The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) released its final report — five volumes and thirty-five hundred pages — in the fall of 1996.¹ The report had taken over five years to prepare and cost more than $50 million. Because of the inordinate expense and time involved, the RCAP may be the last royal commission we will see for some time. Nonetheless, it was extraordinarily important, and the appearance of its final report touched off a round of conferences to discuss its recommendations. The experience of participating in one of these talk-fests led me to write this book.

At a conference entitled...

One of the most powerful themes in the aboriginal orthodoxy is that special rights flow from having been here first. It is implied in the phrase “First Nations” — now an almost obligatory label for Indians — as well as in the more technical term “aboriginal,” derived from the Latin wordsab,meaning “from,” andorigo,meaning “origin.” To be the people who were here from the beginning — put here by the Creator, as Indians often say — is the basic idea of aboriginality. The same notion is prominent in Australia, where most Aboriginals claim to have occupied their particular homelands forever, since...

In contemporary discussions of aboriginal affairs, the distinction between civilized and uncivilized has virtually disappeared. For example, Alberta Stoney chief John Snow once said that “a migratory people are not necessarily a people who lack civilization, not if ‘civilization’ is taken in the sense of a law-abiding and caring society.”¹ Ontario Ojibwa chief Fred Plain wrote at greater length: “Civilization is the accumulation of the traditions and culture of a people: their ability to express themselves in a variety of ways — in dance, music, art, law, religion, the telling of stories, the writing of books, and so on. The aboriginal...

“Sovereignty” is another political word with multiple meanings and mythic overtones. As with civilization and culture, we have to begin with some etymological history and conceptual clarification.

The word “sovereign” is derived through French from the Latin adjectivesuperanus,meaning superior, which in turn comes from the prepositionsuper,meaning above . In medieval usage, “sovereign” came to be a synonym for the personal ruler in a monarchical system of government, a usage that still survives in stylized phrases such as “Our Sovereign Lady the Queen.” The noun “sovereignty” correspondingly meant the status of being king or queen.

In his...

One of my most prized possessions is a baseball cap with the words “Lubicon Lake Band” on the front. It was a present from my friend Barry Cooper, who bought it at a rally when the Lubicon and their supporters were trying to disrupt the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. It is an invaluable artifact from the archaeology of knowledge. Today the Lubicon, like other Indian bands in Canada, refer to themselves as a nation, indeed a “First Nation.” Winning wide public acceptance of this terminology has been one of the most striking victories of the aboriginal political movement, reinforcing their...

Under normal conditions, Canadians hear little about politics on Indian reserves. Reporters seldom venture onto reserves and may be physically ejected if they try. Meetings are often closed and sometimes held off reserve, even in foreign countries. Occasionally, however, when a reserve is in crisis, one faction may resort to the media, and then the public will get some information. That happened among the Stoney Nation west of Calgary in 1997—98 .

The Stoneys are a branch of the Assiniboine or Sioux people. They are governed by a council of twelve plus three chiefs, elected every two years (they...

An old and recurrent fantasy about American aboriginal peoples is that they had no conception of property. Christopher Columbus got the impression that “in that which one had, all took a share, especially of eatable things.”¹ The Baron de La Hontan, who had served as a soldier and explorer in the New World, wrote in 1703 inNew Voyages to North America:“TheSavagesare utter Strangers to distinctions of property, for what belongs to one is equally another’s.”²

The same misconception crops up in our own day in the speech allegedly given by Chief Seattle in 1854 but actually...

The 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties defined a treaty as “an international agreement concluded between States in written form.”¹ This understanding has been more or less the same for centuries. In 1758 Vattel wrote that a treaty was “a compact entered into by sovereigns for the welfare of the State.”² Behind these modern definitions lies a much longer tradition of statecraft going back through the Romans and Greeks to the covenants entered into by the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hittite empires of the ancient Middle East.

Statehood and sovereignty are essential concepts here. Only states — that is, political...

Throughout the vast wilderness of northern Canada, traditional aboriginal life remained viable during the nineteenth century and, in some places, even into the second half of the twentieth. Aboriginal people continued to support themselves largely by hunting, fishing, and selling furs. Where conditions permitted, they also planted gardens and raised a few horses and cattle. In hard times — to give only two examples, a period of famine in northern Alberta in the 1880s¹ and a lethal epidemic of influenza in the Mackenzie Valley in the 1920s² — the Hudson’s Bay Company, Northwest Mounted Police, missionaries, and Indian Affairs officials distributed relief...

Figure 10-1 shows the themes of the preceding chapters arrayed as the corners of an octagon — a geometrical representation of the aboriginal orthodoxy.

Each line between two points represents the connection between two leading ideas of the prevailing orthodoxy. I have numbered the eight lines making up the perimeter of the octagon as well as six interior lines connecting opposed points on the perimeter. One could draw fourteen more of these interior lines, but that would make an already complicated figure impossible to decipher. There is enough in the figure as it stands to illustrate how the ideas of the...

When I wrote the first edition of this book, the “Clovis model” of the settlement of the Americas — i.e., that people from northeastern Asia first came to the Americas about 13,000 or 14,000 years ago, moving south through the gap between retreating glaciers in Alberta — was under some pressure but was still espoused by many authorities. Since then, however, support for the Clovis model has receded, although there is no consensus on what should replace it.

One challenge to Clovis comes from the genetic evidence. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA confirms Asia as the source of America’s population, but the diversity...