Canada's First Nations uses an interdisciplinary approach--drawing on research in archaeology, anthropology, biology, sociology, political science, and history--to give an account of Canada's past. Olive Dickason's widely acclaimed history of Canada's founding peoples is augmented by David McNab's updates and in-depth examination of recent events, including the Ipperwash inquiry and global warming's effect on Innu of Canada's the north. This text describes how Canada's Aboriginal peoples were radically altered by the arrival of Europeans. They fought as allies beside the French and English during the battles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they were hunted to the point of extermination in Newfoundland; and their numbers were decimated by European diseases. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Canada tried to legislate Aboriginal cultures out of existence, as the official assumption remained that assimilation would bring an end to any Indian "Problem." From Nescambiouit and Potiac, to Pound Maker, Abe Okpik, and Elijah Harper, Amerindians and Inuit have responded to persistent colonial pressure in various ways, including attempts at co-operation, episodes of resistances, and politically sophisticated efforts to preserve their territory and culture. The revitalization of today's Aboriginal communities--dramatically expressed by the Mohawk at Oka in 1990 and by members of the six nations in Caledonia in 2005--reminds us that accurate perception of the past is essential to a just shaping of Canada's future.

Canada's First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times

History

Dickason, Olive

McNab, David T.

Americas

Oxford University Press

No Place for Fairness: Indigenous Land Rights and Policy in the Bear Island Case and Beyond (McGill-Queen's Native and Northern Series) (Volume 59)

Aboriginal policy and claims negotiation in Canada is seen to be a murky and perplexing world that has become an important public issue and has significant policy implications for government spending. Aboriginal land policy in Canada began as an Aboriginal initiative. In No Place for Fairness, David McNab - a long time advisor on land and treaty rights for both government and First Nations groups - looks at the Bear Island Indigenous rights case, initiated by the Teme-Augama Anishinabe, to explore why governments fail to deal effectively with Aboriginal land claims. The book, divided into two sections, includes a survey of the historical background of the Bear Island claim followed by a more personal series of reflections about what happened as the claim encountered decades of policy hurdles, court cases, public protests, and above all resistance by the Temagami First Nation. McNab provides details of how ministers and their senior officials resisted real efforts to resolve problems as well as examples of field staff resisting government attempts at resolution. He also shows that government entities such as the Indian Commission of Ontario and the Native Affairs Directorate were largely used as "mailboxes" where successive federal and provincial governments sent things they wanted to bury. No Place for Fairness is the story of what happens when Aboriginal peoples' political rights are crammed into the Euro-Canadian legal system. McNab makes a clear case that a legalistic approach to these problems is wholly inadequate and that more important things - like fairness - must be recognized as paramount if a just and lasting Aboriginal land policy is to be created.

McGill-Queen's University Press

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Acumen Publishing

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Books by McNab, David T.