Reddit mentions: The best first nations canadian history books

Okay here we go:

Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day. General information!

Looking At Indian Art Of The Northwest Coast by Hilary Stewart, which has a lot of the common symbolism you see in many coastal tribes. Many other useful books by this woman. Here's her Amazon page. Some of her books are kinda pricy but there are other affordable ones out there!

Indian Relics Of The Pacific Northwest by SG Seaman. Some visual information on tools used by indigenous tribes, dry but good info.

Art In The Life of the Northwest Coast Indian by Erna Gunther. This one is a little more in depth!

Totem poles were a distinct and important part of many NW coast tribes. Lots of books out there on their function and purpose, definitely something to research.

The potlatch was another extremely important aspect of PNW indigenous lives. Some info here and here, but also lots of research papers for free on the internet.

Salmon was a vital food resource for hundreds of tribes. They fished along the Columbia, Pacific, and other major waterways. Here and here is more info.


Indians of the North Pacific Coast by Tom McFeat.

Mythology is a must! There might be some online collections but here and here are a couple books.

Tales of the Northwest is a classic!

Please check out the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology website. They have TONS of information on a variety of indigenous tribes, with a focus on NW coastal tribes. If you ever have a reason to go to Vancouver you MUST visit this beautiful, beautiful museum.

The Seattle Public Library (also a must visit, just a gorgeous library) has an extensive local history section.

Once you've read a couple books and have a better understanding of what you want to study, it's actually much easier to pick a certain tribe or area and find more information that way. Tons and tons of books out there on the Haida, Kwakiutl, Salish, Chinook, etc. I would highly recommend contacting people who study or write about these tribes! For the most part professors and authors love to talk about their work, or can direct you to other resources.

My final recommendation is if you want to write a fictional book about a PNW tribe, please read some fiction out there already written by indigenous Americans! This will help you more intimately understand the emotion and history that is part of these ancient cultures.

Anyway, don't feel too bogged down by all the info. Pick a subject or two you want to learn about and do some internet research before you buy a book. I don't know what kind of access your library might have, but maybe you could rent a few books through them.

Lastly, if you ever have a chance to come visit the PNW, please do! It is absolutely beautiful out here and unlike many parts of the world. It's cool and rainy so we have an extraordinary abundance of wild flora. So many must visit places: Vancouver, Mt Hood National Park, Vancouver Island, Olympic National Park, the San Juan Islands, the Columbia Gorge, Gold Coast, Oregon Coast, Haystack Rock, Redwood Forest - look up any of those and you will start to get an understanding of how indigenous peoples connected with their gorgeous natural environment. You may also start to notice that many of the pictures that appear in r/earthporn are from the West Coast. It's damn pretty out here.

Cheers, mate, and hit me up if you ever make it out here!

This is a very broad topic, and difficult to encapsulate in a few lines, but I'll give it a go. I spent about eight years of my life dedicated to this pursuit. I got a degree in bio and worked as a field botanist for years. I tutored it, etc etc.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there, even within the confines of structured and scientific botany. Species aren't neat little packages that many would like to believe, there are hybrid complexes and recent, yet unstable, specialization events that lead to distinct morphologies but the ability to interbreed.

Practically, you want to discern species A from B so that you may harvest one for a particular purpose. Some groups of plants are easy to ID (e.g. Brassicaceae), and relatively safe to utilize, where others (e.g. Apiaceae) contain both extremely beneficial AND deadly toxic species.

Yet, to get to the level of comfort and mastery where you can discern a poisonous plant from a nutritional plant that differs only in the number of stamens or the position of the ovule, it takes years of dedication. Ask yourself how committed to this you are? The consequences of mis-identification can be severe.

Now, past the disclaimer.

To begin this pursuit, you must, odviously, start with the basics. That is learning plant groups. Start coarse and work your way into more fine distinctions. Begin with this text book. It is well written and gives you all of the primary info. It is well written and concise and one of the few text books you that is highly readable. Botany is laden with terminology, and this book is invaluable for that.

Next, you need a flora. Just a quick search (i live in a different biota) yields this website / information. This is a group that you can trust. If you live near, you may attend some of their field trips or lectures. This is the inner circle of botanists in your area and the ones that probably have the info you are looking into. But, most botanists are in it for intellectual masturbation, so keep the uses out of the discussion or you will be shunned (some are more accepting than others).

A couple of other books that are credible, exhaustive, and useful for your purposes are this and this. Lets face it, the indigenous cultures of this continent knew what they were doing long before we Europeanized the landscape. Also try this and this is the definitive guide for European transplants (many of which are naturalized and invasive but nonetheless useful to us).

Any questions, I'd be happy to answer to the best of my ability.

First Nation? Second Thoughts by Tom Flanagan is probably the most representative book on the conservative (small c) view of Indigenous issues; I know some people have a negative opinion towards Flanagan, but this work is great by most academic standards and I think it's a must read for anyone interested in Indigenous issues.

Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State by Alan Cairns. This was Cairns response to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal's people. Again, I think it's a must read to learn more about the various perspectives about Indigenous issues.

Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom by Taiaiake Alfred. Alfred is probably the most "extreme" in terms of his vision for Indigenous peoples in Canada, but he's a must read.

Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal. This book provides the greatest insight into why the White Paper was met with opposition from Indigenous peoples and to Indigenous issues in general (it's a little older, but if you were to read one book out of all the ones I recommended this would be it)

Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics by Donald Savoie. I haven't read this one yet (I hope to soon) so I can't speak to how it is, but I've been told it's a great book. It basically looks at how the federal government has become increasingly centralized into the PMO

EDIT: If you go to university/college and have free access to academic journals you should look in those. There are so many interesting articles and are less time consuming than books. Here's a directory of open access journals, but keep in mind not all of these journals are of "top quality"

Actually … the oral literatures of the Northwest Coast natives (several distinct cultures, but sharing this) are very interesting to look at from a software-y perspective. They were intellectual badasses, and it’s a shame that their work is almost forgotten now when we’re reading Plato and Euclid and Homer on the land where they lived. Quick examples:

• In Nine Visits to the Mythworld, or maybe one of his other translations of Haida myths, Robert Bringhurst makes some great points about how the stories were, in a broad sense, fractal. Often a myth has a couple distinctive themes (like a particular number or emotion) which appear both openly and subtly all through the story. This is fun to look at from a computational perspective; it makes you think about how the stories are encoded in memory as a fairly small set of features, then produced in slightly different forms in each performance.
  
  
• Russel Barsh’s Coast Salish Property Law: An Alternative Paradigm for Environmental Relationships is a legal perspective on how these cultures handled ownership of abstractions. Some of it is remarkably like WIPO IP law; some of it is remarkably different. And of course potlatch-style gift economies have already been compared with the open-source model.
  
  
• Just for one example of practical ingenuity, some of the ways used to catch salmon were incredibly clever. They were even creating favorable habitat for prey fish to lure salmon to particular coves year after year. All their foodstock management was practical and long-term; there’s a grain of truth to the patronizing “lol they were in tune with nature” comments you sometimes hear. I know some people who are trying to get some of these systems back in place, but it may be too late.
  
  Here’s something that really did my head in. The glaciers left the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last ice age, about ten thousand years ago. At that time it was basically sand and scoured rock: no soil, no nothin’, and with new topology. But the earliest Coast Salish artifacts are from pretty much the same time. In other words, since this land was last reset by geology, its natural state has been to be inhabited and managed by the Coast Salish.

>Get rid of the charter or rights or create a charter of rights and responsibilities.

>Get rid of hyphenated Canadians. In or your out, choose.

>Solve the native problem, either return canada to them and leave, or they become the same as everyone else, no special rights.

>Canadian and Canadian Citizenship should be synonymous but isn't right now.

>Get rid of multi-culturalism as a vision, no nation has ever been successful like that, instead teach tolerance and to value different perspectives.

While I see your point here, I would disagree with you. In my mind and the minds of some of our greatest thinkers this fact has been our greatest strength. You mentioned "Become a truly bilingual country", but perhaps the fact that we hold bilinugalism so dear is that we realize that we are a State made of many Nations. Quebec and the Quebequois are one.

As to your hyphenation point, I'd argue we are all hyphenated, except for the Natives and it is a shame we don't give two shits about them. The fact that you can be a hypenated Canadian is the top reason (in my limited experience) why immigrates appreciate coming here. They understand that in Canada you can be Canadian and you can be Indian, Chinese etc. My partner is Vietnamese, born in Paris, and calls herself Canadian, French, and Vietnamese depending on the context. Infuriating when having an argument with her, yes, but that doesn't mean it's invalid.

As a final point, your idea that we should be a melting pot and not a mosaic is premised on flawed ideas of nationhood based on the European and US models. John Ralson Saul's recent book on this topic, A Fair Country clarified greatly my thoughts in this area. If you don't want to read it his lecture is online both from CBC Ideas and TVO Big Ideas and highly recommended.

Canada, since before first contact and after, has always been (in its ideals, granted) a conversation between parties. And I think that the fact that Europe and the US are having problems with their immigrant populations while we accept more immigrates that any other nation in the world speaks to the success we have made of our model.

The above does not white-wash the negative aspects. It is admittedly a normative claim.

I wrote this as a hypothetical "day in the life of..." kind of thing last year for the Museum of Ontario Archaeology. I wrote a whole series of them for each time period, but the 11,000 years ago one (Paleoindian Period) is the only one that's up so far. I don't want to send you the others since I wrote them when I was an employee of the museum, and I don't know how that works copyright wise and all that. I would like to volunteer some time for them to get the others in the series ready to post, but I have other things I need to do more urgently (and procrastinate like mad). We'll see though, maybe I can do something in the next couple months.

Explore the museum's website a bit too, especially under the "discover" tab. There are a few short videos by Chris Ellis, one of the foremost Ontario archaeologists, describing each of the three broad periods in precontact Ontario history. There are also some other links there that have an overwhelming amount of info, especially this site. It's poorly organized and outdated, but there's a lot there. And since you are asking specifically for southwestern Ontario I presume that you are in or near London. If you can, go to the museum. It is inexpensive to get in. To be honest, it's not a great museum and it has a lot of problems, but there are some good people there who are working on it, and they have some great artifacts. They also have a partially reconstructed village at the museum, which is the location of an actual 15th century Iroquoian village.

To answer your question a bit more specifically, the people who lived in this region shortly before direct European contact were an Iroquoian group we call the Neutral or Attawandaron. The French gave them that name since they were neutral in the wars between the five nations of the Iroquois (a confederacy of nations who lived mostly in upstate New York) and the Huron-Petun or Wendat, another Iroquoian group that lived in the Toronto and Lake Simcoe area. But not much is known about the Neutral. The French had first encountered them in the Niagara region, but the neutral had already abandoned southwestern Ontario at that time so this area appeared to be empty and "pristine" when the French first saw it for themselves (had the French come 100 years before they would have found a bustling and populous area with many villages around the Thames and its tributaries, and with fields as far as the eye could see).

So we don't know much about the Neutral, but we do know that they were Iroquoian and spoke an Iroquoian language, so we make assumptions that they lived in a similar way to the Huron, who we do know more about. What about before the Neutral? That is hard to say, and I'll admit here that Ontario is not my main focus and I'm not entirely up to speed on current ideas about populations movements. It is really hard to push ethnicity or group affiliation back very far, at least using archaeological data (oral histories are different and can help do that, but since the Neutral left this area it is hard to trace those stories). And although people in Ontario and neighbouring regions were largely sedentary after about A.D. 1000, there were still large migrations and movements and it is hard to know whether that happened in this region too, and there is some debate about that. We know that the Neutral were here after about A.D. 1400, but it's hard to know who was here before, and impossible to know how people saw their own ethnic identities.

My main source for all this is Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province, edited by Marit Munson and Susan Jamieson. It is a great source with chapters written by many of the biggest names in Ontario archaeology, and they are all very readable and informative for non-specialists. Neal Ferris and Gary Warrick have chapters dealing with southwestern Ontario in the more recent precontact period, and Chris Ellis has one dealing with the more ancient stuff (11,000 - 3000 years ago). The museum has a small bookstore and they stock this title as well as others that you may find interesting, if you make it there.

Edit: oh yeah, and you can ask this as well in /r/askanthropology. This question really falls as archaeology rather than history, and there is a greater concentration of archaeologists there. I'm not sure if anyone there is specifically an Ontario archaeologist, but there are some people who are familiar with the archaeology of eastern North America in general.

That's a lot of questions!

When it comes to the justice system, we have one similar to most western nations. We have courts, lawyers, prisons, parole officers etc. But at the same time, there's a certain awareness that justice ultimately needs to be restorative, not retributive. In part this awareness comes from our First Nation communities: they teach us that crime is more than just an aberration to be punished, it's an indication of a fractured community that needs to be healed. I strongly suggest the book Returning to the Teachings on this subject.

So for example, this means that we imprison a much smaller percentage of our population than you do! And even our corrections department has as part of its organisational mission actively encouraging and assisting offenders to become law-abiding citizens, while exercising reasonable, safe, secure and humane control..

So our goal is always that people will be drawn back into the 'social contract.' We don't want a large number of people excluded from that context.

And I think the same thing is true when it comes to immigration. As I was reminded at my citizenship hearing, we welcome refugees and immigrants, and we encourage immigrants to progress on the path to citizenship.

Now that said, we do have limits in place. We typically accept about 250,000 immigrants every year; and it's certainly easier to immigrate here if you have family ties in the country in the first place. But as I said, the goal is that every newcomer become an active, participatory member of Canadian society.

Actually, cash had a lot to do with it. The resources available via cash purchase changed the social dynamic in many communities--in terms of wealth display and feasting--and as a result destabilized many established communities. This was not only because of new "challenges" to chiefly authority, but because in some cases people even sold their own (or even others') masks and belongings to anthropologists, collectors, merchants, etc... Either as a bid to increase their own wealth, or as part of their renouncement of their "pagan" beliefs in favour of Christianity.

The biggest change came as a result of the fragmentation and displacement of communities around canneries and urban centers. Canneries and in some cases logging sites were the only places that Native people could find employment, not qualifying for more respectable "white men's" work. There they competed against Chinese workers for jobs and wages, with a varying relationship between the two groups (who each represented their own interests in terms of labour/bargaining, and alternately served as scabs when the employer wanted to lower wages). Furthermore, being closer to urban centers lead to increased exposure to things like alcohol and gambling, and indeed likely increased the resentment felt by both Whites and Natives due to racism and minor conflicts. In the season that would historically have been spent at fishing camps (harvesting seafood and other resources), Native people now flocked to canneries to earn money for the winter potlach season, in many cases bringing their families with them.

This had the gradual effect of decentering longstanding village sites (which were positioned in relation to natural resources and the geopolitical network of other villages/groups). Thus the "diaspora" that resulted from this movement and resettlement lead to the simple "erasure" of many longstanding communities (villages) as they were absorbed into the larger group of working class Natives in settlements closer to urban centers. My own village, for example, represents a collective of at least 4 different smaller villages that moved together due to proximity to canneries and "euro-canadian" cities and their own fragmented and declining populations.

Also, Rolf Knight has a good book on this very topic, if you're interested. http://www.amazon.com/Indians-Work-Informal-Columbia-1858-1930/dp/0921586507

I found the passage I was thinking of. It's actually from the book Indians and English by Karen Kupperman. I misremembered slightly: she's not talking strictly about pre-Columbian native societies, but of the changes in eastern North American native societies between the time of Columbus and the arrival of the first European settlements in their territories - a gap of more than a century. So part of what she's talking about is the enormous disruption caused by the waves of disease that passed through natives as a result of contact between the Spanish and Americans thousands of miles away.

But there were also changes not caused by contact, including climate change: the Little Ice Age, which led to shorter growing seasons "and changes in wind and rainfall patterns" which seem to have triggered the worst drought conditions that natives had experienced in something like 800 years. So that's a factor independent of contact that was causing change in native nations, including "competition over the ability to bring rain through supernatural means." It also helps explain why relations with the Roanoke colony went south so quickly: the settlers were demanding food (including seed corn) from people who were experience a drought without precedent for hundreds of years.

Kupperman says that there's evidence that before contact, the village or band had been the main political unit for most coastal Algonquians, and that "tribes" per se may have only arisen as a result of these disruptions and of the European demand for negotiating partners. She says there is considerable evidence that at the time of the first European settlements in North America, native tribes were in the middle of a process of political consolidation, moving into new political groupings dominated by "unprecedentedly powerful chiefs". So one reading of the evidence is that this process was at least partially in response to European-American contact.

But the question is how much of this consolidation really was a result of contact - there's apparently lots of evidence that it was happening independently of European contact:

>The processes of change are seen in the archaeological record before colonization and therefore were an internal development within native culture which may have been intensified by the European presence but were not created by it. The Susquehannocks provide a good example of this process. Archaeological evidence suggests that sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, they moved their location three hundred kilometers down the Susquehanna River closer to the centers of trade, and instead of replicating their scattered villages, they built a single large fortified town at the new site. The trade in native-produced commodities that they controlled began to include European goods as these became available...
>
>Ethnohistorians agree that the strong Powhatan chiefdom at the head of a highly complex socieity began to emerge in the Chesapeake in the sixteenth century well before European influence was felt in a prolonged or systematic way....Helen Rountree argues that the process of consolidation was occurring on differeing scales throughout the mid-Atlantic region...
>
>In New England as well, archaeologists emphasize processes internal to American culture in fostering consolidation of political and economic life. Kathleen Bragdon, drawing on a wide variety of findings, argues that probably from the fifteenth century the introduction of maize agriculture and rising population had combined with a new long-range trade ... to create more heirarichal social structures with increasingly powerful chiefly lineages and more clearly defined specialist roles.

​

Here is my list, they are mostly books which have helped me to live a better life, so not so much suited for a bucket-list as books which should be read early in life:

• Wisdom of the Desert (http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Desert-New-Directions-ebook/dp/B0099JRE3O/)
  
  
• Native American Wisdom (http://www.amazon.com/Native-American-Wisdom-Classic-Collections/dp/0931432782)
  
  
• The Five Love Languages (http://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-That-Lasts/dp/0802473156/)
  
  
• The Four Agreements (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Agreements-Practical-Personal-Freedom/dp/1878424319/)
  
  
• Dali Lama, The Way to a Meaningful Life (http://www.amazon.com/How-Practice-The-Meaningful-Life/dp/0743427084/)
  
  
• Dave Ramsey, The Total Money Makeover (http://www.amazon.com/Total-Money-Makeover-Classic-Financial/dp/1595555277/)
  

This isn't really what you're looking for geographically, but Sylvia Van Kirk's Many Tender Ties is a great resource for looking into the role of both native and European women in fur trade society. It focuses more on Western Canada but is a really interesting read and might be a good springboard for other resources.

Here are some good sources:

Books
Medical Botany (https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Botany-Plants-Affecting-Health/dp/0471628824/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494004860&sr=8-1&keywords=Medical+Botany)

Dewick’s Medicinal Natural Products (https://www.amazon.com/Medicinal-Natural-Products-Biosynthetic-Approach/dp/0470741678/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494004479&sr=1-1&keywords=medicinal+natural+products)

Biology of Plants (https://www.amazon.com/Raven-Biology-Plants-Ray-Evert/dp/1429219610/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1494004531&sr=8-3&keywords=biology+of+plants)

Fundamentals of Pharmacognosy and Phyotherapy (https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Pharmacognosy-Phytotherapy-Michael-Heinrich/dp/070203388X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494004776&sr=8-1&keywords=fundamentals+of+pharmacognosy+and+phytotherapy)

Eating on the Wild Side
(https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Wild-Side-Pharmacologic-Implications/dp/0816520674/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494006419&sr=1-1&keywords=eating+on+the+wild+side+nina+etkin)

The Origins of Human Diet and Medicine
(https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Human-Diet-Medicine-Chemical/dp/0816516871/ref=pd_sbs_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0816516871&pd_rd_r=ATDC8YB48N1H2TS7X84C&pd_rd_w=zYebJ&pd_rd_wg=zAAqF&psc=1&refRID=ATDC8YB48N1H2TS7X84C)

Florida Ethnobotany
(https://www.amazon.com/Florida-Ethnobotany-Daniel-F-Austin/dp/0849323320/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494006266&sr=8-1&keywords=florida+ethnobotany)

Native American Ethnobotany
(https://www.amazon.com/Native-American-Ethnobotany-Daniel-Moerman/dp/0881924539/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494006230&sr=8-1&keywords=native+american+ethnobotany)

African Ethnobotany in the Americas (https://www.amazon.com/African-Ethnobotany-Americas-Robert-Voeks/dp/1461408350/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494006185&sr=8-1&keywords=african+ethnobotany)

Traveling Cultures and Plants: The Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Human Migrations
(https://www.amazon.com/Traveling-Cultures-Plants-Ethnopharmacy-Environmental-ebook/dp/B00EDY6AVM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494006139&sr=8-1&keywords=traveling+cultures+and+plants)

Plants, People and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany
(https://www.amazon.com/Plants-Culture-Paperback-Michael-2005-12-23/dp/B01NH01YZP/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494005994&sr=8-1&keywords=balick+and+cox)


Websites
Quave Research Group (http://etnobotanica.us/)
Emory Herbarium (https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/emoryherbarium/)
National Center for Complementary and Integrated Health ( https://nccih.nih.gov/)
National Center for Natural Products Research (https://pharmacy.olemiss.edu/ncnpr/)
Center for Natural Product Technologies at UIC (http://cenapt.pharm.uic.edu/)
Journal of Natural Products (http://pubs.acs.org/journal/jnprdf)
American Society of Pharmacognosy (http://www.pharmacognosy.us/)
Society for Economic Botany (http://www.econbot.org/)
Economic Botany (http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/plant+sciences/journal/12231)
US National Librar(y of Medicine’s PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed)
Tropicos (http://www.tropicos.org/)
International Plant Names Index (http://www.ipni.org)
WHO Guidelines on Good Agricultural and Collection Practices for Medicinal Plants (http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js4928e/)
Convention on Biological Diversity (https://www.cbd.int/)
Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the USA (https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/)

Opinion of herbal healing books:
Herbal healing books run the full gamut from remedies based on anecdotal evidence to remedies that have been subjected to some level of scientific testing. As with anything else, you would be well advised to check the credibility of the sources used.

Anarchists tend to leave this pretty vague and open-ended, because it's difficult to create a blueprint that will work in all cases for all communities (which speaks to one of the reasons why anarchists don't like the state). Generally speaking, anarchists tend to roll with the principles behind Restorative Justice.

There are lots of examples of alternatives to learn from too, including indigenous societies (taking care not to fetishize them), past anarchist experiments, and other attempts to find a more humane path to justice.

AFAQ, for example, holds up juries as a good starting point:

> In terms of resolving disputes between people, it is likely that some form of arbitration system would develop. The parties involved could agree to hand their case to a third party (for example, a communal jury or a mutually agreed individual or set of individuals). There is the possibility that the parties cannot agree (or if the victim were dead). Then the issue could be raised at a communal assembly and a "court" appointed to look into the issue. These "courts" would be independent from the commune, their independence strengthened by popular election instead of executive appointment of judges, by protecting the jury system of selection of random citizens by lot...

Kristian Williams talks about alternatives to policing in his book Our Enemies in Blue (PDF). He adapted a few chapters from it for publication elsewhere, including:

• A Look At Feminist Forms Of Justice That Don't Involve The Police, which looks specifically at community response and prevention around assault, abuse, and rape
  
• Civil Rights with Guns, which looks at alternatives to police from the Black Freedom Movement
  

In front of me is my bookshelf. The following titles will serve as my description.

• Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex
  
  
• The Invasion Within
  
  
• The Great Cat Massacre
  
  Awesome.

Honestly, for one book that covers everything, this one is really good. For a comprehensive book that examines every major event in Canadian history, briefly mind you, it is a solid read. I am sorry for the link.

This one on Louis Riel is great if you are looking for something different to read, but still want to learn about Canadian history. I read it in a couple hours, it is a light read, great with a glass of wine on a snowy night.

Thomas King's excellent The Inconvenient Indian is readable, funny, informative, and covers the basics:

https://www.amazon.ca/Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account-America/dp/0385664214

The first volume of the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples is also fairly well written and has the advantage of being online and free:

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/royal-commission-aboriginal-peoples/Pages/final-report.aspx

I can't personally vouch, but my roommate enjoyed the ethnography Inuit Morality Play by Jean L. Briggs.

John Ralston Saul is a good place to start: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0670068047/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

He is very good about pre-Canadian history. Realizes and strengthens the roles that First Nations played in early Canada while addressing the realities/atrocities of some of things we have done

So its all about money, is it? Well, I could increase my wealth by stealing money, but I don't. One of the reasons that Canada became wealthy, is that it brutally stole wealth-creating lands from the Aboriginals. Read Clearing the Plains if you still don't understand that.
Obviously, returning some of the wealth is important, but the Liberals have promised something much more important than that, namely: "a total renewal of the relationship between Canada and indigenous peoples".

i have written many papers on indigenous issues and governance, but not particularly anarchism. i would be willing to share parts of them, sure!

if you are interested in anarcho-indigenism, taiaiake alfred is essential to the movement, and i found this handy website that gives a basic overview of the concept.

From my understanding because residential schools were starting to close they had to find another way to “remove the Indian from the child”.

If you’re looking for other good reading there’s a book https://www.amazon.ca/Night-Spirits-Story-Relocation-Sayisi/dp/0887556434 if you google it there’s a preview and stuff. I grew up in northern Canada in communities that are half/half. I thought that I had a pretty good grasp of what reserves were like and how history had went down until I read this book. It’s a series of firsthand stories from one of the aboriginal groups in Manitoba that was relocated from their original community where they had cabins and their seasonal route established, to Churchill. It’s very very sad and I found shocking. We had to read it in our Aboriginal history course for university. I would 10/10 recommend.

la-chanteuse wrote:

If you haven't already, I would recommend you check out Daniel N. Paul's We Were Not the Savages. It talks a lot about the history of the colonization in the Maritimes, and explains in layman's term a lot of the heavily formalized language that can be found in the treaties and policies. The book is much more interesting than anything else I've discovered on the subject, and I appreciate that Danny Paul himself is a Mi'kmaq elder in Nova Scotia. He carefully takes into account the historical research that has been done before him, and compares that to the information which has been passed down to him, in essence filtering a lot of historical misrepresentations by White Europeans to achieve a true understanding of the past.

http://www.amazon.ca/Clearing-Plains-Politics-Starvation-Aboriginal/dp/0889772967

This is his recent work, and the one that won the book of the year award from the Canadian Historical Association.

Well, it depends - what sort of history are you interested in? A broad overview? Political history? The wars? Labour history? Gender?

Actually a really good book for non historians to get a feel for Canadian History is Will Ferguson's Canadian History for Dummmies. I used it while studying for my comprehensive exams... though clearly as an aid, not a real text or anything. It doesn't get everything right, but it's a good, light attempt at examining Canadian history in a somewhat critical way.

I haven't read this, but I have read other Wil Ferguson books, and they were excellent. I'm therefore assuming this is too: http://www.amazon.ca/Canadian-History-Dummies-Will-Ferguson/dp/0470836563/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268672449&sr=1-4

Note: I am not trying to imply you are a dummie.

Awesome man, everyone should learn these histories! Another really good book about the US relationship with indigenous peeps is "The Inconvenient Indian" by Thomas King http://www.amazon.ca/The-Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account/dp/0385664214

You're damn right. If you like the essay, I have to plug the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Roosting-Chickens-Reflections-Consequences/dp/1902593790

He just goes off on the most scathing critique of US empire you've ever read in an extended written ramble, then offers a year-by-year breakdown of every single action of the United States Military from 1776 - 2003 (when the book was published), including the numerous atrocious incursions on Native communities, and offers another year-by-year breakdown of every illegal US action from 1776-2003. Really great book, one of my favorites, and he lost his job at CU Boulder over it.

This shouldn't surprise anyone... people have been here for thousands of years, and they used the rivers as their highways.

A great read: http://www.amazon.ca/Before-Ontario-The-Archaeology-Province/dp/0773542086

IIRC, there has not been a single year from inception through 2000 that the US wasn't involved in military engagements.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Roosting-Chickens-Reflections-Consequences/dp/1902593790 Neat timeline in there.

https://www.amazon.ca/Canadian-History-Dummies-Will-Ferguson/dp/0470836563

Don't let the format throw you off, Will Ferguson is a fantastic writer.

This is monstrous. Reminds me of a certain Native Canadian book...

Recommended reading for those who want to learn more about this horror in Manitoba history.

Sounds like he should start by reading The Inconvenient Indian if he really knows that little about the issues with scrapping the Indian Act.

It depends on soil type and moisture levels. Most of of those are indeed old world plants, though most of them can thrive in arid climates with water and proper soil. There are also many native analogues (same genus different species), and that book is a good jumping off point for their qualities.

For more regional herbals, this guy got me started. Or if you want the encyclopedia, this is unrivaled. There are more. But all of these, including Grieves, tells different parts of the same story.

http://www.amazon.com/Clearing-Plains-Politics-Starvation-Aboriginal/dp/0889772967

A book that may change your mind

http://www.amazon.ca/Fair-Country-John-Ralston-Saul/dp/0670068047

> Have you read the storys in this thread, every one of them mentions that the econmy was completly not function!

I noticed most said things were better off under communism -- did you?

> Please show me a list with ever attack of the US to all the socialist stats

That would be pages and pages long. You should Google it. Various people have made such lists. Ward Churchill put together one of the most comprehensive but it's no more than a paragraph or so on each as I recall, although it's a couple of hundred examples. William Blum's Killing Hope covers fewer but in much more detail (a chapter each) and several examples are free to read on line. You might like the chapter on Cuba.

Except you don't read, I forget.

< I dont grammer check for you

Did you mean to say "spell check"?

Consider that residential schools led to the complete extermination of approximately 50 indigenous languages and associated near-complete or total loss of distinctive culture for about as many peoples.

Consider that the death rate at some residential schools (as high as 60%) compared to the death rates for children in white schools in the same area at the same time (5%) is actually comparable to the difference in the death rate rate compared between some of the Nazi extermination camps (35 - 90%) and regular camps for ethnic German citizens and Western PoWs (~3%).

Checklist:

• An intentional government policy aimed at cultural extermination.
  
  
• The carry-out of that government policy was uninterrupted even when the majority of children subjected to it died.
  
  
• Human medical experimentation was done on the children.
  
  
• Instances where the majority of the population subjected to the policy died.
  
  
• So they used mass graves because they died too quick to bother with individual burials.
  
  
• With the little children digging the graves of their own school friends knowing full-well they'll probably be next.
  
  
• And clever use of novel means to speed up mass extermination (biological warfare / gassing).
  
  The end result sure looks the same. There aren't many Jews in Europe. And there sure aren't many Snokomish or Penlatch people left -- every last one was exterminated.
  
  The numbers and the consequences sure look genocidal for certain periods, especially at the peak in the early 20th century.
  
  Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life is a recent book that thoroughly details the means by which the Canadian state, in parallel to the American, used disease, geographic displacement, starvation, isolation, interment and the occasional bout of literal mass murder, to effectively depopulate much of the continent.