Hidden in Plain Sight: Contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canadian Identity and Culture (review)

Volume 1 of Hidden in Plain Sight is a useful resource for general audiences seeking broader knowledge of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The volume is divided into a number of thematic sections that detail key contributions of Aboriginal peoples in areas such as literature, the arts, media, justice, and the military. In most essays, a historical approach gives readers an overview of the topic under discussion, as well as detailed profiles of important figures. The essays are supplemented by brief biographies of Aboriginal contributors to the arts, politics, and sports, written by students in Cora Voyageur's sociology of First Nations class at the University of Calgary. The book is varied, well intentioned, and worthwhile; it is an ambitious project with a broad scope.

At the heart of this book, however, lies a necessarily unresolved tension. This tension is visible in the title itself, which may set off warning bells for some Aboriginal scholars. Implicit in the structure of the book, it seems, is an assumption about what 'Canadian Identity and Culture' might be, and this Canadianness seems on the surface to exclude Aboriginal experiences. This book appears, in other words, to examine Aboriginality from within a Canadian sense of self that is fundamentally European in origin. As a result, the book seems to project a desire to appropriate the 'contributions' of Aboriginal peoples to a white Canadian norm. Aboriginal peoples, however, have not always been willing contributors to the Canadian national project (as the unresolved land claims of the country suggest, among too many other things to list), and I was worried upon beginning to read this volume that it would be contributing to this history of appropriation from within an unexamined multiculturalist framework. A book modelled on the reverse theme – Canadian contributions to Aboriginal identity and culture – would probably not be as flattering.

This problematic is one, however, that the editors recognize, and that the contributors work to undo. There is no Canada without Aboriginal peoples, the contributors hasten to point out, and the book projects itself into a future in which Aboriginal people will work more and more for themselves in order to further their own, self-determined goals. The book measures developments within Aboriginal cultures both through Western indicators of 'progress' (statistical analyses, comparisons to the rest of Canada) and from Aboriginal perspectives that examine the cultures from within. The contributions of, in particular, Jeannette Armstrong and Drew Hayden Taylor intelligently and playfully whittle away the Native/non-Native dialectic that runs throughout the book, recognizing not only the importance of Aboriginal contributions to Canadian identity and culture, but also the importance of Aboriginal contributions to Aboriginal identity and culture. Further essays, especially those by Valeria Alia (on Inuit naming systems) and David McNab (on the recovery of Aboriginal ancestry in his own family) give personal interpretations of the broad histories offered by earlier essays by Jean-Pierre Morin and Michael Cassidy (both on the processes of treaty making). This confluence of the individual and the broadly historical allows the volume to personalize the abstract effects that European settlement has had on Aboriginal peoples and to examine how Aboriginal peoples have, in turn, deeply affected the evolution of the settler-invader Canadian state, with which Aboriginal people continue to negotiate for their rights.

A couple of reservations about such a politically charged book are inevitable. It would have been nice to see a few more contributions from Aboriginal peoples themselves (only seven out of twenty-five essay contributors self-identify as such in their biographies). Somewhat dismaying, also, were the number of typographical errors that remained in the final copy; these were enough to push me beyond a merely pedantic sense of frustration. I hope that the planned second volume of the series is treated with a bit more diligence, because these are crucial topics. On the whole, Hidden...