Leslie A. Robertson

Leslie A. Robertson with the Kwagu’? Gixsam Clan, Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

This book is a revisionist biography of Kwakwaka’wakw leader and activist Jane Constance Cook or Ga’axsta’las (1870-1951), written in response to community and scholarly representations that depicted her only narrowly as an “anti-potlatcher.” The work also offers a rich history of a local community’s negotiation with colonialism by examining community interpretations of smallpox, treaties, trade and the economy, relationships with missionaries, ceremonial practice, and local perspectives of health care, among other things. Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las is an especially innovative work in Canadian Aboriginal History.