An often harsh, but apparently honest, reflective biography of Yvonne Johnson,a mixed Cree/Norwegian woman incarcerated for first degree murder. Well researched and guided by Rudy Wiebe, with moments of shear beauty found in some of Yvonne Johnson's writing, it is none-the-less an emotionally dif...
In 1944, as war rages across Europe and Asia, famine, violence and fear are commonplace. But life appears tranquil in the isolated farming settlement of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan, where the Mennonite community continues the agricultural lifestyle their ancestors have practised for centuries...
“What can that mean, I and my family will have a ‘reserve of one square mile’?”So asks Big Bear of Governor Morris, come to impose a square treaty on the round, buffalo-covered world of the Plains Cree. As the buffalo vanish and the tension builds to the second Riel Rebellion, Big Bear alone of t...
Rudy Wiebe’s latest novel is at once an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man’s emotional voyage into his heritage and his own self-discovery. Ambitious in its historical sweep, tender and humane, Sweeter Than All the World takes us on an extraordinary odyssey never before fully re...
Rudy Wiebe has written award-winning fiction for decades. He is recognized as one of Canada's finest literary treasures. Twice he has received Canada's most prestigious prize for fiction writing: The Governor-General's Award (equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Now comes new ...
CHIEF To ride a train was beyond anything I had experienced. Forget about horses and wagons on dirt roads, or a slow car or jerky bus grinding over gravel, lurching around holes and mud; this amazement of leaning back in a cushioned seat beside an immense window while the world whirled past witho...
Whose magnificent orations were never written down in his richly metaphorical languages, who spoke no English, and whose profound, extended images exist only in bits of translation—often made by incompetent translators—that were recorded largely by his enemies? To try to write Big Bear’s story, I...
–Yvonne Johnson to Rudy Wiebe, 24 December 1992 TO BEGIN A STORY, someone in some way must break a particular silence. On Wednesday, 18 November 1992, in Edmonton, Alberta, I received an envelope from Box 515, Kingston, Ontario. Inside, folded into quarters, was a long sheet of paper typed from t...
Joan, Mom, Grant hear it / the people, the place has never helped me live. And I’ve had enough of seeing a distant A (didn’t say this out loud) no A, every Sunday—enough already. Make series of photos, snow patterns, little Sara N (6) dancing in snow, beautiful profile, always turning her laughin...
The winter world darkens into silver around Keskarrah’s hide lodge heaped with spruce boughs and snow in the shelter of the esker. And the sharp corners of the mudded English buildings are softening a little as the ice grows over them, their green logs cracked open by the cold now furred thick as...