This book presents stories of sustainability from communities in circumpolar regions as they grapple with environmental, economic and societal changes and challenges. Polar regions are changing rapidly. These changes will dramatically effect ecosystems, economy, people, communities and their interdependencies. Given this, the stories being told about lives and livelihood development are changing also. This book is the first of its kind to curate stories about opportunity and responsibility, tensions and contradictions, un/ethical action, resilience, adaptability and sustainability, all within the shifting geopolitics of the north. The book looks at change and sustainability through multidisciplinary and empirically based work, drawing on case studies from Norway, Sweden, Alaska, Canada, Finland and Northwest Russia, with a notable focus on indigenous peoples. Chapters touch on topics as wide ranging as reindeer herding, mental health, climate change, land-use conflicts and sustainable business. The volume asks whose voices are being heard, who benefits, how particular changes affect people’s sense of community and longstanding and cherished values plus livelihood practices and what are the environmental, economic and social impacts of contemporary and future oriented changes with regard to issues of sustainability? This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability studies, sustainable development, environmental sociology, indigenous studies and environmental anthropology.

Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations: An Applied Anthropological Perspective presents a unique and honest account of an applied anthropologist’s experience in working with Indigenous peoples of Canada. It illustrates Dr. Nadia Ferrara’s efforts in reconciliation and rehumanization, showing that it is all about recognizing our shared humanity. In this self-reflective narrative, the author describes her personal experience of marginalization and how it contributed to a more in-depth understanding of how others are marginalized, as well as the fundamental sense of belongingness and connectedness. The book is enriched with stories and insights from her fieldwork as a clinician, a university professor, and a bureaucrat. Dr. Ferrara shows how she has applied her experience as an art therapist in Indigenous communities to her current work in policy development to ensure the policies created reflect their current realities. Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations describes the cultural competency course for public servants Dr. Ferrara is leading, as a means to break down stereotypes and showcase the resilience of Indigenous peoples. She makes a compassionate and urgent call to all North Americans to connect with their responsibility and compassion, and acknowledge the injustices that the original peoples of this land have faced and continue to face. Reconciliation requires concrete action and it starts with the individual’s self-reflection, engagement in authentic human-to-human dialogue, learning from one another, and working together towards a better future, all of which is chronicled in this insightful book.

This book is about transnational and transracial adoption in North American culture. It asks: to what extent does the process of international adoption reflect imperious inequalities around the world; or can international adoption and the personal experiences of international adoptees today be seen more positively as what has been called the richness of “adoptive being”? The areas covered include Native North American adoption policies and the responses of Native North American writers themselves to these policies of assimilation. This might be termed “adoption from within.” “Adoption from without” (transnational adoption) is primarily dealt with in articles discussing Chinese and Korean adoptions in the US. The third section concerns such issues as the multiple forms that adoption can take, notions of adoption and identity, adoption and the family, and the problems of adoption.

In Quebec National Cinema Bill Marshall tackles the question of the role cinema plays in Quebec's view of itself as a nation. Surveying mostly fictional feature films, Marshall demonstrates how Quebec cinema has evolved from the innovative direct cinema of the early 1960s into the diverse canvas of popular comedies, glossy co-productions, and reworked auteur cinema of the postmodern 1990s. He explores the faultlines of Quebec identity - its problematic and contradictory relationship with France, the question of Native peoples, the influence of the cosmopolitan and pluralist city of Montreal, and the encounters between sexuality, gender, and nation traced and critiqued in women's and queer cinemas. In the first comprehensive, theoretically informed work in English on Quebec cinema, Marshall views his subject as neither the assertion of some unproblematic national wholeness nor a random collection of disparate voices that drown out or invalidate the question of nation. Instead, he shows that while the allegory of nation marks Quebec film production it also leads to a tension between textual and contextual forces, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, and between major and minor modes of being and identity. Drawing on a broad framework of theory and particularly indebted to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Quebec National Cinema makes a valuable contribution to debates in film studies on national cinemas and to the burgeoning interest in French studies in the culture and politics of la francophonie. Bill Marshall is professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has written several books and numerous articles on film and Francophone culture.

Combining language research with digital, multimodal, and critical literacy, this book uniquely positions issues of transcultural spaces and cosmopolitan identities across an array of contexts. Studies of everyday diasporic practices across places, spaces, and people’s stories provide authentic pictures of people living in and with diversity. Its distinctive contribution is a framework to relate observation and analysis of these flows to language development, communication, and meaning making. Each chapter invites readers to reflect on the dynamism and complexity of spaces and contexts in an age of increasing mobility, political upheaval, economic instabilities, and online/offline landscapes.

Featuring interviews, conversations and observations from a multi-sited ethnography of Ecuadorean musicians and their families, this book offers an innovative response to previous analyses of globalization and indigenous languages, demonstrating how transcultural practices can enhance the use and maintenance of indigenous and minority languages.

Indigenous and settler scholars and media artists discuss and analyze crucial questions of narrative sovereignty, cultural identity, cultural resistance, and decolonizing creative practices. Humans are narrative creatures, and since the dawn of our existence we have shared stories. Storytelling is what connects us, what helps us give shape and understanding to the world and to each other. Who tells whose stories in which particular ways leads to questions of belonging, power, relationality, community and identity. This collection explores those issues with a focus on settler-Indigenous cultural politics in the country known as Canada, looking in particular at Indigenous representation in media arts. Chapters feature roundtable discussions, interviews, film analyses, resurgent media explorations, visual culture advocacy and place-based practices of creative expression. Eclectic in scope and diverse in perspective, Indigenous Media Arts in Canada is unified by an ethic of conciliation, collaboration, and cultural resistance. Engaging deftly and thoughtfully with instances of cultural appropriation as well as the oppressive structures that seek to erode narrative sovereignty, this collection shines as a crucial gathering of thoughtful critique, cultural kinship, and creative counterpower.

Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground. Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors document how residential schools have been understood and represented by various groups and individuals over time; how survivors are undermining colonial narratives about residential schools; and how the churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the “new” residential school story. Ultimately, Power through Testimony questions the power of the TRC to unsettle dominant colonial narratives about residential schools and transform the relationship between Indigenous people and Canadian society.