Merging Fires: Grassroots Peacebuilding Between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Peoples

The past two decades have witnessed the emerging role of grassroots social movements and community-based peacebuilding as key sites of transformative political and cultural engagement. Merging Fires explores three grassroots alliances between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous activists in Canada, including the actions of the Chippewa of Nawash, the Grassy Narrows First Nation and the Anishnabe Grand Council of Treaty #3. These Canadian examples offer insights into the challenges, limitations and complexities of transformative, community-based alliance building and raise critical questions about power, knowledge and critical pedagogy at the grassroots level. While this analysis is uniquely Canadian in scope, Merging Fires is of great political relevance in light of the Idle No More movement as well as other initiatives occurring worldwide. Furthermore, Rick Wallace s sophisticated research methodologies are starkly different from many academic approaches, and his documentation of on-the-ground grassroots efforts at peacebuilding fills a noticeable gap in the work on this subject.