Sheldon Krasowski - No Surrender: The land remains Indigenous

Between 1871 and 1921 a series of so called "numbered treaties" were signed between the First Nations of Canada and the (settler) Canadian government and the monarch. They covered issues such as access to land, resource extraction, farming, education and regular payments. The first seven of these are the subject of Seldon Krasowski's book. Krasowski's book is an intervention into a longstanding discussion about the treaties, which begins from the historical record, First Nation's oral traditions and history and other, often ignored or unpublished sources. The debates are not sterile. They have important implications for contemporary Canadian politics and social movements, and at their heart is a crucial question - whose land is it? As Krasowski says in their introduction:

Indigenous oral histories state that there was no surrender of lands through the treaty process. First Nations agreed to share their lands in exchange for the benefits offered by the Canadian government.

Many accounts, even those sympathetic to the First Naitons, have suggested that the problem was that the indigenous people did not understand, or comprehend the treaties themselves, that "cultural differences impeded a mutual understanding of the treaty terms". It is fair to say that Krasowski's research makes it clear that this is wrong. The First Nations were extremely clear on what they were arguing and hoping to get from the treaties. But it was the Canadian governments negotiators who changed the terms of verbal agreement. One previous historian who rejected the "cultural misunderstanding" argument says of treaty nine, that the Anishinaabe and Cree "did not know what the parchment said when they touched the pen". Here, touching the pen, refers to the practice of the Indigenous signatories to the treaties touching the pen with their fingers before someone else wrote their names. It is not merely about whether or not the First Nations people could write, but Krasowski argues, it was also a way of separating the negotiations from the actual physical treaty. 

Context also matters in two ways. Firstly the pressures on First Nations peoples was forcing them into reliance with the Canadian government. As Krasowski says of the context to the first and second treatries, "by 1870 the declinging resource base, competition from free traders and a lack of support from the Hudson's Bay Company led to chjallenging economic times for the Anishinaabe.

But second there was also the context of the indigenous peoples' society, how they made decisions and how they understood their relationship with land. A quotation from Cree Elder Jimmy Myo makes this clear: "You cannot begin to understand the treaties unless you understand our cultural and spiritual traditions and our Indian laws".

The importance of the oral tradition is key here. As Chief Mawedo-peness said to Commissioner Morris, one of the government negotiators for treaty three, "you must remember that our hearts and our brains are like paper; we never forget". Thus the oral records of treaty three contain different understandings of the treaty text to the printed edition. Dawson recorded this speech from CHief Mawedo-peness:

And I trust, what we are about to do today is for the benefit of our Nation as well as for our white brothers - that nothing but friendship may reign between the Nation and our white brothers. And now I take off my glove to give you my hand to sign the Treaty. And now before you all, Indians and whites, let it never be said that this has been done in secret. It is done openly and in the light of day.

In the newspaper accounts of the speech though, the crucial line reads "I take off my glove and in giving you my hand, I deliver over my birthright and lands". Krasowski argues that this shows how the newspaper, as a public record, "might have been influenced by pressures to achieve a surrender of Indigenous Lands". Dawson was writing for himself and his account "does not conflice with Anishinaabe oral histories and in fact reinforces them". Krasowski concludes:

The addition of the clause "I deliver over my birthright and lands" in the official record of Treaty Three is significant because it suggests that Canada's representatives introduced the notion of a land surredner where none existed. This arose from a strategy of the Canadian negotiators to ignore land questions in favour of benefits. Such duplicity meant that quite quickly the First Nations were complaining about the Treaty and their benefits. It is clear here, and elsewhere in the various treaties, that the government's representatives were acting to downplay the impact of the treaties, to introduce arguments that had not been discussed and to lie. These were not misunderstandings, it was purposeful duplicity.

It is important not to neglect the role of the First Nations representatives who fought to ensure they got the best deals possible. Indeed one response to Treaty Three after the Nations felt they government had reneged on its promised was to highlight that their warriors were ready for battle. As Krasowski writes of Treaty Six, it is 

unique ecause a number of eyewitness accounts of the negotiations were record... These accounts contadict the offical accounts published by Treaty Commissioner Morris and emphasise the agency of the Chiefs who managed to expand the treaty terms beyound what had been authorised by the Canadian government, including protection from disease and famine, the medicine chest clause and assistance in the transition to agricutlure... Oral histories shared by Treaty Six Elders have emphasised that Indigenous Peoples did not surrender their Traditional Territories and eyewitness accounts noted that the surrender claused was not discussed by the commissioners... Chiefs focused their understanding of the treaty on the oral discussions and were less concerned with the reading of the treaty text.

The duplicity and lies of government negotiators has left a lasting political and legal legacy. As Krasowsku say.

The texts of the numbered treaties clearly state that the First Nations surrendered their 'rights, titles and privileges to the land.' However there is no evidence thatAlesander Morris or his fellow treat commissioners discussed the surrender clause during any of the treaty negotiations... The treaty commissioners' accounts claim that the interpreters read the terms of the treaties after the negotiations, but I argue that the interpreters were chosen because they supported the commissioners.

This "casts doubt on the validity of the complete surrender of Indigenous Lands". The question of land sovereignty remains central to the question of freedom and liberation of First Nations people in Canada today. It also casts doubt on the role of the Canadian government in the past and today. A recent victory by the Quw’utsun Nation, while not directly related to the numbered treaties, demonstrates the ongoing importance of questions of land ownership and social justice, as well as the potential for victory by social movements. Seldon Krasowski's book is an important and detailed argument for First Nations rights and a weapon those fighting racism and oppression in Canada today.

Related Reviews

McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature

This is a stimulating book that approaches key concepts of environmental politics and Marxist economics from a fresh point of view. It's central thesis is that the Free Gifts to capitalism, clean air, water, raw materials and so on, only look free because they are so defined within a system geared towards blind accumulation of wealth. These Free Gifts offer humanity much, but they are also taken from us in ways that undermine and destroy society. Alyssa Battistoni's book offers much food for thought, and I'm looking forward to reviewing it for another journal. I'll post the link here when it's complete.

Ken Liu - All That We See or Seem

One night Elli, a famous artist and extremely popular weaver of dreams, gets out of bed, closes the bedroom door on her still sleeping husband Piers, and walks out of the house. She vanishes. There's seemingly no reason for it. The police are baffled and Piers has no idea. Then he gets a phone call. Someone called The Prince has Elli, and is demanding that Piers return what she stole. The Prince tells Piers that he will kill her if he doesn't find the missing thing. The problem is that Piers doesn't seem to know what is missing and the Price is light on clues.

Piers finds Julia Z, a young woman who lives in the fringes of society. Its a world of data, surveillance and control. Everything from information about what you do, where you go and how you live is stored, bought and sold. Data is everything. Julia, in rejecting that, has learnt to live in the cracks and use her skills to earn cash through semi-legal schemes and also to resist the system itself. Julia, Piers hopes, can rescue Elli by identifying what is missing. 

So begins a romp through a future world that feels not very different to our own. This is Ken Liu's first techno thriller and he embraces the concept fully. Few pages pass without some new technological idea, equipment or concept being thrown at the reader. There's a lot of action, thrills and spills and some nasty bad guys - not least the Prince himself whose corporation manipulates data and knowledge to shift governments, opinion and, well anything. 

The problem is that its all a bit one-dimensional. Julia, the centre of the story, has a good back story that shows how she rejected society and entered the underworld. But she's just unbelievable as a person. Her skills are almost superhuman. At various points in the story she's able to reach into her rucksack and pull out a self-built gadget that can hack, store, video, fly or analyse. AI here is a tool to be used and key to modern life. Yet it's also a deus ex machina that fills every plot hole and drives the story foreward. There's no real innovation - the bad guys are comically bad, and the contrived plot let's Julia jump from escapade to escapade leaving the reader bored and unconvinced.

There's a good story here, trying to get out. But Ken Liu's world building, character development and overreliance on increasingly unbelievable technology as a problem solver didn't do it for me. As a commentary on our world of data and surveillance it failed.

Related Reviews

Stephenson - Snow Crash

Vine Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

When Custer Died for your Sins was first published in 1969 it came out in the midst of the growing and radicalising Civil Rights movement. It is an angry read, a rage against the American system that condemns Native Americans to poverty, disease and racism and offers a powerful manifesto to alter the imbalance of power and wealth. As such it is also a very contempory book. If many of the demands of the manifesto are now dated or too specific, the framing of the book and the context of which it sets itself remains highly relevant. The source of the book's infamous title is a bumper sticker produced by the organisation that Vine Deloria organised through - one that parodies and rejects the politics and actions of the Christian Churches that are tasked with "helping" the Indians. The title also reflects the humour and rage that makes this such a powerful read nearly sixty years after first publication.

Running through the book is the influence of the US Civil Rights movement. Deloria writes

Indian Affairs today suffers from an intellectual stagnationl that is astounding. Creative thought is sparse. Where the younger black students were the trigger to the Civil Rights movements with sit-ings in the South, young Indians have become unwitting missionaries spreading ancient anthropogical doctrines which hardly relate to either anthropology or to Indians. The young blacks invented Black Power and pushed the whole society to consider the implications of discrimination which in turn created racisl nationalism. Young Indians  have barely been able to parody some black slogans and have created none of their own.

If this seems, in hindsight, a little unfair, it is a reflection of the author's frustration. Timing was everything. As Deloria was writing the book the American Indian Movement which famously took control of Wounded Knee in 1973 was just being formed. Movements take time to grow and generate politics and ideas of their own. The Civil Rights movement was clearly an impetous that would grow over time. Nonetheless there are some important insights that Deloria offers, centred on one of his great hates - anthropologists. He writes positively of the Apaches, who "don't worry about what type of Indianism is 'real'" and counters this other young Native Americans who

attend workshops over and over again. Folk theories pronounced by authoritative anthropologists become opportunities to escape responsbility. If, by definition, the Indian is hopelessly caught between two cultrues, why struggle? Why not blame all one's lack of success on this tremendous gulf between two opposing cultures? Workshops have beomce therefore, summer retreats for non-thought rather tahn strategy sessions of leadership enhancement.

But, this was not unique to the Native American movement. It was also true of those whose response to US imperialism, inequality and racism was to "tune in and drop out" and form hippy communes. But Deloria is making a point about the need for a movement that struggles for demands and poltiics. Indeed he argues that it is not enough to "talk of Civil Rights", because this "lessens our chances of understanding the forces involved in the rights of human beings... we should begin talking about actual econoic problems; and in realistic terms we are talking about land".

Deloria argues that 1968 represented a crisis for the Native Americans and the Civil Rights movement. The murder of Martin Luther King and the explosion of riots, Deloria says, meant simply taking a colour TV. "America, rioters seemed to be saying, is a colour TV and this is what we want from here". This is a crude analysis that mirrors what the mainstream were saying, but it arises, Deloria argues out of a contradiction about what was wanted from "Civil Rights":

When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majorty of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it . A socio-economic rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal.

Indeed, Deloria is frustrated that while King made a turn in 1968 toward economic issues he lumped "all minority communities [together] on the basis of their economic status." But the "real issue for Indians - tribal existence within the homeland reservation - appeared to have been completely ignored". Native American poverty was awful, but alieviating it required a more radical approach.

Deloria ends the book hopeful. While his manifesto contains much in the way of detailed suggestions about politics, land control and the US government, he has as an amibition a wider aim - the protection of Indian space within US society. Here he celebrates the story of the Tiguas, a tribe in Texas that won recognition as an Indian tribe after having seen a steep social and economic decline. The fact that they had protected their culture meant that a campaign was able to win a protected reservation and recognition for them and "a chance to build a sound economic base for the future". Deloria says:

Ever since Indians began to be shunted to reservatiosn it has been assumed by both Indians and whites that the eventual destiny of the Indian people was to silently merge into the mainstream of American society and disappear. The thought of a tribe being able to maintain traditions, socio-political structure, and basic identity within an expanding modern American city would have been so preposterous an idea had it been advanced prior to the discover of the Tiguas, that the person expounding the thesis would have been laughed out of the room. 

Deloria hoped this would lead to a great revival of Native American culture and life. Ultimately however, he wants the "recolonisation" of "the unsettled areas of the nation by groups of Indian colonists".  With this Deloria hoped/expected that "traditional Indian customs will come to predominate" within the communities. Indeed there is a hope that this would go further and lead to the rejection of capitalism:

Where ordinary white corporations serve to produce income from capital invested, corporations will not do so in the new Indian scheme. Rather they will serve to coordinate community life. Earnings will be used to provide services ordinarily received from various governmental agencies. As economic independence becomes greater, independence in other areas of life will follow. Indians can thereby achieve a prosperity not seen since the landing of the white man.

Sixty years later this has not happened. Indeed Native American reservations remain some of the poorest parts of the United States. Racism, imperialism and the politics of settler colonialism continue to divde and rule and keep the Native Americans in poverty. Part, perhaps of the problem, was that the Native American movement was too separated from wider Civil Rights struggles. Deloria himself repeatedly seems to reject radical and revolutionary (he says "violent") struggles. But it was Wounded Knee in 1973 when Native Americans literarily took up arms and fought of the US state which helped shift the narrative (and the occupation of Alcatraz). Nonetheless his agenda is assuredly against the system. Nick Estes has written recently that "Deloria's calls for peoplehood... were a step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the restoration of Indigenous governmnce and territories, a project long in the making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system". It is an inherently revolutionary project.

Is the prospect of Native American reemergence within wider "white" society possible still? I would suggest it is, but it will require the dismantling of US capitalism. In winning this Native Americans will surely fight alongside all the poor and oppressed people of America. 

Custer Died for your Sins was enormously influential (not least among shamefaced anthropologists). It forms the base for much later theoretical and revolutionary work and those interested in Settler Colonialism, as well as Native American struggles, will get much from reading it. I found it hard to get hold of a copy in the UK, but I recommend that you try.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Marshall III - The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History
Wooster - The Military & United States Indian Policy 1865-1903
Nerburn - Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

qntm - There is no Antimemetics Division

The online SCP Foundation, via the SCP Wiki, has been a source of excellent fictional writing focused on the idea that various secret organisations exist that study and fight paranormal, alien and (sometimes comic) supernatural creatures and species. Qntm, the pen-name of Sam Hughes, has produced an excellent novel based on their writing on the SCP Wiki and various short stories. There is No Antimemetics Division is based around Marie Quinn, the leader of the Antimemetics Division which fights various alien and supernatural creatures, most I think of which appear on the SCP Wiki.

The story begins with some of the more mundane events, where it becomes clear that there are many existing threats to the Division and to humanity in general. But what also slowly emerges is that there are layers on experiences and knowledge that are hidden from the characters themselves. Fighting monsters that can live in ideas, or thoughts, or their awareness of you, means sometimes having to forget key pieces of information. Then there is the problem that some of the monstrous threats alter or destroy memories. So the joke of the book's inner flap "Welcome to the Antimemetics Division, this is not your first day" is a very real one for employees of the Division.

What quickly becomes clear is that there is a very big conspiracy that is threatening reality itself. Quinn is central to fighting this, but she's not entirely aware of her role, and some of the best bits of the novel are those where characters like Quinn find hidden information or even special firewalled offices that allow them to discuss infomation they have forgotten.

One of the great things about the SCP Foundation has always been the way it gives the reader tantalising glimpses of wider stories. If this was all qntm's novel did it would probably work - especially because frequently these glimpses come through the character's own discovery of knowledge of their forgotten memories. But the novel really works because there is a good story here too. Quinn discovers that the Division is shrinking. They are losing their war. This is deeply personal for her and this loss is at multiple levels. In fact the reader is not just an observer - we know things that Quinn forgets. This allows a level of horror to develop beyond that of just that caused by death and destruction.

Related Reviews

Lacroix - Here and Beyond
Elliott - Awakened
Moore - The Great When
Bester - The Demolished Man

Ben Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end

It seems fitting that my last book review of 2025 is "on extinction". After all, this year once again broke records for temperature, extreme weather, floods and so on, and also saw a failed climate COP. The human cost of these tragedies is growing, and the outlook is bleak. But Ben Ware's On Extinction is not a catalogue of disaster, nor an interrogation of the science, or indeed a historical study like Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. 

Ware's book is an attempt to grapple with how we understand extinction philosophically and the limitations of what he calls "progressive liberalism". In other words the book is a critique of how we think about the end of the world and what we imagine can be constructed instead. I will admit that I approached the book with some trepidation - I am not someone for whom philosophy comes naturally. That said Ware's book was accessible, stimulating and I was carried along by his easy prose.

At the heart of the book are two related discussions. The first is the aforementioned inability of liberal political thought to construct an alternative to capitalism that can avoid catastrophe even in the imaginations of the liberals. The second is the concept of revolution. Revolution is an essential alternative to capitalism's logic of accumulation ("moses and the prophets", says Marx). It is capitalism that is dragging us under, but it is also the only framework most people have - witness a host of books written by well meaning academics and writers anxious about the future, but ideologically unable to imagine anything different.

Ware says that in 1921, the Marxist Walter Benjamin described "capitalism as a demonic cult, 'perhaps the most extreme that ever existed'." Capitalism is, for Benjamin,  a celebratory cult where there is no break, no holiday, every day "demands the utter fealty of its worshippers". Ware contines:

In the first instance, the demonic figures as a kind of bad infinite: it is surplus-producing activity without cessation - activity that threatens the complete destruction of human existence... a crucial second sense... [capitalism] establishes guilt/debt as the organizing principle of social relations."

The second demonic sense Benjamin explains is that this guilt/debt causes the "expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world." What does guilt/debt/despair mean in this context? 

Our guilt/debt is part of the compulsion to behave in a particular way. To spend, to work, to obey. And in doing so we acccept we will live in a system of exploitation and oppression, war and homelessness, poverty amid plenty. But for the capitalist it might refer to the compulsion they experience to endlessly accumulate due to the competition inherent in the system. We have seemingly no choice but to sell our labour, and buy their commodities. They have to behave in a particular way too. Ware analyses this through a brief study of the popular series Squid Game (which I haven't seen). The winner of that (imaginery) game carries with them, the "guilt-burden" of everyone else's failure. Or, "their new-found wealth remaining permanently indebted to a system of suffering, exploitation, and sadistic enjoyment". That at least is not fiction.

Ware concludes however by saying that "we might say that the only thing one is certain of under capitalism is one's guilt... but this then creates an issue that Benjamin does not exxplore... how to deal with accumulated guilt."

Ware points out that for Marx the vampire of capitalism sucks the life blood from the worker, it is a "mechanical monster" whose "demonic power", "drains the life-energy from the body of every man, woman and child". But crucially for Marx the worker is also the "active agent of political change, the potential motor of world history". For Marx this potential for revolutionary transformation is the hope. But for many revolution is not about fundamental change, it is about internal change. 

Ware looks at this through a discussion of Kant. Ware says:

For Kant, one becomes morally a 'good' person only through a 'revolution' in one's 'disposition';, through a kind of 'rebirth' or 'new creation'... political enlightenment, but contrast, can only be achieved 'slowly', by a gradualist movement from worse to better... In relation to the French experiment, what matters is not the revolution itself but instead the way in which it allows enthusiastic spectators to extract moral and aesthetic capital form it. What Kant thus appears to want is revolution without Revolution.

Here I think Ware nails things exactly in relation to contemporary politics:

What we encounter here then... is a version of torday's 'progressive' left liberalism: a politics that is bringin with enthusiasm when it comes to 'looking at' the burning issues of the day - ecological devastation, accelerating inequality, the threat of nuclear war - but which... has not the slightest intention of activiely participationg in anything that would change the political and economimc conditions from which these problems emerge.

Think of all those failed COP meetings, the heart-searching articles and books by the likes of Bill Gates, or countless academics, whose hope is to reinvent capitalism or defang it to make it all nicer. The alternative has to be revolutionary. Here Ware returns to despair, but this time reconstructed as a potential force to encourage change:

By opening outselves uip to the force of despair, we arrive (potentially at least) at a properly political truth: the problems we confront cannot be resolved within the existing framework, and so it is the framework itself that must be transformed.

It is a powerful conclusion and reminds us of the power of philosophy. Ware's book is a polemic, but it is not one that I expected - it left me enthused and stimulated, and enlightened (in the best sense). But it is also encouraging that at least in Ware's response to extinction the working class, as a class, is at the heart of his answer. On Extinction covers a lot of ground in its 150 pages. Ware touches on a host of philosophers and thinkers, and many cultural milestones (some of which are quite obscure). Nonetheless this is a stimulating book that will provoke plenty of debate, argument and inspiration too. 

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Riley Black - The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs

Riley Black's The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a remarkable book that places dinosaurs in their historical and ecological context. But it also shows how our own understanding of dinosaurs is constantly changing. As such the book is also a history of paleontology. As Black jokes in her afterword, "in the past two hundred years our favorite prehistoric creatures have stompled through our imaginations as immense lizards, leaping oddities, tail-dragging dullards and rainbow-coloured fluffballs". By placing dinosaurs in their wider ecological, social and historical context a new understand emerges. This ecological approach is important. Dinosaurs are changing, growing and developing creatures. They are, in consequence, very real.

This was brought home to me when I was lucky enough to visit the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. There a fantastic display Triceratops skulls shows how the animal heads changed through their lives. Later, adult, skulls had huge fans and horns. But also holes (fenestra as they are known) in their fans which only developed later in life. Dinosaurs, like Triceratops, grew up. Their bodies changed constantly, and as Black repeatedly points out, so likely did their behaviour.

For instance the horns or clubs of dinosaurs have usually been understood as weapons - reflecting a tendency for nature to be understood as "red in tooth and claw". While it is undoubtably true that dinosaurs hunted each other and bit each other, it is far from the only use for such features. Black shows how horns and claws are more likely to have been used for multiple purposes (as many animals do today) having roles in development, mating or fighting. It is very unlikely that given the variety of dinosaur horn arrangements, they "all evolved their horns to principally ward off predators" otherwise "there would likely be an ideal configuration for telling tyrannosaurs to back off". Instead the variety of horn arrangements suggests that "interactions between individuals of the species were a central factor in how these dinosaurs evolved".

Black shows how palentologists have had to break with older ideas to allow us to understand dinosaurs in a new way. It is hard not to conclude that some of the newer approaches to ecology that have developed in recent decades are part of this changing view of the dinosaurs. The environmental crises have changed our understanding of how human society interacts with nature, and this has led to new approaches to how we should understand the interaction between living things and their environment. Black's book feels refreshing in this regard. It moves us on from simply seeing dinosaurs as carnivorous individuals fighting over a herbivore carcass as they are often portrayed in books or on screen. Indeed, Black repeatedly encourages us to see dinosaurs within their wider context - including non-dinosaur animals. Here again the reader is encouraged to think differently:

The supposed antagonism between dinosaurs and mammals has been overplayed, and in some ways misunderstood because of a focus on competition for ecological prominence.... The emerging pictures is that competition between different forms of early mammals restricted the evolution of our ancestors, not the dinosaurs.

The competition between species may have been less important than the interactions between individuals of the same species. Here I really enjoyed (and learned a lot from) Black's discussion of the rearing of young dinosaurs, and how adults treated their eggs. Sometimes they cared for them, and sometimes they left the eggs alone and the young to fend for themselves. But whichever strategy was adopted by different dinosaur species, it had consequences for the behaviour of the young and for the wider ecology. Take young T-Rexs. Their very existence likely changed the local ecology, but also the fossil record. As Black says of the T-Rex young they took up the "distinct ecological role of the medium-size predators that we would expect to find, preventing other dinosaur species from taking it up. it's one reason that the Hell Creek Formation... sometimes seems to have lower dinosaur diversity than other habitats". 

Of course dinosaurs, like all living creatures, transformed their own environment. Black gives several examples of how they changed the landscape - creating pools through their size and weight, or ensuring that a forest would have had plenty of open space as well as woodland. The disappearance of the dinosaurs then opened up an evolutionary space where mammals could become dominant, but so could many other forms of flora and fauna. Dinosaurs were not isolated lizards. They were social creatures that changed their environment and evolved, developed and disappeared over a huge period of time. Black reminds us that the later dinosaurs could possibly have walked past fossils of their older ancestors. It is a startling reminder of how old the Earth is, and how long the time of the dinosaurs was.

Since reading one of Riley Black's earlier books The Last Days of the Dinosaurs I have enthused about it to everyone who mentions dinosaurs to me. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a fine volume that broadens the story and places dinosaurs in a much wider context. Anyone who wants an introduction to the dinosaurs that shows how we have changed our understanding of these fabulous beasts will enjoy this book. Its an excellent, entertaining and insightful read.

Related Reviews

Black - The Last Days of the Dinosaurs
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters
Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution
Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared
Fortey - Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind

Ivan Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

*** Warning Spoilers ***

The second volume of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, is the first chronologically. It probably doesn't matter whether you read this, or English Creek first, because these are independent tales. But Dancing at the Rascal Fair sets up the origins of most of the people who live in Two Medicine Country, a fictional area of Montana just east of the Rockies towards the Canadian border. 

Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill are leaving Scotland to head to Montana where Rob's uncle Lucas is working as a miner. Lucas sends money home every year - sizeable chunks - and Rob and Angus are attracted to the good pay and better quality of life than late 19th century Scotland can offer. Montana is a land of opportunity, riches, good land and an escape from grinding poverty.

The first chapters have a dreamlike quality as Angus narrates his and Rob's voyage and then their long search in Montana's new towns for Lucas. Eventually they end up in Two Medicine Country, where Lucas is not mining, but running a bar and the two of them join Lucas in sheep business. Right from the start the messy reality of small, close-knit, emigre communities is there. Rob falls for Lucas' partner - and getting him and Angus to homestead in the mountains is part of making sure this doesn't get even more messy.

But it is Angus whom we follow for the next generation, as he farms, clears, and also teaches in the local school. He meets, and falls hard for Anna, another teacher and hopes to marry her. When she choses someone else, in part for economic reasons, Angus is desroyed and marries Rob's sister who has been brought over for that purpose. Their's is a caring and loving marriage, but Angus' love for Anna hangs over it like a shroud. Eventually Rob is unable to cope with Angus' unrequited love and hope and their brotherly, almost lovelike, relationship comes apart.

For while this is a story of love and humanity, it's set against the harsh backdrop of Montana's climate and the economic and political reality of the early 20th century. Boys get sent to fight in the trenches, influenza hits and the farming economy goes through its ups and downs. In addition harsh winters, dry summers and the gradual changing of farming practices transform the area and drive some to poverty.

Doig is wonderfully skilful at placing the human emotions of his characters against the backdrop of economic crisis, winter storms, drought and war. We're rooting for his people, while anxious for their survival. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is no cowboy adventure. Its the story of what happens over time. The book takes place over thirty or forty years, yet some chapters deal at length with a handful of days. It gives the reader a feeling of an epic, while occasionally zooming in on great detail.

What happens to Angus, Rob and the others is, in many ways, shaped by forces beyond their control. There's little here about the US's own politics - other than setting up of the National Forests which plays a big part in English Creek. Instead characters play their parts against a backdrop of events out of their control. That, I think is a deliberate ploy to make the reader think about the people. 

It should be noted that one group of people who are not here in detail are the Native Americans. Its probably a criticism of Doig's fiction that he neglects their place in Montana's history (though this isn't true of all his books - see Winter Brothers). Here they are literarily unnamed, but ever present in a Reservation on the other side of the hill. Doig's focus on emigrant and immigrant lives reminds us that the modern US was built in part on the labour of economic migrants. But the other part - the genocide - is absent.

That criticism aside, this is a deeply moving look at the lives that people live, which forms the backdrop to modern Montana.

Related Reviews

Doig - English Creek
Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America