recollections of federal and territorial public servants, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Canadian military
- exploration
- science
- politics
Our series welcomes perspectives on Northern homelands and lives by Inuit, First Nations, and Métis authors. Where books are written by Indigenous people or the primary subject of the book is an Indigenous person, we will strive wherever possible to involve families and communities in the publication process, guided by the ethos of “nothing about us without us” and with due respect for traditional protocols.
Our series also presents the voices of non-Indigenous people who have written about their experiences in the Canadian North as life-long or long-term residents, repeat visitors, or brief sojourners. We embrace varied perspectives on the Canadian North that capture diversity of experience. These life stories can also serve as valuable ethnographic, genealogical, and historical sources that facilitate future interdisciplinary research.
Books in this series fall into two main categories:
- Books based on previously unpublished manuscripts, often acquired by archives or in family collections;
- Republications of out-of-print, overlooked, or otherwise elusive publications that we believe are of interest and relevance to contemporary readers. Each of these editions is edited by a subject matter expert on the subject or in the field who provides a robust introduction that situates the work in geographical, cultural, and contemporary contexts.
This series is intended to complement, rather than supplant, existing series published by various commercial and university presses.
Our Approach
Given the high costs of university press publishing, the need for financial subventions, and often limited readerships associated with specialized topics, our series adopts an innovative, low-cost, alternate model to conventional academic publishing. Through a collaborative peer review process, we ensure that the volumes reflect high standards of reliability, academic integrity, and quality.
Authors and editors will not receive royalties for books produced in this series.
While there may be limited print runs of specific titles, these will be offered on a cost-recovery basis.
Upcoming Titles:
- Eenoolooapik by Alexander M’Donald, introduced by Kenn Harper
- Joe Tedjuk’s Story, introduced and edited by P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Mark Stoller
- Adventures Unlimited by Catherine Hoare, introduced and edited by Corah Hodgson and P. Whitney Lackenbauer
- Interesting and Pioneering … But Adventure Never: The Northwest Territories Memoirs of John Anderson-Thomson, 1944-1982, introduced and edited by P. Whitney Lackenbauer
- The Autobiography of Patrick Douglas Baird, introduced and edited by P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Peter Kikkert
- The Klondyke Diary of Dr. John Henry Richard Bond¸ introduced and edited by P. Whitney Lackenbauer, with an overview by Andrew Taylor
If you are interested in contributing a volume to this series, please contact Whitney Lackenbauer at pwhitneylackenbauer@trentu.ca.