The story of life on reserves after treaty is a story of power: the power of Indian Affairs. Indian agents controlled every aspect of life on and off reserve - the dreaded pass system and permission slips needed to sell farm produce, or not as it suited the agents; the instructors whose job it was to transform Indian hunters into farmers; the residential school system, and the questionable surrender of reserve land. Yet, this book does not make a political statement. It does not judge the actions of the government, its agents, or anyone else. In an ever-respectful voice, this book relates things as they were, and points to the many successes of Indian peoples despite the many challenges they faced.

Treaties with Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest have had profound and long-lasting implications for land ownership, resource access, and political rights in both the United States and Canada. In The Power of Promises, a distinguished group of scholars, representing many disciplines, discuss the treaties' legacies. In North America, where treaties have been employed hundreds of times to define relations between indigenous and colonial societies, many such pacts have continuing legal force, and many have been the focus of recent, high-stakes legal contests. The Power of Promises shows that Indian treaties have implications for important aspects of human history and contemporary existence, including struggles for political and cultural power, law's effect on people's self-conceptions, the functions of stories about the past, and the process of defining national and ethnic identities.

"Compact, Contract, Covenant" is renowned historian of Native-newcomer relations J.R. Miller's exploration and explanation of more than four centuries of treating-making.

In A People and a Nation, the authors, most of whom are Métis, offer readers a set of lenses through which to consider the complexity of historical and contemporary Métis nationhood and peoplehood. The field of Métis Studies has been afflicted by a longstanding tendency to situate Métis within deeply racialized contexts, and/or by an overwhelming focus on the nineteenth century. This volume challenges the pervasive racialization of Métis studies with multidisciplinary chapters on identity, history, politics, literature, spirituality, religion, and kinship networks, reorienting the conversation toward Métis experiences today.

After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive. Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.

Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet as Canada expanded westward and colonized First Nations territories, liberalism did not operate to advance freedom or equality for Indigenous people or protect their property. In reality it had a markedly debilitating effect on virtually every aspect of their lives. This book explores the operation of exclusionary liberalism between 1877 and 1927 in southern Alberta and the southern interior of British Columbia. In order to facilitate and justify liberal colonial expansion, Canada relied extensively on surveillance, which operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. By persisting in Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values, structures, and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach, it worked to exclude or restructure the economic, political, social, and spiritual tenets of Indigenous cultures. Further surveillance identified which previously reserved lands, established on fragments of First Nations territory, could be further reduced by a variety of dubious means. While none of this preceded unchallenged, surveillance served as well to mitigate against, even if it could never completely neutralize, opposition.

In the pre-reserve era, Aboriginal bands in the northern plains were relatively small multicultural communities that actively maintained fluid and inclusive membership through traditional kinship practices. These practices were governed by the Law of the People as described in the traditional stories of Wîsashkêcâhk, or Elder Brother, that outlined social interaction, marriage, adoption, and kinship roles and responsibilities.In Elder Brother and the Law of the People, Robert Innes offers a detailed analysis of the role of Elder Brother stories in historical and contemporary kinship practices in Cowessess First Nation, located in southeastern Saskatchewan. He reveals how these tradition-inspired practices act to undermine legal and scholarly definitions of “Indian” and counter the perception that First Nations people have internalized such classifications. He presents Cowessess’s successful negotiation of the 1996 Treaty Land Agreement and their high inclusion rate of new “Bill-C31s” as evidence of the persistence of historical kinship values and their continuing role as the central unifying factor for band membership.Elder Brother and the Law of the People presents an entirely new way of viewing Aboriginal cultural identity on the northern plains.

On July 1, 2017, Canada celebrated the 150th anniversary of Confederation. The nation-wide festivities prompted ambiguous reactions and contradictory responses since they officially proclaimed to celebrate 'what it means to be Canadian.' Drawing on the analytical perspectives of Diversity Studies, this fifth volume of the 'Diversity / Diversité / Diversität' series explores the repercussions of 'Canada 150's' focus on identity. The contributions touch upon issues of Canada's French and English dualism; of its settler colonial past and present and the role of Indigenous Peoples in Canada's identity narrative; of Canada's religious, cultural, ethnic and racial diversity; and of the challenge of forging a 'Canadian' identity. The authors analyze these and other problems arising from the tensions between identity and diversity by empirically addressing topics such as multicultural memories, Canadian literary and political discourses, Métis history, Canada's Indigenous peoples, Canada's official federal discourse on language and culture, and Canada's evolving citizenship regimes. Contributors: Marie-Eve Beaulieu, Charles Blattberg, Paul Carls, Sarah Henzi, Jane Jenson, Wolfgang Klooss, Gillian Lane-Mercier, Pierre Lavoie, Ursula Lehmkuhl, Laurence McFalls, Nikolas Schall, Lisa Schaub, Elisabeth Tutschek

Indigenous Methodologies is a groundbreaking text. Since its original publication in 2009, it has become the most trusted guide used in the study of Indigenous methodologies and has been adopted in university courses around the world. It provides a conceptual framework for implementing Indigenous methodologies and serves as a useful entry point for those wishing to learn more broadly about Indigenous research. The second edition incorporates new literature along with substantial updates, including a thorough discussion of Indigenous theory and analysis, new chapters on community partnership and capacity building, an added focus on oracy and other forms of knowledge dissemination, and a renewed call to decolonize the academy. The second edition also includes discussion questions to enhance classroom interaction with the text. In a field that continues to grow and evolve, and as universities and researchers strive to learn and apply Indigenous-informed research, this important new edition introduces readers to the principles and practices of Indigenous methodologies.

This invaluable reference reveals the long, often contentious history of Native American treaties, providing a rich overview of a topic of continuing importance. Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty is the first comprehensive introduction to the treaties that promised land, self-government, financial assistance, and cultural protections to many of the over 500 tribes of North America (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada). Going well beyond describing terms and conditions, it is the only reference to explore the historical, political, legal, and geographical contexts in which each treaty took shape. Coverage ranges from the 1778 alliance with the Delaware tribe (the first such treaty), to the landmark Worcester v. Georgia case (1832), which affirmed tribal sovereignty, to the 1871 legislation that ended the treaty process, to the continuing impact of treaties in force today. Alphabetically organized entries cover key individuals, events, laws, court cases, and other topics. Also included are 16 in-depth essays on major issues (Indian and government views of treaty-making, contemporary rights to gaming and repatriation, etc.) plus six essays exploring Native American intertribal relationships region by region.