Roots of Entanglement: Essays in the History of Native-Newcomer Relations ed. by Myra Rutherdale, Kerry Abel, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer (review)

This collection of articles published in honour of J.R. Miller, a leading historian of Indigenous people, may signal the end of an era in which the perspectives of Miller and his colleagues dominated the field's historiography. As one might expect in a festschrift for someone of the stature of Miller, the contributors are some of the leading and most prolific scholars of Indigenous history of Miller's generation, many with a significant public profile, including Kerry Abel, Jean Barman, Alan C. Cairns, Ken Coates, Hamar Foster, Frank Tough, Diane Newell, Arthur J. Ray, Donald B. Smith, and Bill Waiser. The others are respected younger scholars including Jonathan Anuik, Keith Thor Carlson, Brendan Frederick R. Edwards, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, and Myra Rutherdale. Each of them contributes work that builds upon his or her previous scholarship. As a collection, the book covers a wide range of aspects of Indigenous-state relations in English-speaking Canada from the establishment of Upper Canada to the recent past. It is a very worthwhile volume.

Nonetheless, the collection may very soon be seen as symbolizing the way the history of Native-newcomer relations used to be written. One might wonder, for example, how many more collections of essays on Indigenous history in Canada will comprise articles written exclusively by authors whose biographies suggest no Indigenous heritage and whose perspectives signal sympathies for what might now be considered moderate political aspirations for Indigenous people in Canada. In his contribution to the collection, the late political scientist, Alan Cairns (1930–2018), while discussing the policy of assimilation that he, as a member of the Hawthorn Commission of the 1960s, had a part in discrediting, quoted William Ralph Inge's maxim that "if you marry the spirit of your age, you will be a widow in the next." Ironically, his article tellingly entitled "Aboriginal Research in Troubled Times," betrays a melancholy nostalgia for the days – say between about 1969 and 1991 – when his views, and that of Miller and many of his generation, well matched the prevailing spirits of their time.

After World War II, the bases for the assimilationist policies of the Canadian government were eroded by new intellectual and cultural currents that swept the Western world. In Canada, the 1966 Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada (better known as the Hawthorn report) and the response of Aboriginal leaders to the Canadian government's 1969 White Paper, heralded the end of that era. Although Cairns expressed his regrets about the current "politicization" of academic research on Indigenous issues, the scholarship in the field has long been influenced by political considerations. Scholars active since 1969 (primarily non-Indigenous persons) ought to reflect upon the degree to which their publications were shaped by a belief that the assimilation policy was misguided and perhaps malevolent and that, instead, Aboriginal people should be treated as "citizens plus" (that they should enjoy all of the rights of other Canadian citizens, plus certain Indigenous and treaty rights). Certainly, the portrayal of Canadian Aboriginal people that has emerged and grown in Canadian historiography since 1970 – as having been active, intelligent, and capable advocates for their own interests when they faced a hapless, even malicious, state – has served the aspirations that those scholars believed Indigenous people should have had (and that many Indigenous leaders did have). The influence of the "citizen's plus" idea may have reached its high-water mark with its codification in Canada's Constitution in 1982.

The winds of change appear to be blowing inexorably across the landscape of Indigenous scholarship in Canada, particularly as universities attempt to accelerate the process of indigenization of the academy. Many of the voices that are replacing those of Miller's generation are those of Indigenous scholars, and many express bolder political objectives than have been typical in academia in the past. Many are more sympathetic...