I've got a little list

Someone asked this week on an online private group for suggested new non-fiction reading about Newfoundland and Labrador.

My mind went blank for a second.

Then more than a second.

And then it got worrying.

Normally, it would be hard to limit the list not put titles on it.

The first one that came to mind is by someone originally from this province and about a huge issue here. But it’s published in French, in Quebec.

Maîtres chez eux - Churchill Falls, la fondation d’Hydro-Québec au Labrador

Buddy’s bilingual so that one is no sweat for he.

The second one that came to mind was also in French and only partially about this province. Published in 2011, so not new but relevant since it about the Labrador border and the thing came up in the news within the past couple of weeks.

Le Québec: territoire incertain

Again in French but buddy can manage that even if the locals - like say Generic U history prof Sean Cadigan - cannot even be aware enough to know that someone else raised the issue, not Tony Wakeham. That’s the only reason CBC’s Content Assembly Facility went looking for Cadigan who has otherwise disappeared since his overpaid executive sinecure wrecking the university stopped a few years ago. True to form Cadigan blathered some clued-out nonsense about giving Quebec fodder for the centenary of the decision rather than put the thing in proper context.

After that, there was Mill girls, Heather Barrett’s account of women who left Newfoundland to work in Ontario textile mills. This is 2025, too. Basically a series of Ceeb human interest scripts reworked into a book - 37 insanely short chapters? holy crap - but it is engaging even if a huge opportunity for some wider social and political context about the women and why they moved is missing entirely.

Openly Karl, last year’s memoir from Karl Wells that is still immensely popular, and deservedly so.

Then came-to-mind John Greene’s densely written Race, religion, and class in Newfoundland politics, 1855 - 1934. Again, not this year’s work - published in 2023 - but it is definitely something to add to the shelf even if reading it would be done in slices over a long time. Frankly, I only found it this year, hence it is new to me.

You’ll notice there were no Newfoundland and Labrador non-fiction books in 2026 so far.

None.

There are other recent local non-fiction works - like Dear Mr. Smallwood or From silence to suffrage - but they suffer under the weight of their presentist assumptions and contain little information to inform readers about people in the past in their own context.

The past really is a foreign country, which some people do not even try to understand. In many respects these books and another couple on the Mi’gmaw and Newfoundland society at the turn of the last century- at least one of them a recent Generic U doctoral thesis in history no less - are akin to writing about Japan based on The Mikado.