Myrna Kostash

In 1862, a store clerk of Métis and Irish heritage, Thomas Trueman Quinn, crawled into a barrel under his store counter at the Yellow Medicine Agency on the Minnesota River, and thus managed to survive a bloody battle between Dakota warriors and settlers that resulted in large numbers of white and Native American deaths. In…

From January to April 2009, I audited an undergraduate history class at the University of Alberta, taught by John-Paul Himka under the rubric “Topics in Ukrainian History.” The topic we studied—the Great Famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine “in History and Memory”—had been virtually ignored by western historians until 1986 and the publication of works commemorating the event’s 50th…