First Peoples In Canada

First Peoples in Canada by Alan D. McMillan and Eldon Yellowhorn is a textbook that was assigned to me for my "Canadian Aboriginal Cultures" class.  Although I have really been enjoying the class and have been really personally challenged by it, I have to admit I feel a sense of relief upon finishing this book.  The book is essentially an introduction to the First Nation cultures throughout Canada and stretches its discussion back to "time immemorial" (which is usually during the Holocene period 10,000 or so years ago) up until the modern day.  This is a lot of history to fit in one book, especially when you consider that we are dealing with dozens of distinct societies.  The complexities of this book are further compounded when one considers that we actually have very little with which to build a history for First Nations until the dawn of globalization (European contact with the Americas). 

The first chapter of this book is devoted to explaining the different kinds of anthropology and ethnography (and a whole series of other -ologies and -ographies) that go into piecing together the missing pieces of the puzzle.  Unfortunately, due to a lack of actual story, the piecing together makes for some of the most dry and unengaging history that one could read. Subsequent chapters in the book are organized regionally according to a broad definition of cultural groups: Maritime, Eastern-Woodlands, Plains, Sub-Arctic, Plateau, North-West Coast, Arctic and Metis.  Every chapter begins with a long descriptions of what the different fossils might mean about the early cultural habits of native groups in the Holocene and Doecene periods and drawn out speculations about how those groups settled where they did in the first place.  Speculation and description culminate into a snapshot of the eating, hunting and sociological habits of these early nations.  The chapters then describe the meeting between Europeans and these Native groups - how the meeting happened and what implications it had for the native residents of that region.  Finally every chapter moves into the 20th century to describe the recent struggles and issues that aboriginal groups are dealing with today and what inroads have been made in their discussions with the Canadian government.

If the description of the book that I have written above sounds dry, it is because the book is dry.  The parts on fossils were particularly hard to get through, especially since the pages were large, the writing was small and the chapters were long.  I did appreciate the end of the chapters though, which educated me as to how all of this boring history manages to fit into the now, and this book has brought to mind some issues such as land claims that have provided food for thought.  While I can say that although this was not a fun read, it was an informative one, and I walk away from this book knowing a lot more about First Nations in Canada than I did.