Law & History

"This book represents the archeological evidence for the first 5,500 years of prehistory in British Columbia, from about 10,500 to 5,000 years ago. As this period is poorly known, even to specialists, Early Human Occupation in British Columbia is a vital contribution to current knowledge about an enigmatic time in a critically important area of western North America. New data and syntheses have been integrated with previous data about the period, making this the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the subject.

"How did a Belgian Oblate missionary who came to Canada to convert the aboriginals come to be buried as a Cree chief? In Dissonant Worlds Earle Waugh traces the remarkable career of Roger Vandersteene: his life as an Oblate missionary among the Cree, his intensive study of the Cree language and folkways, his status as a Cree medicine man, and the evolution of his views on the relationship between aboriginal traditions and the Roman Catholicism of the missionaries who worked among them.

"Most activities in our lives involve electricity. Yet, how often do we recall that even the simple act of turning on a light is supported by a long history of debates over group vs. individual rights, environmental impact, political agendas and technological innovations?

"In conventional histories of the Canadian prairies, Native people disappear from view after the Riel Rebellions. In this groundbreaking study, Frank Tough examines the role of Native peoples, both Indian and Métis, in the economy of northern Manitoba from Treaty 1 to the Depression. He argues that they did not become economically obsolete but rather played an important role in the transitional era between the mercantile fur trade and the emerging industrial economy of the mid-twentieth century.

"The heyday of anthropological collecting on the Northwest Coast took place between 1875 and the Great Depression. The scramble for skulls and skeletons, poles, canoes, baskets, feast bowls, and masks went on until it seemed that almost everything not nailed down or hidden was gone.

"A monolingual Cree speaker from Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, Kâ-pimwêwêhahk / Jim Jim Kâ-Nîpitêhtêw was a highly respected orator; in later years he served as senior member of the Council of Elders at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in Saskatoon. His discourses have great force an authority, and no speeches of similar scope of depth have ever been published in their original form. In these eight speeches, Kâ-pimwêwêhahk speaks of his concerns for young people, the proper performance of rituals, and also gives an account of the signing of Treaty Six.

"Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada is the newly revised third edition by J. R. Miller. A professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, Miller has made substantial additions to his comprehensive 1989 text. Miller views Indian-White relations within a four-stage framework. His original thesis remains unchanged but his revisions acknowledges the changes from Oka in 1990, the sovereignty issue, and the results of several recent court decisions such as Delgamuukw.

"This elegantly written and insightful book provides a geographical history of the Indian reserve in British Columbia. Cole Harris analyzes the impact of reserves on Native lives and livelihoods and considers how, in light of this, the Native land question might begin to be resolved. The account begins in the early nineteenth-century British Empire and then follows Native land policy – and Native resistance to it – in British Columbia from the Douglas treaties in the early 1850s to the formal transfer of reserves to the Dominion in 1938.

"Especially notable for Lucien Turner's descriptions of nineteenth-century Native material culture, Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory was originally published in 1894 as part of the Smithsonian's Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology series - publications that are often considered to mark the beginning of American anthropological studies.

"The heart of the traditional legal order of the Lake Babine Nation of north-central British Columbia is the grand ceremonial feast known as the balhats, or potlach. Misunderstood and widely condemned as a wasteful display of pride, the balhats ceremonies were outlawed by the Canadian government in the later nineteenth century. Throughout the years that followed, the Lake Babine Nation struggled to adapt their laws to a changing society while maintaining their cultural identity.