The English writer Saki quipped that the people of Crete have always made more history than they can consume locally. In Canada, there are those who’ll argue that we go the other way, and that hereabouts history, like emeralds or bamboo, is a natural resource for which we lack.

It’s bunkum, of course: our past is as full of life – and of lives – as anyone’s. We may not tell it to ourselves as often or as well as we should, but that doesn’t mean that Canadian history is any less storied, shameful, heartening, and/or edifying. Making the case, this fall and next, for the abundance of our history is Canada: A People’s History, the bilingual, 30-hour, $25-million CBC/ Radio-Canada series steered by producer Mark Starowicz.

Backing up the television series is a book-borne history in two richly illustrated volumes by writers Don Gillmor and Pierre Turgeon. This first installment starts pre-contact, examining the archeological records and native creation myths alike, and ends more than 300 pages later, at Confederation. It’s a vast, variegated territory, and A People’s History covers it with a lively style appropriate to a popular history. Although, by needs, Gillmor and Turgeon compress and distill, they manage to illuminate the details and textures of individual experience that bring the landscape of our past into the living light.

In many cases the individuals and their deeds are well-known. Cabot and Champlain and Thompson are here, to be sure, as are Montcalm and Lord Durham and Riel. But here, too, are the lesser known likes of Shawnadithit, the last of Newfoundland’s Beothuks, and Mary Ann Shadd, a freeborn black woman who fought in the mid-19th century for integrated schools in the Canadian West.

It’s easy with such a broadly ranging book to wish for more – to be disappointed, say, by the too-few sentences describing the decisive hours of the War of 1812’s Battle of Crysler’s Farm – but then maybe that’s one of the costs of being a country with so much history on its hands.