Seven Oaks Reader, The

Finalist for the Wildrid Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards!

The long rivalry between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company for control of the fur trade in Canada’s northwest came to an explosive climax on June 19th, 1816, at the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. Armed buffalo hunters–Indigenous allies of the Nor-Westers–confronted armed colonists of the HBC’s Selkirk settlement near the forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers in today’s Winnipeg. This “battle” would prove to be a formative event for Métis self-determination as well as laying down a legacy for settlers to come.

The Seven Oaks Reader offers a comprehensive retelling of one of Canada’s most interesting historical periods, the Fur Trade Wars. As in the companion volume, The Frog Lake Reader, Kostash incorporates period accounts and journals, histories, memoirs, songs and fictional retellings, from a wide range of sources, offering readers an engaging and exciting way back into still-controversial historical events.

AUTHOR

Myrna Kostash

Born and raised in Edmonton, Canada, Myrna Kostash is a full-time writer, author of the classic All of Baba’s Children, the award-winning No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls and Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe. Among her other books are Reading the River: A Traveller’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River, The Frog Lake Reader, The Seven Oaks Reader, and Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Runcimann Award (UK), and which won the 2010 City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Wilfred Eggleston Award for Best Nonfiction. In 2010, Kostash was awarded the Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for a Life of Writing.

Alongside writing for numerous magazines, Kostash has written radio drama and documentary, television documentary, and theatre cabaret. Her journalism, essays, and creative nonfiction have been widely anthologized. She has been a frequent lecturer and instructor of creative writing as well as a writer-in-residence in Canada and the US.

Kostash has lectured across Canada and abroad in Kyiv, Warsaw, Cracow, Belgrade, Nis, Skopje, Sofia, Athens, Szeged, and Baia Mare. She has also served as Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada and on the Board of Governors of the Canadian Conference of the Arts and the Board of the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta. She is co-founder of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, has been a volunteer at the Carrot community café, and serves on the Board of St John’s Institute in Edmonton.

Myrna Kostash makes her home in Edmonton, Alberta. For more information about her work, visit her website at myrnakostash.com.

Reviews

Praise for The Seven Oaks Reader:

“Myrna Kostash provides a robust history of the Battle of Seven Oaks from a diverse range of perspectives, relying on primary and secondary sources, as well as original interviews with contemporary scholars. The Seven Oaks Reader includes all of the most relevant details about the events, accounts, and controversies that stem from Seven Oaks, and is accessible to scholars, students, and the public in general.”
~ Adam Gaudry, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Indigenous Studies, University of Saskatchewan

“In 1816 the Metis poet Pierre Falcon memorialized the Battle of Seven Oaks in a provocative Michif ballad. Two hundred years later Myrna Kostash offers us this beautifully detailed reader of facts and varied, often contradictory, opinions about the tragic event.”
~ Rudy Wiebe, author of Where The Truth Lies