Finding a Way to the Heart

When Sylvia Van Kirk published her groundbreaking book Many Tender Tiesin 1980, she revolutionized the historical understanding of the North American fur trade and introduced entirely new areas of inquiry in women's, social, and Aboriginal history. Finding a Way to the Heartexamines Van Kirk's work, her academic career, and her influence on a generation of feminist scholarship in fur trade and gender history, the history of Aboriginal women, the North American west, Nativenewcomer relations, and multicultural history. Using Van Kirk's themes and methodologies as a jumping-off point, the book also off ers ten new essays examining race, gender, identity, and colonization over a time period extending from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century and a geographic area reaching from the western plains to southern Ontario to New Zealand.

Robin Jarvis Brownlie is an associate professor in the Department of History at University of Manitoba and author of A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918-1939. Valerie J. Korinek is a professor in the Department of History at University of Saskatchewan, and is the author of Roughing It in Suburbia: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties.