Law & History

"Aboriginal peoples in Canada have diverse cultures but share common social and political challenges that have contributed to their experiences of health and illness. This collection addresses the origins of mental health and social problems and the emergence of culturally responsive approaches to services and health promotion. Healing Traditions is not a handbook of practice but a resource for thinking critically about current issues in the mental health of indigenous peoples.

"One of Canada's longest unresolved issues is the historical and present-day failure of the country's governments to recognize treaties made between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. Compact, Contract, Covenant is renowned historian of Native-newcomer relations J.R. Miller's exploration and explanation of more than four centuries of treaty-making.

“Encounters between aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations produced racial anxieties that underwrote cross racial interactions in the salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the (white) slavery scare in late-nineteenth- and – early- twentieth – century British Columbia. Colonial Proximities explores these contacts as politically charged sites of racial knowledge production in need of colonial governance.

“In the 240 years from contact to the present, British Columbia’s population has experienced transformations of a kind and magnitude witnessed nowhere else in North America. The introduction of exotic diseases changed the human landscape almost overnight, as did gold rushes, industrialization, two world wars, a baby boom, late twentieth-century immigration from Asia, and a grey wave.

“The birth of Canadian identity and nationalism is often associated with political and military events in the twentieth century. This incisive, richly illustrated book contends that in Montreal at least a new Canadian identity emerged much earlier, between 1840 and 1885, and in the cultural rather than the political realm. How did British colonists in Victorian Montreal come to think of themselves as “native Canadians”?

"American Indian Sovereignty and Law: An Annotated Bibliography covers a wide variety of topics and includes sources dealing with federal Indian policy, federal and tribal courts, criminal justice, tribal governance, religious freedoms, economic development, and numerous sub-topics related to tribal and individual rights. While primarily focused on the years 1900 to the present, many sources are included that focus on the 19th century or earlier.

"Broken Landscape is a sweeping chronicle of Indian tribal sovereignty under the United States Constitution and the way that legal analysis and practice have interpreted and misinterpreted tribal sovereignty since the nation's founding. The Constitution formalized the relationship between Indian tribes and the United States government--a relationship forged through a long history of war and land usurpation--within a federal structure not mirrored in the traditions of tribal governance.

"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.

"The fate of Native Americans has been dependent in large part upon the recognition and enforcement of their legal, political, property, and cultural rights as indigenous peoples by American courts. Most people think that the goal of the judiciary, and especially the US Supreme Court, is to achieve universal notions of truth and justice. In this in-depth examination, however, Walter Echo-Hawk reveals the troubling fact that American law has rendered legal the destruction of Native Americans and their culture.

"This book presents new material and shines fresh light on the under-explored historical and legal evidence about the use of the doctrine of discovery in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.