Through the Mackenzie Basin: An Account of the Signing of Treaty No. 8 and the Scrip Commission, 1899 by Charles Mair (review)

HUMANITIES 291 environmental consequences of development are treated in passing. This book is written close to the sources. The author has unearthed business correspondence and records of corporations and governments from a variety of depositories in Canada, the United States, and beyond. Frequently, the author favours detail over perspective. This book lacks the context that would place the development of the Saguenay within a broader framework. The author does not address the fact, for example, that in this same period, Canadians invested heavily in power projects and utilities in Latin America and the Caribbean. How does the level of American investment in Canadian waterpower projects compare to Canadian investment abroad? Was J.B. Duke=s investment unusual or part of an emerging pattern? These are the kinds of questions that are lost when focusing so closely on the paper trail of a single project. Massell=s work is, nevertheless, a fundamental contribution to Canadian political economy and business history. Historical studies of international investment are difficult to execute and there are few books of this kind in the Canadian literature. Massell=s work will be of interest in particular to students of international investment, water development, and the role of the Quebec state. (MATTHEW EVENDEN) Charles Mair. Through the Mackenzie Basin: An Account of the Signing of Treaty No. 8 and the Scrip Commission, 1899. Introductions by David W. Leonard and Brian Calliou University of Alberta Press 1999. lii, 194. $24.95 One of the great ironies about literary studies today is how, long after the advent of New Criticism and poststructuralism, we continue to read not books but their authors. The University of Alberta Press reprint of Charles Mair=s Through the Mackenzie Basin is a case in point. In their introductions, David W. Leonard and Brian Calliou rightly laud the 1908 travelogue as one of the most perceptive documents on governmentBFirst Nations relations in what is now northern Alberta, specifically the Treaty Number 8 and Half-breed Scrip commissions of 1899, which transferred much of the Athabasca and Peace River countries to Ottawa. To quote Leonard, Mair=s >account has come to constitute the most detailed published source for the interpretation of these events, although obviously written by a decidedly government apologist.= However, both Leonard and Calliou ultimately seem unable to trust the text at hand because of the personality B and history B of its author. They acknowledge that >the words recorded by Charles Mair have had, and will continue to have much significance in the affairs of the Northwest.= Yet they immediately temper any such praise by reminding the reader that Mair was a >brash= young nationalist who fervently believed in >progress and development,= as if that somehow made 292 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 him exceptional for a nineteenth-century North American. Through the Mackenzie Basin is based on the journal that Mair kept while serving as the English Secretary to the Half-breed Commission. The Ontario-born author of Tecumseh was a fervent Canadian nationalist, a passion B some might even say fanaticism B which led him to clash with Louis Riel and the Métis during the Red River Resistance of 1869B70. Still, this >apostle= of Euro-Canadian expansion shows a remarkable willingness to listen to Aboriginal voices. As he cites the objections by a local leader named Keenooshayo to the Commissioner=s claim that the >Queen owns the country= and thus that both Natives and newcomers are co-citizens: >You say we are brothers. I cannot understand how we are so. I live differently from you. I can only understand that Indians will benefit in a very small degree from your offer.= Throughout the text, Mair also reveals an acute awareness of the history of the land he is crossing, usually providing both the English and Aboriginal names of places. As he says of the Lesser Slave River, >in the classic Cree its name is Iyaghchi Eenu Sepe, or the River of the Blackfeet, literally the ARiver of the Strange People.@= Indeed, what Mair=s writings demonstrate is that he is a rather complex individual. While he may be an >apologist for the British Empire,= he also entertains profound reservations about white settlement...