--October 6, 2021.
Joseph W Graham, best-selling author of Naming the Laurentians, announces the imminent launch of his new book Insatiable Hunger: Colonial Encounters in Context, the product of 12 years of research on contact between Christian European settlers and the Indigenous populations of the Americas, and the period of proselytization, trade, disease, and war between the early 16th and early 19th century. It is a work that offers new insight into the truth needed to achieve reconciliation.
The European Wars of Religion of the 16th century set the stage for a mass migration. Insatiable Hunger compares and contrasts European historical accounts and Indigenous stories of Contact to illustrate the wide cultural chasm that separated the two civilizations. The scale of the mutual incomprehension and its unbalanced consequences—experienced by both settlers and Indigenous Peoples—is the subject of Joseph Graham’s historical exposition.
Insatiable Hunger is about the boiling over of religious differences in Europe and the desperate need Europeans had to escape, carrying their wars along with them, to protect their models of religion and freedom. It is about religiously obsessed Europeans pouring onto the continent, consuming everything in their path. It is about the attempts Indigenous Peoples made to reason with the hungry newcomers. Tracing events from Jacques Cartier’s first visits in the 16th century to the end of war of 1812, Insatiable Hunger delves back to examine the foundational stories of two very different civilizations to find the root causes of the mutual incomprehension. It describes the collapse of stable Indigenous communities in the face of disease, and their inability to understand the Christian incapacity to share.
"...This is an important work. It struggles for truth and accuracy in unfolding the story of Canada. I am not a fan of Canada. Canada is the name of the empire that Britain gave our homelands to, but this is clear in the book. What is not clear is what do we do about it. Reconciliation begins with truth and in this case, it is really our homeland, and nothing can be decided without us. We must become the authors of a new story and I think the writer is taking us in that direction, bravely, doggedly and with grim determination."
—Lee Maracle is an award-winning poet, novelist, and teacher. She is currently a teacher and Mentor for Indigenous Students at the University of Toronto and a cultural instructor at the Traditional Cultural Director for the Indigenous Theatre School.
"Twelve years in the making, Joseph Graham’s Insatiable Hunger makes no excuses for the blind ravages of the Euro-Christian invasion of North America. Grasping the distinction between the Indigenous American gift economy, with its emphasis on nature-connected sustainability, and the Euro-Christian market economy, with its emphasis on wealth accumulation at any cost (to others), Graham wends his way through the meta-history of European colonization, 1535−1814. He places it in the context of, on the one hand, the lack of any Indigenous need for Europeans in the Americas, and on the other hand, the invading Europeans’ desire to escape Christianity’s belligerent factions at home, even as they continued their internecine wars of all against all in America. Having escaped Christianity at home, European began imposing it on Indigenes. Locked in their cultural bubble, disdaining Indigenous societies, the French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedes, and British invaders then pushed relentlessly inland, spreading lethal diseases visiting mortality rates on Indigenous nations that fell below population sustainability. What disease and siege did not take, liquor did. Throughout, Graham’s lingering question is how the damage is repaired, as he urges moving from hierarchical markets to egalitarian gift relations. Eminently readable, Graham’s clear and unpretentious yet documented prose respects Indigenous stories as much as Euro-Christian stories in contrasting Indigenous female-male co-valence with European male dominance. "
—Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., Professor of Humanities at Jesup Scott Honors College and author of numerous books, including Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2006).
"Europeans doing good and getting rich. If you want to understand the toxic impact of Christianity and the market economy on the Indigenous peoples of North America, then read this book. If you want to reflect on the astonishing durability of Indigenous cultures and world views and the promise they hold for a planet in search of sustainability, read this book. A work of great erudition and passion."
—David Cameron, CM, FRSC, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto
Insatiable Hunger is available through Black Rose Books: https://blackrosebooks.com/products/insatiable-hunger-joseph-w-graham
Joseph Graham, a historian from the Laurentians, is the author of the best-selling Naming the Laurentians. He has worked for decades to encourage people to know and value their history. Together, he and his partner grow their own food, inspired by Indigenous farming methods
Black Rose Books is a non-profit, independent, and alternative book publisher that has published non-fiction books in the fields of the social sciences and humanities since 1969.
Author contact:
Joseph W Graham
819-326-6872
[email protected]