Inhoudsopgave:
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The history of Aboriginal-settler interactions in Canada continues to haunt the national imagination. Despite billions of dollars spent on the âIndian problem,â Aboriginal people remain the poorest in the country. Because the stereotype of the âlazy Indianâ is never far from the surface, many Canadians wonder if the problem lay with âIndiansâ themselves. John Lutz traces Aboriginal peopleâs involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing on an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the roots of todayâs widespread unemployment and âwelfare dependencyâ date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices â what Lutz terms the âwhite problemâ drove Aboriginal people out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as âcompensation.â Makúk invites readers into a dialogue with the past with visual imagery and an engaging narrative that gives a voice to Aboriginal peoples and other historical figures. It is a book for students, scholars, policymakers, and a wide public who care to bring the spectres of the past into the light of the present. |
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