Applied Anthropology in Canada: Understanding Aboriginal Issues (review)

This text is the second edition of a book originally produced in 1995 as an overview of how anthropology has and can be applied to the issues facing Aboriginal peoples in Canada. In limited areas the book has some real strengths, which unfortunately are outweighed by its shortcomings as a broad-based approach to applied anthropology in Canada.

Almost by definition, anthropology tends to have a more applied focus in Canada because of the close relationship with the Aboriginal peoples who inhabit the country. There is not the distance from the studies that the European colonial powers of Britain, France, Holland, and Germany have, and American anthropology, at least where it concerns Native Americans, has focused largely on acculturation studies. Canadian anthropology is thus unique in that it brings together the theoretical appreciations of Britain, France, and the United States with highly empirical, grounded work in Canada. Hedican's text seeks to outline the rich possibilities in Canadian anthropology. The opening chapters deal with the history of this association and the terminological nightmare that confronts any researcher working with Canadian Aboriginal peoples. The book then moves to consider in some detail the ethical issues that researchers working on the applied side of anthropology must deal with and demonstrates these through a case study from his own work in Northern Ontario (chapter 4). The rest of the book looks directly at various policy issues to which anthropologists should be contributing: land rights and the subsistence economy (chapter 5), development and dependency (chapter 6), and education and self-government (chapter 7). Finally, the book addresses the complex questions of Aboriginal identity and ethnicity in the context of Canadian racial politics (chapter 8).

Hedican is one of the few authors to devote space to the ethical issues that face researchers working in Aboriginal communities. He gives a good discussion of the classical ethical dilemmas that arise from trying to conduct "scientific" work among people with whom one lives for long periods of time and with whom one becomes close friends, so that there is a moral obligation to advocate on their behalf. But Hedican's concerns are very dated. He seems to entirely overlook the postmodern and post-colonial crises that wracked/wrecked anthropology in the 1980's and 1990's. The ethical dilemmas that Hedican poses continue to assume that anthropologists can and do produce objective data that can be used as evidence. Most of the postmodern critique challenged this notion, suggesting that we must move our attention to looking at the production of knowledge and discourse. Hedican effectively deploys the notion of colonialism, but is working with older models unrefined by the thinking of authors such as Said, Bhabha, and Spivak. I was very surprised that Hedican did not explore the implications of the Delgamuukw case (which he only mentions on p. 140 in another context) where anthropological evidence was rejected by the court as being too sympathetic. This led to one of the most profound critical evaluations of anthropological involvement in applied research that has ever been produced. Many of the ethical dilemmas that Hedican deals with were dealt with substantively in this discussion.

Hedican argues a number of times that the key to making good policy decisions is to have accurate up-to-date data. He should note that as of the 2006 census (this revision was published in 2008) 54% of the Aboriginal population of Canada lives in urban areas. He notes a number of times that the presence of Aboriginal people in urban areas (actually off-reserve) creates jurisdictional problems for the federal and provincial governments. Clearly this policy dilemma is THE contemporary issue for Aboriginal people, and one would think Hedican would devote significant discussion to it.

One of the major problems with the text is that it is too "Ontariocentric." Admittedly, this is because Hedican uses his own research in Northern Ontario very effectively as a series of case studies to...