Bryan D. Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025

The third volume of Bryan D. Palmer's trilogy on the history of Canada brings the account right up to the present date. Indeed, so recent is some of the material that it covers 2025. It means that there's the slightly uncanny experience, for this reader at least, of reading a history book cover events that are part of your own experience.

Palmer opens his book by making a general point about the period covered. Before the 1960s he says, there was  "scan indication" that oppositional movements could unite together. As both the previous volumes have shown, there is a long and rich tradition of resistance and organisation from below in Canada. This includes movements such as Indigenous struggles, working class movements, including radical socialist and anarchist ideas, movements against war and movements for liberation. At times, particularly in the period covered in the first book, when those movements failed to unite. Had they done so, they was a potential for systemic and radical change. But Palmer says about the first decades covered in this volume:

In the 1960s, voices of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism gew louder, amplified in many ways. There were also hints that the long-standing divide keeping those challenging the profit system and those opposing colonial thought and practice separate and consequently weakened was breaking down. This 1960s development was paralleled by a strengthening and increasing penchant for militancy among mainstream working-class trade unions and Indigenous organisations, groups and associations.

What these movements saw was a proliferation of radical groups, parties and organisations - a process that mirrored what was happening elsewhere in the world as the post-war boom turned to economic and political crisis, and the movement against US imperialism was fuelled by resistance on the ground. Revolutionary ideas inspired these movements. In Canada, "anti-capitalist and anti-colonial thought... captivated those drawn to the New Left" and "causes traversed one another". Palmer tells the story of an Abortion Caravan that left Vancouver in April 1970, but by the time it reached the capital, some of its participants were also raising demands as "Victory to the NLF" and "Smash Capitalism" was written on the outside.

The peculiarities of Canadian history however added new factors to the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Quebec, there was an "upsurge of radical nationalism, supported by many Québécios workers" which built upon a movement for independence that had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. The movement included many who saw colonialism and capitalism as the "enemy". Canada's 1968 moment, in the summer of that remarkable year, saw a massive protest at Dorval Airport near Montreal. Traffic was stopped, buses set afire and molotov cocktails thrown. Gunshots were heard. Palmer says:

New Left aspirations, anti-colonialist indépendantiste demands, and a militant class struggle and anti-capitalist politics thretaened to come together. This was a rare development in Canada... The often young and unusually militant Quebec sovereigntists situatied their struggle within the global anti-colonail mobillisations of the 1960s. They railed against the mainstream politicians and capitalist interests, both French and English-speaking. They held this rich elite responsible for deepening the subordination of oppressed and working-class Québécios.

These revolutionary and radical ideas "appeared to resonate with wider sectors of society" terrifying the ruling class. Here, as in the previous volumes, Palmer places the history of Indigenous people, and their resistance, central to his account. He shows how revolutionary ideas influenced "Red Power" movements, and these in turn, fed back into wider radicalisation. In 1969, the Government struck back, it appeared to offer concessions, but did so by arguing that the Indigneous peoples of Canada, where "burdened... with a historically constued paternalism" this required dismantling and an end to the allocation of "First Nations a plus status as an addition t their citizenship".  While superficially appearing radical, in reality this "would inevitably leave First Nations peoples without any possibility of successfully pursuing land claims or holding on to entitlements that shored up their traditional ways of life". The backlash, including the publication of the tremendously successful book The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, saw a retreat by the Canadian government, but it did see the "drift of Indigenous leadership into collaboration with the colonial state" and the decline of the revolutionary Red Power movement.

The radicalism of these movements was the context for a wider awaking of knowledge of Canada's colonial past. In the years after the 1960s Canada saw renewed attempts at control of radical movements and First Nations peoples, what Palmer calls "coercive continuities". If the 1960s had seen Red Power, revolutionary radicalism and "class war from below", including some spectacularly powerful trade union movements, 1975 onward saw "class struggle from above". The political and economic gains of the 1960s  that had been won by working class and First Nations struggles, were eroded as Canada turned toward neoliberalism and austerity to try and resolve the contradictions of its economic crisis. This period saw systematic and brutal deindustrialisation as thousands of workers lost their jobs. In Montreal, for instance, between 1976 and 1996, 27,000 jobs in the garment industry were lost. What strikes there were, were unable to significantly turn this tide. In the case of Montreal, a strike against job losses was sold out, a "scathing indictment of the cozy relationship between the union leadership and garment industry bosses".

The final chapters of this book are perhaps the most depressing. They paint a picture of Canada dominated by economic precarity, low levels of struggle and rampant capitalism - massive levels of homelessness, low wages and economic insecurity are one picture of the period. But Palmer is careful to note that there is resistance, including another rise in the level of organisation by First Nations peoples, often building links with the wider working class movements. This includes the struggles against oil infrastructure and the expose of the horrors of the Residential School system. A horrific chapter on the "murdered and missing Indigenous Women", the thousands of women who have lost their lives and disappeared, makes it clear that much more needs to be done. Indeed the racism at the heart of the Canadian state continues to be exposed by the lack of action on this.

The weakness of the trade union movement, Palmer argues, means that there is a tendency for the trade unions to respond to the current economic situation, including the pressures from the Trump administration, with nationalist answers rather than class struggle. As the labour movement lines up behind national demands, "working people and their interests were hitched to the cart of Canadian capital and the state". 

Palmer's book is, however, written in the spirit of the need to rebuild a new and radical left, that can shift the narrative. If the urgent need is there, so the crisis creates the potential. As Palmer says Canadian capitalism, like that around the world, is "increasingly riddled with contradictions and challenges". Understanding the history of Canada, and the interplay between class struggle, anti-colonial and Indigenous resistance, and updating that for the 21st century is an urgent need.

The final volume of such a series will be distorted by the narrowing of the writer's lens. If the first two books covered sweeping periods of history, this later book covers shorter periods in more detail. This reflects both the author's and the readers' experiences. Inevitably it means that things are missed. For instance I thought it would have been helpful to have more detail on the growth of Canadian fossil capitalism and the politics and economics of (say) the Tar Sands. But this is a minor complaint against a powerful book and a wonderful series. Everyone who is interested in the fight for liberation and the struggle against capitalism today ought to read these three books.

If Bryan D. Palmer's book teaches us anything it is that the history of Canada shows that ordinary people have frequently resisted oppression and exploitation, and they have often done so in the most militant and inspiring ways. The knowledge of that history will be immeasurably helpful in rebuilding the sort of radical left we need to face the challenges of 21st century capitalism. Palmer is owed a huge vote of thanks.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960

Bryan D. Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960

Volume two of Bryan D. Palmer's trilogy on the history of Canada begins where the previous book left off. But, as Palmer immediately notes, Canada on the cusp of the twentieth century "was remarkably different than the disparate collection of British North American colonies" that had come out of the 17th century. Canada was now a fully fledged capitalist nation, with economic crises to prove it, and part of a global capitalist economy. Capitalism was "most assiduously cultivated in the open yeaes of the twentieth century" writes Palmer. The country "took off" economically in the period before 1914 and by every aspect of measurement the economy was growing. New technologies were introduced, whole new industries appeared, and class relations were "reconfigured".

The opening chapters explore this growth in different sectors. This was a period of class struggle from below and above, and one of consolidation of the economy. Palmer writes:

The layers of colonialism in which Canada was richly enveloped grew increasingly complicated, with capital imports rising to £100 million annually in 1911-1913. British capital supplied three-quarters of this influx... securing the loyalty of the Canadian chartered banks"... On the eve of the First World War, 60 per cent of Canada's government debt was held abroad, and servicing this borrowing consumed one-quarter of the country's export earnings.

At the same time the Canadian government was continuing and expanding its colonial control at home. New laws oppressed Indigenous people still further, and "Ottawa also worked diligently to extend the domination of the Dominion into the last frontier of capitalist exansion, an enclve of the preservation of Indigenous ways of life: the resource-rch North." Finally, "francophone Quebec" was further subordinated within the Confederation. There were also significant examples of workers' resistance and organisation in this period. But the key line of development was the increased centralisation and consolidation of capital.

While there were significant economic differences through the Canadian regions, there was a general growth in large corporations such as steel manufacturing, coal and industrial farming. But the wealth from these accrued to a small minority of the population. Hard work by miners, industrial workers and farmers drove capital accumulation, but they were not its main beneficiaries. Take farming. Palmer explains that on the prairies:

It was wheat... that proved the major engine of capital accumulation... the single most important crop enticing homesteaders. They settled on some ninety-nine million acres of land between 1870 and 1927, successfully patenting 58.2 million acres by 1930. Settlers bought more land than they acquired for free through federally overseen pre-emptions, with fifty million acres purchased from the railways, Hudson's Bayt Company and other agents... These lands, traditionally the territory of various First Nations, sustained the wheat economy of the Canadian west. Harvests of the prairies proved a juggernaut of capital formation for the railways and their beneficiaries, the monopolistic grain elevator owners who controlled the sales and distribution of what. Powerful interests like these bled farmers dry.

Such growth required massive numbers of workers. Between 1901 and 1931 Canada's population nearly doubled. Urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver grew at astonishing rates. The immigrants who came arrived from enormously different areas, and experienced appalling racism.

The prejudice and poverty faced by these recent arrivals disfigured Canada, the intolerance they confronted paralleling the marginalisation and discriminatory treatment accorded the country's original colonised peoples. Confederation's economic margins now included First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Québécois, the labouring poor, the immigrant masses, most Maritimers and wage-earning women, whose pay in the 1920s averaged 54-60 per cent that of males.

These immigrants had arrived hopeful of owning and farming land. The Canadian government "extolled the virues of European peasants as the kind of human material best suited to the settlement of the West" but most lacked the experience and resources and instead usually "ended up as itinerant harvesers... peripatetic railroad navvies...miners; or the lowest-paid labourers in industrial factories." 

There was, inevitably, a racist dimension too. These immigrants "became the racialised 'other', scapegoated in the social construction of a Canada htat had to be constantly remade in the image of a British Dominion championed as 'White, forever'."

One of the great strengths of Palmer's histories of Canada is his subtle exploration of the relationship between capital and colonisation. Thus he traces the impacts of capitalism's expansion on the First Nations, Métis and Innuit peoples and its impact on the workers. The growth of new industry, followed by the industrial decline and depopulation of the Maritimes or the expansion of capital and resource extraction into the North and the displacement and genocidal policies against the Innuit. These are handled with care and thought, and never once does Palmer dimminish the horror of what happened to First Nations, the oppressed and exploited. Canada's colonism wasn't just internally. It was central to expansion of the British Empire into the global south: "Sugar refineries in Canada, for instance, were at the centre of capital's expansion in the 1890-1914 years". Imports of sugar from Asia transformed the people and economies of places like Fiji. These were now part of the "sphere of influence" that Canadian capital cultivated. Canadian banks were at the forefront of expansion into South America and the Carribean. 

The middle part of the book covers the Great Depression and the horror experienced by working people in the 1930s, it also covers a great period of resistance. Massive strikes, in particular in the "year of rebellion" 1937, saw millions of workers fighting back over pay and conditions. This also saw an expression electorally with the growth of the Communist Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Palmer traces the evolution of these groups, and their intersection, well. For those on the Canadian left this is probably a well trod path. For most of us outside of Canada it will be very new material. 

Canadian capitalism did not recover until World War Two. Palmer accurately describes this as "capital's saviour". But production of food, weapons and ammunition drove the Canadian economy to new heights, bringing new opportunities for women workers'. Economically it was also transformative. US capitalism spent "nearly $12 billion" in Canada during the war, which "helped keep the wartime domestic economy huming and further solidified the Dominion's integratin into a new continentalism, driven by rising American demand". Uranium mining in Canada also meant the country, and its government, became closely linked to the US atomic bomb programme. Coming out of the War the Canadian government needed to implement a Welfare State - much like in Britain, fear of further workers' rebellion fuelled the belief in reforms to buy off the potential threat. But it is striking to learn that so racist was the Canadian state that the original plans for Welfare did not even feature the poorest Canadian people - the First Nations.

By the end of the period, "obvious voices of anti-capitalism" and anti-colonialism were "quieted" and "in retreat". the left was weaker and the post-war consensous seemed to have gained for the trade union movement "much of what it had long sought to attain". But the 1960s were to be a "decade of tumultuous change and oppositional turmoil" and would see Indigenous movements, those of the oppressed and organised workers, and the left, grow and pose radical challenges. But, argues Palmer, these changes were all rooted in a the longer trajectory of colonialism and capitalism boom and slump across Canada.

This book tells a wonderful, if frustrating, story. In the face of a vicious, settler, state power, working and Indigenous people were sacrified to the interests of capital. Resistance was almost continuous. But with the exception of the period after World War One and the later 1930s, rebellion did not fundamentally challenge capital. Palmer tells the story of the few brave radicals who led that fight, and more emerges in the final period in the third volume. But this reader felt that there were too many missed opportunities for radical resistance.

I enjoyed volume two almost as much as Palmer's first volume. I was surprised at the ommission of two things. One was any mention of the experience of Canadian troops during World War One. I had expected that the slaughter in the trenches would have had a political impact back home, but this was not discussed. Secondly I was surprised that there was little discussion of far-right and Nazi politics in Canada in the 1930s. Was there such a movement like much of the rest of the world? Was there anti-fascist resistance? These omissions aside, Palmer's sweeping history is excellent.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025

Bryan D. Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890

Running through this, the first of a trilogy of books on Canada's history, is an emphasis on the way that Indigenous Peoples were dispossed of their land and power through the "reciprocal historical projects" of colonialism and capitalism. "Canada's story", Bryan D. Palmer writes, "has always involved the interface of colonialism and capitalism,even as the latter was not truly and unambiguously established". The expansion of colonial powers into what is now called Canada, and the development of capitalism, saw the "obliteration" of some Indigenous People, and the subjection of all to a "cultural genocide" which, "was thwarted by Ingenous resiliency, as continuous historically as was the process of dispossesion that First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people resisted".

This first volume of the trilogy traces this process. But it begins with what was lost. Palmer explores the First Nations life before colonialism. This was not a Utopia, but it was one with a completely different conception of property to that of Europeans. One of the first European settlers, Jazues Cartier was, according to Palmer, "unsettled" by his encounter with the "original inhabitants of the St. Lawrence Valley". He sais, "These people live as it were in a community of goods". A frightening thing for Europeans obsessed with money and natural resources as a source of wealth accumulation. 

This "community of goods" meant that Europeans would struggle with their relations with First Nations. The seemingly free landscape was not unused or unvalued. First Nations expected compensation for the loss of resources, and were prepared to fight if they didn't get it. 

But Palmer is also careful not to idolise pre-colonial Canada. He quotes an incredulous First Nations account of visiting Paris in 1649 shocked at the extreme poverty adjacent to the wealth of the Court. But he rejects a romantic view of Indigenous Peoples. They suffered "want and war" and sometimes "abhorred one another". But Palmer notes how this view often dominated early accounts of Canadian history (and some more recent ones):

Romanticized notions of the innate goodness of Indigenous people - the 'noble savage' or the ecological preservationist - are thus misplaced, the mirror image of stereotypical, ethnocentric denigrations... Both judgements should give rise to discerning skepticism.

But, he also points out that colonialism destroyed all the realities of Indigenous life, upsetting and transforming social and cultural relations and dividing, or increasing, divisions between groups. As he says:

A struggle for dominance in the fur trade pitted First Nations against one another in new, intensified ways. Commerical, commodified exchange relations with white traders played a significant role in an evolving state of conflic, undeniably exacerbated by the introduction of trade goods, European-based pathogens and technologies.

The Canadian state, which emerges out of the colonial conflict between Britain and France, and then that between Britain and the US, was shaped by white supremacy, racism and the acceptability of forced dispossession and genocide. Canada itself was "born a conservative, counter-revolutionary colony" shaped by wider forces of industrial development and colonial conflict. But it was also born in the era of Revolution and this meant that Canada's capitalist development had to be "mirrored... in a rhetoric of constitionalist, liberal-democratic rights".

The contradiction of Canada's supposed liberalism and its treatment of Indigenous Peoples and workers is a key part of Palmer's analysis in the second part of the book. The development of industrial Canada, based on its plentiful natural resources - land, wood, fish, coal and so on - combined with racist genocide and the brutal exploitation of workers shapes the country on the eve of the 20th century. 

The early Canadian capitalist class also had to be wary of a different dynamic. As land became the "decisive" commodity European settlers could hope to break free of their proletarian chains. Indeed just as in the United States, capitalism's development depended on a section of people doing just that and in doing so "opened up and developed land, enhancing the value of the larger holds of the elite". Simultaneously this helped to discipline and further displace Indigenous Peoples. But the capitalist class were worried. Lord Goderich, the British colonial secretary, worried in 1831 that "without some division of labour, without a class of persons willing to work for wages, how can society be prevented from falling to a state of almost primitive rudeness, and how are the comforts and refinements of civilised life to be procured?" 

It is tempting to think that the "primitive rudeness" that Lord Goderich feared was one of "community of goods", but what this illuminating paragraph actually shows is that the capitalist class knew that they had to fight to construct a society in their interests. It was, as Palmer notes, the story of English enclosures "all over again" but "in a colonial setting in which Indigenous displacement seemingly created land's availability".  At the same time though the British state was terrified of losing control of its wealthy colony, and deliberately tried to hold back industrial development in order to keep Canada's reliance on Britain.

The book's final chapters trace how, in the aftermath of independence, the late 1800s in Canada were characterised by two parallel processes. The first was the further dispossesion of First Nations, including such brutal experiences as Residential Schools, as well as their resistance including the Métis rebellion in 1885. The second process was a massive wave of workers' resistance and trade union struggle which emerges from the development of a new industrial working class. The "Great Upheavel" of 1886 saw mass strikes and the ruling class feared revolution. But the failure of these struggles to break through partly lay in the inability of the struggles to connect. This reflects, Palmer argues, the "Canada's history of uneven capitalist development combined with its historically evolving colonialism" which structure the struggles differently. The tragedy was the failure of these two struggles to connect in significant ways. And while Palmer highlights the "faint indications" that "both challenges to capitalism and colonialism were nonetheless gravitating in directions that might feed into common struggles", he also notes:

Labour's uprising rarely espoused an unequivocal anti-capitalism to the same extent that the Métis-led war of resistance in the North-West categorically rejected colonialism.

Having said this, Palmer finishes his fantastic book on a positive note: 

Canadians need not be confined in the shapes that colonialism and capitalism have hammered out for them, over centuries, on an anvil of developmental determination. Paths once taken can be reversed; choices advocated and refused might now well be embraced, adapted to new circumstances. And struggles long separated from one another can be brought into new and exhilarating alignment.

It's a fitting conclusion for a remarkable history that traces the tragedies and horror that mark the birth of Canada at the same time as celebrating the struggles and resistance that shaped the state. I look forward to the next two volumes which will no doubt show these processes continuing in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960
Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Krasowski - No Surrender: The land remains Indigenous
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Fagan - The First North Americans
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

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

Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

One of the first things that struck me about Thomas King's famous account of "Native People in North America" is that The Invonenient Indian doesn't particularly take much notice of the border between Canada and the United States. After all this imaginery line is really only that. Imaginery. The people who lived in North America (or Turtle Island as some groups describe it) didn't distinguish between the two nation states that were eventually imposed upon them. This ought to be an obvious point.

But so used are we to thinking about the nation state, that we impose it backward. King's book doesn't make that mistake, though in his history of people he does deal with the different paths that have led to different laws, politics and struggles among indigenous people. He writes "while the line that divides the two countries is a political reality, and while the border affects bands and tribes in a variety of ways, I would have found it impossible to talk about the one without talking about the other."

The second thing that struck me was one of King's comments about the hunt for the correct term for the people of North America. First Nations, Indians, Native Americans. What was the correct phrase to use? "Why do we need one?" he counters. After all these were not a single group of people at all.

The point I got from these initial thoughts was how easy it is to slip into very crude and simple approaches to people that stem from the world we live in today. "Being", Marx said, "determines consciousness". And the modern framework of nation states, imperialism and earlier colonialism still shapes these thoughts. 

Thus King's book is refreshing in that its narrative is not a simple linear one of conquest, defeat and oppression. Though this material is all there - and sometimes it is shocking and unpleasants. Rather it is a discussion of what it means in terms of how Native Americans (for want of a better term) are seen, indentified, protrayed and understood by non-Native Americans today. King uses two categories to explain this, the Dead Indian and the Live, or Legal, Indian. The former is acceptable in a sense, because it is the Indian that lives in the imagination - in a thousand western films, or in books, or on food containers. It is the Native American of fantasy. It is one that can be dressed up as. The Legal Indian is the existing one, who has rights and land and as King says in a reprinted interview at the end of this book, "the Legal Indian is the Indian that Canada is trying to kill. They don't want no more Legal Indians".

Here King touches on the way that the "Legal" indian, with their land and (some) rights is a barrier to North American capitalism. Their land ownership, their legal rights, their reservations stop the profit machine. Here is the "inconvenience" of the title - the fact that Indians have fought for their rights, to defend and extend them - from the Indian Wars to the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. Some of the best parts of the book are those where King describes these more rescent struggles - or at least the battles of the 20th century over fishing rights, land access or wealth.

King makes a final, and important, point. He rejects the idea of a static Native American culture, or indeed one that is particularly mystical. Instead he says that "the fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms." Reality means that doing that will mean a constant struggle - against racism, oppression and exploitation. King's book shows that there is a long tradition of that and he does this with verve, passion and humour. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Estes - Our History is the Future

John Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

I write this review in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Milton's devastation of parts of Florida. Milton followed Helene, just a week or so earlier. Both hurricanes cut a swathe through parts of North America, leaving death and destruction in their paths. John Vaillant's recent book Fire Weather is subtitled a "true story from a hotter world" and the story of hurricanes Milton and Helene could have shared that subtitle. They were both made worse by the hotter world we now live on. Scientists and environmentalists have longed warned about the feedback mechanisms of a warmer planet. As the world gets warmer, climate change further encourages the warming of the world. This cycle accelerates the speed of warming. The catastrophes that accompany a hotter planet come thicker and faster.

Fire Weather deals with just one such catastrophe, but it is an emblematic and enlightening one, the destruction of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016. There's a grim feedback mechanism in play here, for McMurray is at the heart of fossil fuel capitalism. It was for many years a boomtown driven by the wealth of the region's tar sands. The bitumen deposits here are difficult to turn into profitable commodities. But when the price of oil is high enough there are bonanzas to be made. McMurray was a town built on bonanza. 

Vaillant traces the history of McMurray, and indeed, the history of industrial capitalism's obsession with oil. Its a fascinating story that shows the way that capitalism embedded nature, and its resources, into a global commodity system. McMurray started off as an isolated place where animal skins and fur were trapped and sold, before morphing into an (isolated) 21st century oil city. Weaved in with this history is a longer story of humanity's relationship with fire. Combustion, burning, fire are essential for humans. We need fire for travel, heating and food. But fire is also intrinsic to nature. The boreal forests that surround McMurray for tens of thousands of square miles need fire to renew and propagate. Humans think of such fires as a threat that needs to be fought - an invading army that has to be countered with traps, weapons and occasional retreat (the retreats are more common now). But the fires that engulf Alberta are part of that ecological system, its just that (unfortunately for humanity) they are more frequent, more intense and more common in a warming world.

Vaillant explains fire to us. But his use of metaphor is interesting. Describing how wildfires crossover ("when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsisus exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage") and become an exponentially faster, more agile, more dangerous fire, Vaillant says that "if unregulated free market cpaitalism were a chemical reaction, it would be a wildfire in crossover conditions". He continues "Alberta's bitumen industry follows a similar growth pattern, with market forces standing in for weather."

Capitalism is the problem here. It drives an endless accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation, based on an insastiable burning of natural resources. It is a wildfire of production, and as it grows it sucks in more nature, more humanity and expels material that pollutes and destroys. The irony of McMurray is that it was destroyed by its own forces of production, or rather the consequences of the usage of the use-values it produced. In fact Vaillant's book is really about the intersection of urban fossil fuel capitalism and wildfire. As he writes:

Combustive energy had drawn people to For McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon... the exodus of May 3 [2016] was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes.

With Hurricane Milton in mind, as well as Vaillants accounts of the escape from McMurray, it might be that the defining images of 21st century global warming in the Global North will be endless streams of SUVs and trucks driving away from environmental disasters. Climate refugees from the Global South are met with barbed wires and closed borders. In the Global North the Ford F-150s were given a much friendlier welcome. In one way the Fort McMurray fire was a very unusual climate disaster. Unusual circumstances combined with a rare urban environment: 

Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousands petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of dessicated trees.

But as Vaillant points out, "this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI [Wildland Urban Interface] fire." Once in a lifetime events are becoming once in a decade events. Soon they'll be more common. 

If Vaillant had only written the story of McMurray and the urban-wildfire environment it would have been a fine book. But at the heart of the story is that of McMurray's population. His account of the desperate evacuation, the struggle of the authorities to adjust to rapidly changing and unprecedented fire condition and the battle of the firefighters itself is a remarkable account of the reality of disaster in modern neoliberal society.

It is the story of a city that is really unable to deal with the disaster, not because of incompetence, or lack of training, or even lack of resources (something that most people in the world facing disaster will not have), but because there was no real understanding that a disaster on this scale could even happen. In many ways McMurray was better prepared than most cities for fire, because it could draw on the resources and fire-fighting experience provided by the oil industry itself. But the failure to control the fire happened because it was on a scale far beyond imagination. In fact clear is that traditional fire fighting doesn't work in the in the 21st century WUI, and new methods of fire control need to be learnt. Interestingly it seems that allowing firefighters and workers to make decisions based on events and knowledge, rather than centralied leadership, is one lesson to be learnt from these massive fires.

Reading Vaillant's account of the breakdown of control I was reminded of those highly popular 1970s brick sized novels epitomised by Arthur Hailey. In those wonderful disaster stories, tiny mistakes and failures would accumulate into a giant failure. In McMurray there were plenty of such failures that combined to help the fire reach epidemic proprtions, but there was no lack of bravery. In fact the stories of the firefighters and indeed ordinary workers who fought day after day to save their city are inspiring. One wonders what is left for them. Vaillant quotes one Radio director who said afterward, "imagine a city - thousands of people - all living in everyday harmony, each and every one with some aspect of PTSD."

There's going to be more. Vaillant writes that "hotter and drier now, the atmosphere has been tilted in fire's favour". As the hammer of global warming drives more and more hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and floods against the anvil of capitalism's fractured and divided society, there will be endless death and destruction. There will also be plenty of PTSD for the survivors. But the bravery, industry and inventiveness of the workers who fought the fire in McMurray, and who rebuilt the town, are the potential force for change. John Vaillant concludes his superb book, by arguing for a different vision to that offered by fossil fuel capitalism - "devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal, rather than combustion and consumption". Let's hope that these are the lessons of Fort McMurray, and hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Related Reviews

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Alan D. McMillan & Eldon Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada

Perhaps the first thing that strikes readers of this history of the Canadian First Nations peoples, is the sheer variety of ways of life that existed before the arrival of Europeans. From the Arctic peoples who lived in extreme cold, hunted seals, fished and gathered very little food, to those living on the plains, hunting bison or engaging in farming and those living from the vast salmon runs of the West Coast, or hunting and gathering in the extensive forests of the east.

An extremely crude version of Canadian (indeed North American) aboriginal history would simply separate the periods into that pre-European arrival and then post-European time. Some First Nations people have their own version of this, the "Dog Days" versus the "Horse Days", remembering a time when positions were moved with the help of Dogs and then, after European's had introduced horses, a time when travel (as well as hunting) was changed.

But what this book demonstrates is that there is an enormously history of those who arrived in the Americas via the Bering land bridge some 12,000 years ago. They arrived in a "Terra Nullius", a land empty of people, but stocked full of flora and fauna. The authors discuss at length how the first people arrived - contrasting the tradition view of an overland crossing with a suggestion that many people would have travelled along the coast lines. Over the intervening time span, humans spread to every corner of the continent, and adapted to live in a myriad of different ways.

Over time, the aboriginal cultures developed and changed. Some died out, victims of hunger or conflict with other groups. This process accelerated as Europeans arrived, particularly as a result of the diseases that came with them, but also as a result of violence and war. Thus the societies that existing at the point of European contact were not ones that had been fixed for thousands of years. They were the result of the First Nations own history, a history that would have continued on its own path had it not been interrupted by European arrival.

Contact with the global economy transformed aboriginal life. In part the existence of metal tools, guns and horses had an immediate effect on life. But so did the particular nature of the relationship. Many Europeans on the west and east coasts wanted enormous quantities of furs or skins. Purchasing these from the native people, transformed those societies. Now they hunted not for food, or to satisfy needs, but to produce commodities for trade. In one case mentioned in the book, warfare took place that may have annihilated the St. Lawrence Iroquois, as a rival group the Stadaconans tried to monopolise trade with the French.

At the core of this book is a detailed examination of the changing life of different First Nations peoples. This is rooted in archaeology and anthropology, but also the culture and knowledge that we have from encounters with these people since European Contact. Indeed, each section begins with an extensive look at the history of the different groups, then finishes with a history of the time of European contact and finishes by bringing the history up-to-date by discussing the group's experience during the "global era".

I found this later part quite illuminating. The struggles of the First Nations people against the emerging nation state of Canada, were struggles for survival. They were also struggles to protect a heritage. Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, First Nations peoples continue to have to fight for their rights and compensation for how they were treated in the past. Even as late as the 1980s remnants of old Indian Acts several restricted the rights of "Indians" to move, to drink or to work. Much has changed, but much must still change. The First Nations people are not a living museum, they are a people with a rich history which continues to develop. The great strength of this book is to link that history to today, and present a continuity of struggle.

Related Reviews

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Andrew Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

Capitalism is a fossil fuel system. For historical as well as economic and physical reasons fossil fuels have fuelled the system's accumulation of wealth. However none of these resources are infinite and as oil in particular becomes increasingly difficult to extract the question of how to fuel the system becomes more and more important. So important is oil, that as one expert points out in this book, a super-tanker must arrive at a US port every four hours.

One solution not discussed in this book is a rapid and immediate shift to renewable energy. A number of studies have been done that demonstrate that this is both viable and possible. I won't rehearse these arguments here but direct interested readers to this article.

Another answer (one favoured by the fossil fuel companies themselves) is to find alternate sources of fossil fuels. Andrew Nikiforuk's important book examines one of the most controversial (and I would argue dangerous) sources of the new "extreme energy" - the tar sands. In particular he concentrates on the tar sands of Alberta, Canada.

His story is one that brings together current environmental disaster, with government mismanagement, corporate greed, corruption, destruction on an enormous scale and future climate change. It is not an easy read because it is a horrific example of the way that corporations place their short-term profits ahead of people and planet. But more than this, it is a demonstration of the way that the system itself is geared towards encouraging this. Rather than being a restraining block on the corporate destruction of the environment in Alberta, local and national government has enthusiastically assisted. Sadly this isn't simply a result of particularly bad Canadian politicians (though they clearly are). Nikiforuk demonstrates the way that oil rich nations historically have followed the same path, one that gradually reduces restraints on fossil fuel companies at the same time as simultaneously undermining democratic rights.

This is one of those books that are hard to review because you feel obliged to get across dozens of facts to the casual reader. My copy is crisscrossed with pencil marks because I felt every salient point needed to be noted and remembered. For this reason I encourage people to buy or borrow the book as my review cannot do justice. But I want to use a few examples.

Firstly the tar sands are an enormous reservoir of fossil fuel. Readers in the UK or Europe may have no idea of the scale. Nikiforuk points out that the "megaproject will eventually destroy or industrialize a forest the size of Florida". The attraction of the tar sands to the oil companies has brought enormous investment (some $200 billion so far). The high cost in part lies in the remoteness of the locations, in part because of the difficulty of extracting usable oil from the tar sands themselves.

Two tons of earth have to be dug out of the ground to make a single barrel of bitumen. Extracting it requires lots of energy and lots of water. In fact, for every barrel of bitumen companies need to use three of fresh water. Needless to say the water is rarely if ever left clean enough to be used again. As rivers dry up poisonous tailings pools surround mining areas, killing plants and animals and threatening to leak into water systems. The scale of this is unbelievable, Nikiforuk quotes one ecologist pointing out that a century ago, all water in Alberta was drinkable but now "all water is non-potable and must be chemically treated" (p79)

The companies involved like to tell the world that this will not destroy the planet. But it is already doing so and not simply because of deforestation and polluted streams. "Each barrel of bitumen produces three times as much greenhouse gas as a barrel of conventional oil". One company (Imperial Oil) wanted to produce four open-pit mines which would produce more greenhouse gas emissions than 800,000 cars. Unsurprisingly Canada's emissions of greenhouse gases in 2004 were up, 51% on 1990. No wonder Canada felt obliged to pull out of the Kyoto treaty.

It gets worse. The area being destroyed by the tar sands extraction is one of the world's most important "sinks" for carbon dioxide. As Nikiforuk points out, "excavating one of Canada's best carbon sinks and weather stabilizers to produce a product with three times the carbon footprint of conventional oil may be an example of global freak economics.

Freak economics it certainly is. Tar sands can in no way prevent peak oil. At best it can slow down the decline very briefly. But even then few in Canada are seeing the benefit. The main beneficiary is the US which gets the oil it needs and frequently does so with subsidisation from Canadian tax dollars. Rarely however do those tax dollars come from the oil companies themselves, who, as the author points out, have lived a life of ease through handouts and deals that mean little of the profits they make from the destroying the country feed back into government coffers.

There is much more to this book. The impact on human health for instance, the appalling destruction of life that takes place when oil towns flourish and cast aside men and women through drink, drugs and workplace accidents or the cancers that arise from the pollution. Nikiforuk is particularly good on demonstrating the way that the Canadian government has become implicit in the tar sands exploitation, as well as the lies that are used to demonstration that tar sands are not destructive, and good for the economy.

Having lauded this book enough I want to make a few criticisms. The first of these is the lack of detailed footnotes. While there is an extensive bibliography the author and publishers have chosen not to footnote the text.This means that we cannot be sure of the source of any of the figures quoted (including the ones I've used in this review). This is a shame because as is made clear in the afterword the book has come under criticism from those in the oil industry and government and with material like this one needs to be confident of sources.

Secondly and far more importantly, Nikiforuk does not argue that the bitumen needs to be left in the ground. I think that this is a crucial position that environmentalists, radicals and activists must take with regard to extreme energy. If we are to stop runaway climate change we cannot burn this oil. We have to find alternate ways of fuelling our economy. The risk is summed up by James Hansen who pointed out in the NY Times that;

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.

Hansen argues that it would be "game over" if the tar sands are extracted. Nikiforuk instead argues that there need to be caps on production from the tar sands and a gradual wind down of the use of fuel from the tar sands. "If North America's cars and trucks are still running on bitumen in 2030, both Canada and the United States will have failed as modern states" he says.

I'd argue that if that's the case in 2030 millions of people will already have died. Andrew Nikiforuk probably argues like this because he feels it is pragmatic, that people want to find a way out that works within the context of the system he has so ably critiqued. Unfortunately everything that he has written demonstrates how unlikely it is that the oil barons and their friends in government are to willingly enact such changes, without significant popular mobilisations against them.

The problem I think lies with Nikiforuk's location of the problem. He understand that the system is wrong. But the blame partly lies, he argues, with consumers who use the fuel. As he says "Every Canadian who drives a car is part of this political emergency. And every Canadian can be part of the solution". Later he repeats this line of thought; "Every time I fill up my tank I'm supporting the First Law of Petropolitics and its corrupt morality....I'm spending my children's inheritance... I'm subsidizing the drug trade... I'm exterminating woodland caribou... etc".

Given the scale of the problem and the power of those corporations and governments who have created this mess I'd argue that Nikiforuk is wrong here. North American car and lorry drivers use their vehicles because the system they live in has destroyed public transport infrastructure in the interest of the automobile industry. They are the victims of the system not part of the problem. Nikiforuk is right that car drivers (alongside the majority of other people in Canada) are part of the solution. But that solution lies in a fundamental reshaping of the economy in the interest of people and planet, not the oil companies. Sadly Nikiforuk has made no attempt to demonstrate how Canada could use renewable energy, nor how (for instance) emissions could be reduced by the improvement of public transport. The lack of this alternative undermines the confidence readers might have in the potential alternatives.

If I had one final critique of the book, it would be that it needs to be more anti-capitalist. Few books have for me demonstrated so well the way that the system itself is the problem environmentally, a system that binds state and capital close together in the quest to accumulate wealth. I think many readers of Tar Sands will come away agreeing with this and I would argue that the logical conclusion of Nikiforuk's book is that we need to overthrow that system. It is disappointing that his conclusions are less radical.

That said this is a book that should be read by every Canadian. But it should also be read widely everywhere else as the vast majority of us have no idea of the scale of tar sands destruction. Here in the UK we have our own version of extreme energy - fracking. I'd venture that many of the trends that Nikiforuk highlights will be mirrored in that appalling industry. His book is an insight into the destructive power of the oil industry and the worrying future for all of us if those companies, big and small, aren't stopped.

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Eleanor Burke Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Eleanor Burke Leacock's collection of essays, Myths of Male Dominance (Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally) is one of the most important works for those who argue that the way we live our lives today is not the natural order of things. Leacock's articles are a powerful defence of the Marxist notion of "Primitive Communism" - the idea that in humanity's past, our societies were egalitarian, private property was unknown in a general sense and class differences nonexistent. Most interestingly, this means that there were also differences in the way that men and women related - monogamy has not always been the natural way of doing things, men have not always been dominant in relationships or society, and different attitudes to sexuality have been far more common that most commentators would have us believe.

Leacock's own research was centred on a Canadian tribe called the Montagnais-Naskapi. These were people who, in their hunter-gather past had lived in a "primitive communist" society. What is almost unique about them, is that this lifestyle had been extremely well documented by the Europeans who encountered them. The Montagnais had lived by collected the fruit and berries of their local area, as well as hunting the plentiful game at different times of the year. European traders arrived in the 1600s and began to trade goods, with the Montagnais in exchange for vast quantities of furs - beaver and the like.

This caused a fundamental transformation of Montagnais life. From a society were private property was almost unknown, were decision making was a collective process and status in society was not based on property or any form of economic power, the Montagnais were transformed into a people were private property (in this case the animal traps and the associated areas of rivers / land) formed part of their lives. This introduction of private property changed all the other relationships in their society, as did the cynical and regular interference of Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits who documented the lives of the indigenous people, also attempted to introduce more European things - like leaders, monogamy, physical beating of children and so on. Prompting one Montagnais to say "You Jesuit's love only your own children, we love all of them".

By the time Leacock was able to live with the Montagnais, a surprising amount of their earlier social relations still existed. She describes how hard she found it to understand the collective decision making process as someone who has only lived in a society with leaders and social hierarchies.

These experiences and the documentary evidence of a people with a completely different set of relations of productions to those we see in the vast majority of the world today shape most essays in this book. Leacock looks at the role of women in Montagnais society - and similar societies around the world, family relations and so on. She also look critically at the ideas of two of the thinkers who have most often dominated this form of discussion for the left - Lewis Morgan and Friedrich Engels.

Collected here is her introduction to Lewis Morgan's classic book of anthropology - Ancient Society. The book itself informed Engels' own work (as well as Marx) in particular, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Leacock wrote a classic introduction to this as well, of which sadly only part is in here.

Rather impressively, Leacock also includes articles and critical responses from other anthropologists - together with her reactions. This is of great interest, in part because she is a born polemicist, but also because it is fascinating to see her ideas tested, and passing the test.

For anyone with an interest in ancient cultures, this is a fascinating book. However it should also be required reading for everyone who wants to argue, or dares to believe that the "natural" relationships that we experience under capitalism are anything but natural.

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