Books

In Owen Toews’ debut novel, Island Falls, a student becomes intrigued by a mysterious friend whose intimate relationship with the history of the mill town where he grew up informs his politics and enigmatic writing. With curiosity that often breaches the private boundaries of friendship, the student’s warm and comedic accounts repeatedly shift to a narrative space where the harsh conditions, operations, and confines of the residents of the mill town are explored in clinical detail.

“With charm, wit, intelligence, but also keen observation, literary sparkle, and almost too-relatable characters, Owen Toews has authored in Island Falls one of the coolest books I’ve read in a long time. A quirky and curious exploration of human emotion, relationship, shortcoming, and success, this book pushes its readers’ understanding of form, genre, narrative, and characterization. At moments Toews’ speaker forced me to stop, consider how and why we write, but also how and why we read, record, notice, and (co-)exist. This fiction debut is not to be missed, but should be held close and remembered as the first offering by a writer who will make an indelible and continued mark on the literary world as we go forward.”

– Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not necessarily Related

“A sad, beautiful read, having experienced living in a village impacted by a major project and the divisions created by the company that still linger, Owens has captured the feelings of loss of a place we once knew. Thank you, Owen.”

– Duncan Mercredi, author of mahican ka onot

“What is this strange document? An essay, a lush story, a sort-of-report, an anatomy of evil? Here, Owen Toews flips the colonial tapestry and begins to separate the threads — the group homes, company towns, unmarked graves and poisoned rivers that make up the everyplace of Island Falls. The result is an essential and beguiling counterhistory of life on this continent.”

Owen Toews’ first work of nonfiction, Stolen City, reveals how settler colonialism, as a mode of racial capitalism, has made and remade Winnipeg over the past 150 years, tracing the emergence of a ruling alliance that has installed successive development visions to guarantee its hold on regional wealth and power. Drawing on a rich local tradition of grassroots counter-planning, Stolen City uncovers the persistence of revolutionary visions for the city and the concrete ways that oppression is shaped by resistance. It gives particular attention to an ascendant post-industrial vision for Winnipeg’s city centre that has renewed colonial ‘legacies’ of dispossession and racism over the past forty years. In doing so, it moves beyond the common tendency to break apart histories of conquest from studies of urban history or present-day urban dynamics.

Winner of the 2019 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the 2019 Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher.

“A sweeping and magnificent spatial history of a city founded in the midst of imperial economic crisis—a crisis resolved through western expansion. Toews intricately weaves theories of racial capitalism into Indian policy from the nineteenth century to contemporary urban development in Winnipeg. This book is a must read for anyone trying to understand the ways that colonization produces spaces that are shaped and then reshaped by hierarchies of difference, rooted in a never-ending struggle to turn Indigenous land into property.”

—Shiri Pasternak, author of Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State

“Stolen City is a riveting account of pan-Indigenous resistance to settler colonial land claims, industries, and (sub)urban development projects. Toews contributes to an exciting and timely conversation on the relationships between racial capitalism and settler colonialism that have relevance for struggles against gentrification and enclosures of land and for planning decolonial futures.”

—Jenna M. Loyd, author of Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States

“Toews moves from the violent Canadian expansion of the mid-nineteenth-century to the hockey arenas, glass condos and incarceration of the 2000s, tracing how different moments in Winnipeg’s history reframed the dispossession of Indigenous people and land. Stolen City is carefully grounded and analytically trenchant, while keeping faith in the possibility of a Winnipeg that is something more than stolen.”

—Adele Perry, author of On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871

“Stolen City is creative, theoretically innovative, and skillfully crafted from an exceptional range of historical and ethnographic data woven into a convincing analysis. The insights that Toews offers are significant for those who are working on these issues across the globe.”

—Setha Low, author of Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America

STOLEN CITY
Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg
By Owen Toews
Illustrated. 343 pp. ARP Books. $25 CAD.

Order Stolen City from ARP Books