ResoluteReader

Saturday, February 14, 2026

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a leading historian of settler colonialism in the Americas and the history of indigenous people and their struggles. Not a Nation of Immigrants is a response to one of the most enduring myths of the history of the United States - the idea that the US is made up of immigrants, and immigrants alone, whose struggles and labour has transformed the barren, inhospitable and virgin landscape into a country emblematic of freedom and hope. That myth has taken some battering in recent years from the second Trump Presidency. Nonetheless, the liberal idea (beloved of the Democrats) of a liberal nation of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures and societies is one held on to by many - perhaps increasingly so as ICE agents arrest and kill on the streets of US cities.

But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it is a myth that needs to be demolished for there to be true equality, freedom and liberation. Rather than a nation of immigrants, we should understand the US as a Settler Colonial power, whose origins were shaped by colonialism and imperialism from the start, and whose legacy of injustice, dispossession and genocide cannot be ignored. As she writes, the US constitution "created a people empwered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent, with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war for independence was fought for, with great sacrifices; this is what the Anglo-American settlers desired."

She continues:

The history of the US is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide.

She quotes the indigenous historian Michale Witgen who concludes:

The US was founded as, and continues to be, a nation of settler immigrants locked into a struggle over the meaning of place and belonging with the Native nations of North America.

The scale of the extermination almost defies comprehension. In hte mid 19th century, around 100,000 Native people in California were "exterminated". Not just murered, but the entire ecological system that they had created was destroyed in a few years by people hunting for gold. Though, as Dunbar-Ortiz points out, if it had not been for their resistance "there would be no indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California", because the settler's "objective" was "to eradicate them".

The argument for a "nation of immigrants" is predicated on the idea that Native Americans no longer exist, no longer have any claim to land and that their history is essentially finished. In her book Dunbar-Ortiz shows however that that this is not true. The treaties and laws that dispossed indigenous people of their lands and livelihoods were ones that continue to be used, and must be challenged. A process of decolonisation is required, but this is one that would require the destruction of the settler colonial state itself. The process of immigration to the US has been a process whereby settlers and immigrants have been incorporated into the structures of settler colonialism itself. She says:

The migrant forced into migration to the US or other states structured on settler colonialism - Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel - is susceptible... to the ideology of settler colonialism, which in the US is imprinted in the content of patriotism, Americanism. Without consciousness of and resistance to this pull, the migrant can passively contribute to the settler-colonial order.

She continues:

This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It's a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers... It's a call for those who work tirelessly for workers' rights and working class solidarity to recognise that it's not nly racism that divides the working class but also the effects of settler colonialism. It limits workers' identification as even being working class and work solidarity in the US and with other workers of the world.

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to reject the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US... state". She says instead "a revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism".

At the core of this argument is one that says the structures of US imperialism and settler colonialism needed the dispossession of indigneous lands. Settlers were able to acquire this land and could reconsitute themselves as the original Americans. The structures, ideology and racism of this setup then shapes the attitudes of millions of people - and unless this is shattered, historic injustices and contemporary ones will continue.

Racism and settler colonialism are at the heart of US ideology - Dunbar-Ortiz shows the horrors of racism towards Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese people, among others. She also demonstrates how ideas of White Supremacy became central for many trade unionists and white workers, against Black and Asian people in particular.

But it is also true that the realities of life in the US constantly create a tension with these ideological realities. Growing numbers of people understand that the US is a society built upon systemic racism and white supremacy. Indeed the very success of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's earlier work, including her brilliant Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, demonstrates this (and shapes it, dialectically). Indeed, the recent retreat of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from Minneapolis following major protests by local people, demonstrates this. On ICE, Dunbar-Ortiz has written (quoting Mexican immigration historian Alexandra Délano Alonso):

The project of dismantling ICE can't be left to the will of the government; rather it will require reimagining society's vision of justice and "a reckoning with the racial and economic injustice built inot the 'nation of immigrants' from its very origins."

It is clear that tens of thousands of people have come to this conclusion as a result of Trump's recent actions in Minneapolis. The task for the US left is to ensure this mood is not diverted by the Democrats into another tiresome electoral strategy that embraces the "nation of immigrants" rhetoric and destroys the potential for generalisation of radical ideas.

But agency too matters. When Dunbar-Ortiz dismisses what she calls the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution" I felt obliged to ask what other alternative there was. What agency exists for the root and branch transformation of US society and the destruction, from the bottom up, of settler colonialism? Here, I think we have to note, that few workers actually gain a stake in the system from settler colonialism. Racism does, of course, divide. But it also disempowers White workers as well as Black workers.

The taking of indigenous land, which is central to the settler colonial project, produces "free land". But not everyone gets that, and when it "presented possibilities for white workers to own property", it also in doing so transformed them from their working class position into that of small producers and smallholders. In turn many of those workers were dispossed by big business and large landowners. Thus few workers have a material stake in the settler colonial society of today. This opens up a contradiction to be exploited. Settler colonialism offers something, but that is out of reach of most workers.

But, I want to emphasis, in concluding this review while these are important debates they do not undermine systematically the importance of Dunbar-Ortiz's central thesis. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project and it must be destroyed. The structures of settler colonialism in the US were emulated everywhere - from Nazi Germany to the racist South African apartheid state and Zionist Israel. Learning the lessons of its history and the resistance to it, are crucial to the liberation project for humanity. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book is a crucially imformative tool in developing our own revolutionary struggles.

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Brian W. Dippie - Custer's Last Stand: The anatomy of an American myth

In 1876 George Armstrong Custer's forces attacked a Native American village. In the battle that followed around half of his troops, including every single man that was with him, was killed. It was a major victory for the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho who had temporarily united and a significant blow to the US Army, and the American state which was in the middle of celebrating its centennial year.

There are a plethora of books about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which is known to White people as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I've reviewed some of them on this blog. There is a modern tendency to understand Custer as a spoilt, over-confident, inadequate military leader whose lust for glory led him and hundreds of troops to an early grave. This was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the Battle. Indeed as Brian W. Dippie's brilliant book points out it was not until the death of Custer's widow Elizabeth Custer in 1933 that more critical accounts began to circulate.

What did circulate in the aftermath of June 1876 was the myth of Custer's "Last Stand" and his heroic battle against "savage" hordes. Dippie's book is a study of the process by which this myth was constructed and the role it has played in how the US sees itself. The book was first published in 1976, and the edition I have was republished with a new introduction in 1994. In that introduction Dippie points out that some critics were frustrated by the repeated descriptions of the "last stand". These, Dippie shows, took places in multiple formats - reenactments, paintings, poetry (such terrible poetry), novels, comics and most recently films.

The problem of the Last Stand is it is a myth. As Dippie points out it was constructed immediately after the Battle with a press dispatch "from the field" reporting "Custer, surrounded bya chose band... all lying in a circle of a few yeard, their horses beside them". It made, according to Dippie, "a deep impression on the minds of contemporary Americans... they became the basis of a heroic national myth".

There is no need in this review to repeat the various accounts that Dippie has collected. Some of them are dire, and bear little resemblance to what happened at the Battle. Custer has, by turn, been ambushed by devious enemies, killed by a rush, killed escaping, died by his own hand, died by betrayal and died as literarily the last man, fighting with a cavalry sword (which neither he, nor any other cavalryman, were carrying on the day). There was a strong tradition of poetry being written, usually heroic, and almost always laughably bad. But poetry was widely read at the time and perhaps more than anything else it helped recast the defeat as a victory - even as Custer was lying in his grave.

But other formats have also played their role - some also influential on me. A very large number of paintings depicted the battle and continue to shape perceptions of how the fighting took place. Dippie notes that one of the most important was that distributed by brewer Anheuser-Busch in 1896. They began promoting Budweiser a million prints of "Custer's Last Fight" sent out to bars and pubs across America. Generations of drinkers looked at that painting as they sipped their beer. Similar paintings graced the covers of childrens books that impressionable kids like me read, marvelling at heroism in the face of American Indian savagery. Looking at the Anheuser-Busch print today one is struck by how laughable it all is. Custer standing tall in the middle of dead and dying soldiers brandishing a sword (he didn't have) as troopers are violently scalped and clubbed around him. Its an awful image that only surfices to portray Custer and his men as the brave, civilised people, in the midst of savagery.

Custer’s Last Fight (1888) by Cassilly Adams

There is a certain irony in this. Dippie points out that for Indians, "Custer is the core of a complex of white racist beliefes. For guilt-ridden whites in turn, he is a convenient cultural scapehoat: 'Custer died for our sins.' " But, he says, ironically, "Custer was no hardline racial bigot". However it's hard to agree completely with where Dippie takes this. "To cast him in the form of a zealous racial exerminator is simply to substitute rhetoric for fact". But in June 1876 Custer had every intention of exterminating a village of Native Americans, just as he had in 1868 when at the Battle of the Washita River Custer's troopers killed men, women and children in a Cheyenne camp.

Nonetheless Custer's death and the myth of the "last stand" became both a justification for further assaults and extermination of Native Americans and a myth of white supremacy. As Dippie concludes, of the Battle, "precisely because it was a deviation from the relentless pace of Western conquest, because it was a temporary imperiment in the path of that 'resistless restless race' of pioneers, Custer's Last Stand was elevated into a realm apart".

Dippie's systematic cataloguing and recounting of pictures, films, poetry and literature, demonstrates both the centrality of the myth to the US's self image and the construction of a particular vision of America. It is a fascinating account.

Claire North - Slow Gods

Claire North has a gift for unusual stories that usually meld fantastical elements (humans who relive their lives over and again; people who can take over other people's minds and bodies) with the gloriously normal worlds the rest of us inhabit. In Slow Gods however North has done something a little out of the ordinary for her. This time her novel has a principle character Mawukana na-Vdnaze who cannot die. Or rather they cannot stay dead ("I am a very poor copy of myself"). But they don't live on our Earth, they live in a very complicated galaxy dominated by a powerful corporation known as the Shine and a rather ineffectual UN type body called the Accord.

The interplanetary travel in this universe is conducted by means of arcspace. Gifted humans have to link into spacecraft and guide the ships through "the dark". In doing so they risk their minds and those of their passengers. Most humans can only do it a few times. But for some reason Mawukana na-Vdnaze can do it repeatedly, and with a precision that allows remarkable missions and occasional warfare. The Shine like to use piloting as a punishment. It's a sign of their cruelty.

Into this well thought out universe comes news from the Slow, and unknown alien force of enormous power. They inform worlds that a supernova will consume a densely inhabited part of the galaxy in a few decades, and leave humanity to try and cope. The Shine does little - rescuing handpicked individuals and people they need, leaving the masses to perish. Other planets do more, and pilots like Mawukana na-Vdnaze are in great demand to pilot refugee ships. Every great science-fiction novel is a reflection on our times, and those of us who've felt horror at dozens of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean can only imagine the horrors when billions are fleeing. Some people get a lottery ticket to escape. Others are left. The evacuation of one planet, Adjumir, sees its population desperately scrabbling to save their culture, traditions and history. But what can be saved? At the end those who've survived have begun to lose their songs and language - merging into their new locales.

In response to the failures to rescue people a resistance movement is born, and on some planets the Shine are fought to a standstill. Eventually the Accord is forced to act - not to save people, but to stop the Shine. Mawukana na-Vdnaze plays their own role, as spy, warrior and pilot. Part of the resistance to the Shine that first destroyed his own city.

Slow Gods is a complicated novel in places. I found North's development of Mawukana na-Vdnaze's story hard to follow as it was scattered through the book. But what worked well were interpersonal relations between Mawukana na-Vdnaze and their friends, comrades and lover. Here North plays around with gender (and lots and lots of pronouns) to flesh it all out vividly.

Ultimately I was left a little disappointed. The book is very much a metaphor for how society reacts to threats. The analogy with the supernova in a few decades time threatening to destroy everything, and the inaction over climate change is obvious and works well. But I found the story itself a little thin and underwhelming. So read it for the people, places and cultures that North portrays. Also a living spaceship made from trees and flowers.

Friday, January 30, 2026

Charlie Kimber & Judy Cox - Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When workers were ready to dare

On day in May 1926 when my grandfather was on his way home from school in Plymouth, he was astounded to see a tram tipped over by a crowd of people. It was such a vivid moment in his youth that in his nineties he could still recall it. It was his only recollection of the British General Strike, but it stuck with him even though it was the closest he ever got to the trade union movement.

This new book, written for the hundredth anniversary of the General Strike, has many such events in it. But I mention it as an opening to this review because it demonstrates one of the themes of Charlie Kimber and Judy Cox's important new book. May 1926 was a period of brutal class war, and the strikers were prepared to escalate and fight for victory. Responsibility for their defeat lay in the hands of the trade union leadership, not in their lack of courage.

This important corrective is needed because the General Strike has traditionally been remembered, outside of the radical left, as a time less of class struggle and more of classes rubbing shoulders. I remember being taught at school about strikers playing football with policemen. How surprised I would have been to hear that strikers derailed The Flying Scotsman the emblematic train of the time. My grandfather would have been less surprised. The authors give us a more examples:

On Wednesday 5 May, there were violent clashes between strikers and scabs in Poplar and Canning Town and around the Blackwall Tunnel [all in London] and cars were shashed and set alight. Newspapers reported that strikers 'tried to impede the progress of cars and motor buses', scabs driving buses had to run to escape violence and 'organised gangs' of strikers were baton-charged by the police. In Hammersmith seven buses were wrecked and fascists attacked strikers... A magistrate in Hammersmith declared, 'Women will be treated the same as men. They often inflame men's passions'.

Such reports demonstrate that this was no mere strike marked by peaceful picketing and protest. Rather, as the authors say:

In 1926, working class people made a huge leap of politics and of imagination by hurling themselves into the struggle. They did not know if they would win or not - but they were determined to try and assert the power of their class.

The General Strike was not an isolated event. It grew out of a long period of radicalism, which saw the British working class, like its comrades elsewhere, flexing its muscles and trying out its power. The run up to World War One and the immediate aftermath had seen strikes and revolutions across Europe. Britain had not been immune from that. 1919 had been a year of near revolution. 1926 saw the big battalions of the British working class taking action to defend their collective interests. The problem was that most workers had illusions in their trade union leaders. As the authors explain:

Trade union leaders and the full-time employees of the unions constitute a separate social stratum with their own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other. They become negotiators between workers and bosses instead of class fighters looking to end exploitation altogether... This makes them pull back from leading strikes in the militant direction which could lead to victory.

In 1926 the trade union leaders in Britain did everything they could to limit radicalism and undermine the strike. They were terrified of it getting out of hand. The worst of the leaders (including those in the Labour Party) made sure that the British ruling class knew that they were not under threat. Despite these flawed leaders, British workers demonstrated their desire to fight for real change. The authors write

Overall, strikers and other trade unionists set up some 300 Councils of Action during the strike. Some began to take over the local administration of society, the basis of elementary and temporary "dual power". It is in this sense that they gave a glimpse (no more than that) of workers' councils and soviets.

Workers "contested the way the TUC leaders had tried to constrain and narrow them politically".

Even the best books on the General Strike can downplay the role of women in the struggle. Revisiting the General Strike on the other hand explores the centrality of women to the struggle usually as active supporters (as the Hammersmith magistrate mentioned earlier demonstrated). The authors quote one local strike newspaper, "We would like to pay special tribute to the brave, enthusiastic and effective co-operation that has been given by the wives and other women relatives of the strikers."

But this support wasn't just passive, it was active in the sense that women took part in protests, meetings and pickets. By the time the strike ended and the miners' were locked out, women had to play a new crucial role in sustaining their communities. Soup kitchens and communal kitchens were set up, and women played a central role in making these work, which "added greatly to the solidarity of the whole community". The strike, and the lock out, also transformed things in the mining areas one commentator noted "there were concerts in every street, and the sense of fellowship in the community was more marked than at any other time."

Women were also central to "mass community mobilisations against scabbing in the South Wales coalfields", and many were arrested and fined.

The authors rightly describe the end of the strike as its "murder". The sell-out came as an enormous shock to strikers, most of whom were experiencing near total solidarity and an escalating number of workers' taking action. The trade union leaders turned off the dispute with vague promises from the government of no victimisation. The anger from below however was contained because there wasn't any political force capable of urging the workers on and taking control out of the hands of the leadership. The potential for that however is described by one of the most fascinating aspects to this book. These are the collection of dozens of telegrams from across the country and the trade union movement protesting the end of the strike. The authors have done an amazing job to get these into print for popular readers as they definitely demonstrate a different story to the one that will be made in May 2026 when various trade union leaders celebrate the anniversary. Let's quote a few:

Custom House: 14 May, Demand resumption of General Strike to safeguard positions of men who responded to the strike call.

Stafford: 13 May, Report extreme dissatisfaction with strike ending here

Hampstead: 14 May, There is a growing feeling locally that your leadership together with our standard of life is at stake

The telegrams once again demonstrate the key argument of Kimber and Cox - the strike showed of workers' growing confidence, their desire to fight for real change and a growing frustration with the established leadership. These were "Days of Hope". But they also were days when the British working class could have moved to a new level of struggle. Tragically the only significant socialist organisation at the time, the British Communist Party, had an incorrect understanding of the trade union leadership and despite its militants being the most frequently victimsed it had disarmed the movement by putting faith in the left trade union bureaucracy.

The book ends with two important final parts. The first is a study of the cultural impact of the Strike, particularly its influence on literature. Having never read Lady Chatterley's Lover I was intrigued to find that DH Lawrence had been inspired by the strike to include it in all three drafts, with growing levels of radicalism. But I was disappointed that the authors didn't mention my favourite example of the Strike in literature - its part in Goodbye Mr Chips (and it's imitator To Serve Them All My Days). The private schoolboys scab on the strike, but Chips surprises them with his sympathy for the workers. As the authors say the strike "shaped the work of the writers who lived through it. For some, it was a terrible reminder of the power of the working class struggle to uproot society. For others, it was a movement of inspiration and possibility).

Finally the book is aimed at a new, and emerging socialist movement. The book is not just a retelling of the history but an attempt to educate workers in the meaning of struggle and the lessons of the period. The inclusion of a glossary of keywords that are much forgotten today - pickets, rank and file organisation, solidarity - shows that the book is a tool to sharpen the struggle today. Read and use this excellent book and the anniversary of the General Strike to renew our fight against capitalism.

Related Reviews

Hinton & Richard Hyman - Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the early British Communist Party
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939
Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Len Deighton - Horse Under Water

*** Spoilers ***

Len Deighton's follow up to The Ipcress File begins in the same seedy post-war Europe that the first novel did. The anonymous hero of Horse Under Water may, or may not, be the same "hero" of the first book. Deighton's 2009 afterword makes it clear he doesn't know himself. It does not really matter, because the point Deighton seems to be making is that spycraft in the 1950s and 1960s was in the context of a cold Cold War and the economic decline of Western Europe.

Horse Under Water though has a difference, it's set in Portugal and Spain, by then they were holiday destinations - for a minority of people. Our spy hero meets his milkman on the flight Lisbon - but we aren't yet in an era of mass tourism. There's still an elements of exotic to the destinations, plane travel and general being abroad drinking coffee and eating local food. Deighton plays this well - not the fancy food of Ian Fleming, but the ordinary tasty working class fare that would appeal to his readers and to him as a cook.

The plot, as always, is convoluted. There's an old Nazi U-boat off the coast and the British want to get into it to grab forged cash that the Nazis had made to finance the resistance against Franco and for democracy. Other people also want the U-boat, but then it turns out that there might not be any cash, only drugs, and then it seems like the drugs are the tip of a rather nasty Nazi iceberg. In fact, it turns out that the Nazis who fled Germany on said U-boat, had in their possession a list of Nazi sympathisers from the Second World War who are now, leading figures in the British Tory Party. Who could have imagined it?

Either way our brave spy, naively hunts this list down in order to fight for democracy and against fascism, only to find out that his masters know already and don't really care. It's a bit grim. But realistic. British spies haven't exactly been known to be on the side of the angels.

Its a thrilling ride that leaves world-weary London with its fan heaters and damp behind, and gives the reader a glimpse of the sun and the exotic world of Southern Europe. There's a touch of the naive about it too. There's so exposition (bizarrely requiring a trip to the Welsh valleys) where the reader gets various types of drugs explained to them. Our hero still has to put in his expense claims at the end though, and there's little to show for it. A great little thriller and, it has to be said, it's a nifty pun title that you might only work out half way through.

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Ivan Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

Ride With Me, Mariah Montana is the final volume in Ivan Doig's English Creek trilogy. It's a sweeping history of Monata set in Doig's remote, and fictional, Two Medicine Country, nestled up near the top end of the Rocky Mountains. After the Native American's were displaced and destroyed it was a part of the world built on sheep, cattle and tourism. The book is set in 1989 as Montana is about to celebrate its centenary, which it should be noted, reminds us just how young much of America is.

One of Doig's strengths as a novelist is his books are not constrained by a format. He can write sweeping epics, and tight little stories focused on a handful of people. English Creek, the first but middle book of the trilogy is focused on Jick McCaskill, a teenager whose family is about to be torn apart as his elder brother falls in love and abandons the plans his family have made for him. The first volume, Dancing at the Rascal Fair also dealt with romance, but set against a breathtaking story of homesteading and the founding of a farming community. In Ride With Me, however Doig abandons both these styles and opts for a road trip featuring the now elderly Jick.

Jick, the bright teenager of English Creek, is now older and more cynical. He has just lost his wife and is bereft. As Montana's centenary approaches his daughter, Mariah approaches him. A photo-journalist, she has been commissioned to do a series of pieces about the centenary, and about Montana, with the star journalist Riley Wright from the local paper. Riley, unfortunately happens to be Mariah's former husband, whose spectacular falling out during the divorce appears to have been the talk of small town Montana. He also rejected Jick's offer to take over the ranch, threatening that the small farm would be subsumed into the big agricultural conglomerates that have been a disliked feature throughout the history of the state and the trilogy.

All this is a convoluted setup to explain why Jick is driving a Winnebago around the backroads of Montana with his daughter and ex-Son in Law in the back. It means that Doig is able to write about the places and people of Montana with his customary love and sensibility. There's plenty of history of course - including some sentimental stuff for Jick, and plenty of other stuff about the decline and fall of various Montana staples - the mining industry of Butte. I was also glad that Doig's characters acknowledged the Native American history, visiting Chief Joseph's final battle site (though oddly there's only a passing mention of the Little Big Horn).

While all this is fun, and its particularly cute for anyone who has done a Montana road trip as you'll recognise places, roads and so on. It makes for a less engrossing story that the early books. It feels like a crude attempt to tie up loose ends from the earlier books. One scene has Jick going to a local library and finding letters from his grandparents back and forth to Scandinavia. These are all characters from Dancing at the Rascal Fair and it all felt contrived.

All in all this was a disappointed finale and not up to the standard of Doig's other works.

Thursday, January 22, 2026

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

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

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.