The annual UVic Author Celebration is coming up as part of Ideafest. Join us as we celebrate authors from the UVic community who will read from their latest works.
When: March 7, 2019
Where: UVic Bookstore
Time: 2:00-4:00pm
The author panel includes: Jason M. Colby (History), Patrick Friesen (Writing), Bill Gaston (Writing), and Lynne Marks (History). Jim Forbes (Director of Campus Services) will host and Jonathan Bengtson (University Librarian) will moderate.
This week, we will highlight the books written by members of the author panel.
Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia by Lynne Marks was released by UBC Press in 2017 and won the 2018 CLIO Prize for British Columbia from the Canadian Historical Association.
About the Book
British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War.
Drawing on archival records and oral histories, Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women who tried to hang onto their faith in an alien land. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere in Canada, in BC many people found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views without significant social repercussions.
This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.
This book will hold broad appeal for students and scholars of social history, cultural history, BC and Canadian history, religious studies, women’s studies, immigration and migration studies, Asian studies, and labour and the Left.
About the Author
Lynne Marks is an associate professor and past chair of the Department of History at the University of Victoria, where she teaches gender history, the social history of religion, and Canadian history. She won the Marion Dewar Prize in Women’s History in 2012. Her first book, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario, won the 1996 Floyd S. Chalmers Award for the best book on Ontario history.
Praise for the Book
“British Columbia is in the vanguard of a secularizing trend that is afoot across the Western world… As Lynne Marks demonstrates in her impeccably researched book, this phenomenon is deeply rooted in the province’s history.” —
“This is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the secularizing trends in the Pacific Northwest, whether in Canada or the United States, and increasingly in the rest of their societies.” —
“Infidels and the Damn Churches addresses a glaring omission in the history of Canada’s West – the role of religion and religiosity (and, in this case, irreligion and irreligiosity) in the formation of a settler society.” —
“This is the finest historical study yet done on the culture of atheism and non-religionism in the late modern Western world. It explores the origins of modern secularity in the most secular part of North America. Marks excels in moving from the micro study of individual families and small communities up to cities and the nation. This is a path-breaking work.” —
Bill Gaston came to the UVic Writing Department in 1998 following a dozen years in the Maritimes, mostly at UNB, Fredericton. There he was Director of the Creative Writing Program and, for a time, editor of Canada’s oldest literary journal, The Fiddlehead. He’s also lived in Toronto, Winnipeg and France, and spent his formative years on the slopes of North Vancouver. He worked at the usual struggling-writer jobs, typically in universities but also in group homes — but the most exotic of these jobs were fishing guide, swamping for a cat at a logging show and playing hockey in the south of France. For decades he’s led a more settled existence in Gordon Head, where he resides with writer Dede Crane. He is the author of seven novels and seven collections of short fiction, as well as a book of poems and a memoir, Midnight Hockey. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and twice for the Governor General’s Award. His most recent novel, The World, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
The poems in this new collection move like swifts. They alight, but only briefly, before their smooth lifts and hair-trigger turns take us places we had not expected to go. Each poem, one sentence long and separated by commas, tracks the movement of the mind. Occasionally using words and phrases from Middle English and Low German, the poems touch on musical influences, the changes in language over the centuries and on the dissolutions, dilemmas and inevitabilities of old age. A beautiful body of work; the poet at his finest.
Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place.
In The Right Relationship, John Borrows and Michael Coyle bring together a group of renowned scholars, both indigenous and non-indigenous, to cast light on the magnitude of the challenges Canadians face in seeking a consensus on the nature of treaty partnership in the twenty-first century. The diverse perspectives offered in this volume examine how Indigenous people’s own legal and policy frameworks can be used to develop healthier attitudes between First Peoples and settler governments in Canada. While considering the existing law of Aboriginal and treaty rights, the contributors imagine what these relationships might look like if those involved pursued our highest aspirations as Canadians and Indigenous peoples. This timely and authoritative volume provides answers that will help pave the way toward good governance for all.
John Borrows is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. He teaches in the area of Constitutional Law, Indigenous Law, and Environmental Law. In addition to teaching generations of students at his home base in UVic’s law school, he has served as visiting professor in the US, Australia and New Zealand. As a global leader in Indigenous law, Borrows’ ideas helped shape the recommendations of both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He has led engagement with Indigenous legal traditions in Canada and internationally, bringing to light some of the injustices, inequalities and conditions of Indigenous people. His scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada. Recently, he was named the 
This book provides a comprehensive overview of navigating the on-going systemic challenges, hardships, and problems facing many indigenous teacher education programs today, helping to foster a commitment to developing quality indigenous teacher education programs that are sustainable, distinctive and excellent. However, despite a growing cadre of indigenous peoples working in teacher education, there is still a noticeable gap between the uptake of what is being taught in conventional teacher education programs, and how this translates to what we see student teachers doing in the classroom. The often tricky and complex nature of indigenous teacher education programming also means that there are multiple realities, approaches and pathways that require greater communication, collaboration, and cooperation. The very nature of this complexity, the book suggests, requires a strength-based and future-focused approach built on trust, integrity, courage and respect for indigeneity, as well as an understanding of what it means to be indigenous. The examples and experiences presented identify a number of promising practices that work well in current indigenous teacher education programs and beyond. By promoting a greater appreciation for the inclusion of culturally relevant practices in teacher education, the book aims to breathe new life into the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of indigenous teacher education programs moving forward.
