A moving, unflinching exploration of life in Prince Albert on Treaty Six territory, as told through one family’s multigenerational story. Robert Boschman grew up in the living quarters of the King Koin Launderette in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, sandwiched between a residential school and a jail built in the aftermath of the Riel Resistance of 1885. White Coal City is the story of this hard hockey-obsessed white-settler town on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River and Boschman’s troubled family who traveled these lands.   Trauma was palpable but never spoken of in the family, and this silence hounded the psychology of its men and boys. Years later, Boschman discovered the reason behind it: the devastating fate of his grandmother, killed by a hit-and-run driver while she was six months pregnant. Her husband, who saw it happen, was plagued by the crime. Their story is gently shared through letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and accounts from the coroner’s inquest.   With its penitentiary, sanatorium, pulp mill, and half-built hydro-electric dam, Boschman describes the city of Prince Albert as a “circle of pain”—one felt by white settlers but more so for the generations of First Nations and Métis people in the city and surrounding lands who were forcibly removed, incarcerated, or abducted. The harms of colonialism touched Boschman’s own family; his Cree sister Crystal was adopted by his parents during the Sixties Scoop when she was just a baby. Careful to tell his own story, not hers, Boschman accounts for his family’s own part in Canada’s shameful past.  White Coal City is a poetic, necessary exploration of the painful landscapes of colonial cities in Canada.

Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene is a collection of essays about the natural environment in a province rich in natural resources and aggressive in development goals. This is a casebook on Alberta from which emerges a far wider set of implications for North America and for the biosphere in general. The writers come from an array of disciplinary backgrounds within the environmental humanities. The essays examine the oil/tar sands, climate change, provincial government policy, food production, industry practices, legal frameworks, wilderness spaces, hunting, Indigenous perspectives, and nuclear power. Contributions from an ecocritical perspective provide insight into environmentally themed poetry, photography, and biography. Since the actions of Alberta's industries and government are currently at the heart of a global environmental debate, this collection is valuable to those wishing to understand the natural and commercial forces in play. The editors present an introductory argument that frames these interests inside a call for a rethinking of our assumptions about the natural world and our place within it.