IPPERWASH: The Tragic Failure of Canada’s Aboriginal Policy by Edward Hedican (review)

As professor Hedican points out, this book emerged out of his desire to publish a second edition of a book on Aboriginal issues and applied Anthropology. Over time, however, the material being consulted morphed into its own right with the resultant book on the conflict at Ipperwash between the Anishinabe and non-Aboriginal people over land. Professor Hedican’s central thesis is that Canada’s Aboriginal policy is fundamentally flawed and his goal in this book is to provide an explanation as to how the current flawed policy emerged and then focus on the question of what we can do in the future to remedy the policy. To address these issues, Hedican presents a case study of the events that took place in Ipperwash in 1993.

The manuscript begins by providing a short assessment of Aboriginal policy and provides examples of various events that have taken place, e.g., Prime Minister Harpers’ apology, the creation of Nunavut, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, as indicative of Canada’s Aboriginal policy. Chapter 3 focuses on the nature of Aboriginal rights but it does not articulate how Government has given up on this issue and turned it over to the courts to decide. Unfortunately, Hedican does not inform the reader regarding the manner in which the courts have shaped the issue of Aboriginal rights and how this is dictating the future of Aboriginal rights without Aboriginal people having any input.

Chapter 4 provides a general discussion of “resistance and confrontation” and presents an abbreviated review of the literature on this issue. This chapter provides brief vignettes of previous conflict situations that have emerged in Canada over the years, e.g., Caledonia, Burnt Church, Lubicon Lake, but the historical context, the main actors and the unfolding of the issues are not clearly presented. In some ways it resembles the documentation presented by John Burrows in his identification of conflict situations between Aboriginal people and the Government of Canada several years ago (Borrows, 2005). The issue of resistance and conflict is a wide ranging literature and unfortunately the author does not present the various perspectives on this topic.

It is only in chapter 5 (well into the second half of the book) that the author begins to discuss the Ipperwash confrontation, and this is followed by a chapter (6) on the Ipperwash Inquiry recommendations. In the end, only about 20 percent of the book focuses on Ipperwash. How the Ipperwash events reflect on Aboriginal policy (in its emergence or future) is never linked. Instead of taking the position of understanding everyday Aboriginal resistance and the reasons open revolts are so rare, he simply focuses on the Report of the Ipperwash Inquiry (2007) as his sole source of information and accepts the contents as the complete and correct interpretation of events surrounding the Ipperwash incident. There is no evidence that any field work was undertaken or that interviews with the major protagonists were carried out. Moreover, concepts such as false consciousness and hegemony are never discussed in his analysis of the conflict. In the end, the book does not present a structural analysis of the events at Ipperwash but rather gives a journalistic account of the activities that took place. The last two short chapters focus on racial oppression and institutional racism in Canada. In these last two chapters, he touches on topics such as ethnicity and discrimination, and suggests his own ideas on the topics. Overall the book is a little unfocused: the recommendations he makes seem artificial in places and some odd topics receive detailed attention.

The book focuses on Police-Aboriginal relations as though those are only the important actors in the scenario that unfolds in the Ipperwash conflict. Hedican seems to forget that most forms of class/ethnic struggle are shown by other scholars to be furtive and below the surface. The infrequency of overt demonstrations of disaffection as a result of...