Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, (Vancouver: UBC Press 1997)

BRINGING TOGETHER a collection of essays highlighting the lives and works of women engaged in the writing and teaching of history over the century spanning the 1870s to the 1970s, Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice address the creation of historical memory both inside and outside the academy. Through these portraits of the individual and collective efforts of "amateur" and "professional" historians, the editors suggest that because of the responsibilities and constraints associated with gender, women viewed history from a different perspective than male historians, addressed topics overlooked by men, and initiated social, cultural, and regional studies well before these became acceptable within the academy.

      Divided into four thematic sections, the book traces what might be viewed as the "evolution" of historical writing by women of Anglo-Celt background as they moved from outside to inside the academy. The first section, "Community Building," looks at the individual and collective efforts of women engaged in writing nation-building history from a social rather than political perspective; an approach that allowed them to incorporate women into the story. Included are profiles of two Victorian women, Agnes Maule Machar and Sarah Anne Curzon, whose writings were influenced by their religious and social convictions, and a study of the Ontario Women’s Institutes’ involvement in writing local histories. Despite differences, they shared a common interest in creating a history that would inspire Canadians to greater feeling for their country.

      The second section, "Transitions," profiles historians who, through study and adoption of professional historical research methods, bridged the gap between "amateur" and "professional" history, still working outside the academy but gradually building links to the inside. Women living within Catholic religious communities engaged in historical writing in the course of their contemplative and record-keeping practices. Like the Women’s Institutes, their work was collaborative. Individual women may have been prime movers; however, individual authorship was rarely acknowledged in publications. Cloistered women initially wrote to preserve historical memory within their own communities. It was in their work as educators that they began to expand their mandate. As their educational institutions strove to gain standing and recognition in the broader community, these women were required to go beyond the convent walls for training in academic disciplines. This process inevitably helped to professionalize their approaches to history, and also encouraged them to write for a wider audience.

      Also operating outside of the academy, Constance Lindsay Skinner and Isabel Murphy Skelton gained a degree of professional respect and support from some male academics through their personal affiliations and innovative combination of "scientific" history research methods, combining cultural and social history. Self-made and earning her precarious living by the pen, Skinner scorned much about the academic world, yet depended upon and valued her connections with those academics who recognized her talents. Married to Oscar D. Skelton, well-known political economist and senior public servant, Isabel Skelton was less financially strapped. However, her desire to engage in research and writing was often thwarted by family responsibilities. In spite of obstacles, Skinner and Skelton produced works of originality in content and approach.

      The third section, titled "The Academy," looks at women either within or on the edges of the academy, articulating the challenges they faced in being accepted into the history profession, regardless of training and talents. Often receiving encouragement in undergraduate study or even at the Master’s level, women found that few professors encouraged them to go further. The few Canadian women who did obtain doctorates were almost always passed over for permanent faculty appointments. Their options were to leave the country for better prospects or stay for poorly paid sessional work. Others taught in public schools or worked in archives. Not surprisingly, independent means and freedom from family demands often determined whether and when a woman historian could practice her craft.

      The last section, "New Departures," looks at the development of women’s history as a category of study within universities during the 1970s. The chapter suggests that while some of the interest in women’s history grew out of the feminist movement, the relationship between women historians and feminist activism is not a given, nor is it always a comfortable one. The essay further suggests that in spite of gains women historians need to be proactive to both maintain and improve the status of women in their profession.

      In this collection of historiographical essays, a number of themes emerge. The authors argue that women have been involved in historical work for a long time, but that the professionalization that occurred around the turn of the century excluded women both from history and the writing of history. Because gender shaped so much in their lives – finances, responsibilities to family, and restrictions in mobility, for example – they tended to write about events, people, and places within their local areas whose experiences bore similarities to their work.

      Of the individuals highlighted in this text, all had some parental encouragement and support for their intellectual pursuits. These women initially engaged in collective community history without constraints on their lines of inquiry or methods. But when faced with the prospect of outside critical attention to their work, the standards of male scholarship imposed new rules. In the case of Women’s Institutes, there were internal differences as to how "professional" they ought to be. In the case of the nuns, as members of their community gained in academic training, their desire to shape their community histories for an outside critical audience grew.

      While one of the express purposes of the book is to "call into question the legitimacy of the amateur/professional dichotomy as applied to the term ‘historian,’" the implicit message is that progress is measured by women’s attainment of professional status. Contemporary tensions among women making history inside and outside the academy are only briefly addressed. This account does not go beyond the 1970s, however. With the professionalization of women’s history, one wonders whether there is a danger of creating a new canon that excludes "amateurs": minority women, feminist activists, and those exploring family and community stories in non-academic ways.

      Nevertheless, this eclectic collection of essays illustrates how women, because of their lived experience, recorded history differently from men . In some cases, they initiated new ways of approaching history through interdisciplinary methods and erased the false boundaries of public and private worlds. Without addressing the overtly political topics of male historians, their act of writing women into history was sometimes political. This collection does not pretend to be definitive. However, it does point to the existence of a vibrant alternative stream of Canadian historiography that grew alongside the professional male-stream historiography and has yet to be fully explored.

Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

I HAVE BEEN accused by western Canadian friends of revealing my eastern Canadian sensibilities in my measurement of distance. When asked the distance between Montreal and Toronto, I answer five hours, a measure of time linked to my experience with a specific form of technology, the automobile. The translation of space into an experiential unit of the time required to drive the distance gives vast space concrete meaning for me. A given technology, in this case a car, orders my understanding of time and space. This link between time, space, technology, and experience is the focus of Gerald Friesen’s Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada.

      Gerald Friesen has written a brave and important book. It is a modern – or perhaps more accurately – a postmodern and contemporary project in the older tradition of national syntheses of W.L. Morton’s The Canadian Identity (1961) or Arthur Lower’s From Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (1946). The book addresses the question of why Canada is a "public identity" and presents a version of history emphasizing continuity with the expressed intent of being meaningful to contemporary society. In Citizens and Nation, Friesen, a University of Manitoba historian, proposes a radically different thematic focus and periodization of Canadian history based on the dominant mode of communication and culture. His chronology introduces four overlapping periods bridging "time immemorial" to the present. It begins with an era Friesen refers to as "oral-traditional," proceeds to a "textual-settler" period, continues onto "print capitalism," and concludes with our contemporary experience of "screen capitalism." The author is especially interested in how these particular regimes of communication shape the experience of space and time. Within each of these communication and technological eras, Friesen focuses on an "ordinary" individual or a group of ordinary individuals to explore his argument. One of the attractive qualities of this temporal division is its geographic flexibility, as these different communication systems occur concurrently in diverse parts of Canada. This method of periodization permits chronological overlapping to recognize the variance of place. The dominant mode of communication for Elizabeth Goudie’s Labrador of the 1930s is therefore very different from the urban Vancouver experience of Phyllis Knight during the exact same years. In addition to proposing a new narrative framework, Citizens and Nations is also a study of Canadian historiography itself. As the narrative of national history proceeds, Friesen explores the ways in which English-speaking, Canadian historians have attempted to create a synthesized national history from this vast and diverse geographic space.

      Friesen begins his study with the examination of a northern aboriginal family through Graydon McCrea’s 1983 National Film Board documentary Summer of the Loucheux: Portrait of a Northern Indian Family. This unusual source is used to explore the "oral-traditional" mode of Aboriginal peoples to demonstrate how the oral story-telling tradition connects to historical and contemporary concerns, causing problems of cultural understanding for those ingrained with the notion of a clear differentiation between empirical fact and myth. In his efforts to emphasize continuity, Friesen recognizes Aboriginal people as one of the founding peoples of Canada but acknowledges that their stories have not been integrated into the myths of other Canadians.

      The second section, characterized by what Friesen refers to as the "textual-settler" move from an oral to a literate society, was marked by the arrival of European immigrants and spanned the period from European contact to the 20th century. Friesen uses the example of Elizabeth Goudie, born in 1902 in Labrador, to represent the last generation of "pioneers" which stretched according to place from the 17th to the mid-20th century. For this group of people, written texts supplemented oral communication and Friesen makes an effort to stress the many social, familial, and economic attributes this group shared with Aboriginal peoples. While Aboriginals and settlers shared a common experience of "natural" time and space, Friesen acknowledges that important differences also emerged in terms of the role of church, law, and government.

      The third section of the book, organized under the rubric of "Print-Capitalist National Societies," will likely be of greatest interest and the source of greatest contention to readers of this journal. Here, through the life of Phyllis Knight, a German immigrant whose memoir was published as A Very Ordinary Life (1974), Friesen turns his attention to themes such as the alienation of labour, waged employment, gender, and ethnicity. Friesen also wants his readers to see this period as a time when ordinary people responded to new manifestations of time and space, such as waged work and technology, and adopted strategies and tools to shape their economic, political, and social worlds. In other words, common people learned to respond through participation in the institutions of the state and shaped society through associations such as political parties, unions, and education. Friesen uses this period to present a historiographical discussion counterposing "progressive social" and "conservative political" streams of Canadian history. In a juxtaposition of the former’s emphasis on the transition "from feudalism to capitalism" and the latter’s emphasis on the "convergence of technological and political factors in the creation of the modern Canadian state," he concludes that they are both "too narrowly economic, and insufficiently cultural, to convey the distinctiveness of the Canadian experience." (122) He closes this argument with the assertion that both these historical traditions are less relevant today and holds up the cultural turn as a potential direction which would keep a history of Canada meaningful.

      The final section, entitled "Screen Capitalism," allows Friesen to bring this story up to the present. Expanding from oral interviews, Ken Dryden’s The Moved and the Shaken: The Story of One Man’s Life (1993) and the memoirs of Simonne Monet-Chartrand, Friesen sees the recent past coinciding with unprecedented technological changes in the experience of time as space and the coexistence of "insecurity and plenty." (168) In this section, Friesen emphases how ordinary people face globalization, and cast doubt on both their government and their own agency as citizens, expressing skepticism about the capacity of any state to govern well.

      This is undoubtedly a clever and thought-provoking study. It is a case where the enthusiastic reviewers’ quotes on the back of the book do not exaggerate. Not surprising for such an innovative book, I came away with unease. In the first place, I remain uncertain about the intended audience. Although it is written in an engaging style, it is not a volume likely to displace popular (and traditional) general histories such as Craig Brown et al’s An Illustrated History of Canada or Desmond Morton’s A Short History of Canada. The context and narrative of this volume are not sufficiently filled out or developed to be easily accessible for those unfamiliar with the general narrative, debates, and themes of English Canadian history. This book, which Friesen modestly refers to as an essay, is more creative, more challenging, and for those grounded in its debates, more interesting. I suspect that Citizens and Nations with its origins in international communications theory, economics, and politics will find its greatest, and perhaps most influential audience in graduate courses.

      The book has other tensions. Friesen adopts an intimacy with his historical subjects and refers to them by their first name – an easy familiarity I did not share. The result was some ahistorical discomfort for me as women such as Phyllis Knight and Simonne Monet-Chartrand became "Phyllis" and "Simonne." The narrative strategy of focusing on individuals succeeds as an engaging approach for highlighting the "heroic" experience of ordinary Canadians, but this emphasis on individuals is in conflict with the importance of movements and communities to Friesen’s arguments and perhaps even with the notion of a common culture. At the level of culture, while the book is an important contribution to English-language Canadian history, despite a conscious and well-meaning attempt to include Francophone Québec, the bridge is uneasy. There is a failure to differentiate the great disparity in international power between the English and French languages in discussions of globalization and communication. This is perhaps a missed opportunity. Finally, and most significantly, I was not convinced that economics and politics or class and gender are in any way less "relevant" today for understanding the dramatic pace of change in the present or the past. In the end, despite what he says, and based on what he actually does in the book, I do not believe that Friesen believes this either. While I concur with Friesen’s use of culture and technology as the means to make history more meaningful to the current generation of students of Canadian history, I maintain that it is important to defend the importance of economics, politics, class, and gender, especially as they were/ are shaped by culture and technology.

      This is a book which must be read by anyone seriously interested in Canadian (however you define it) history. I do not think you have to adopt all of Friesen’s conclusions or assumptions to benefit greatly. This is a synthesis that manages to integrate the presence of Aboriginal peoples throughout the entire narrative. The incorporation of time and space as changing historical experiences and the way they connect to the experience of citizenship has altered the way I see the past. What more can you ask from a book?

Bob Russell, More with Less: Work Reorganization in the Canadian Mining Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999)

BOB RUSSELL, a well-respected sociologist whose earlier book was on employment issues, has produced an original study of Saskatchewan mining and the reorganization it has undergone. He interrogates his subject with a sophisticated understanding of labour process, theory, and methods. For the most part the book is accessible to a general audience but most suitable for graduate students or other researchers. Senior undergraduates would be challenged by the specificity of the debates and research techniques. As a contribution to the scholarly community on work, it is excellent. He uses novel evidence and intensive research to power his analysis.

      The mining industry has been transformed from a labour-intensive to capital-intensive production with the mechanization of underground and automation of surface operations (milling, smelting, and refining). This process has been underway for some time and much of the attention dedicated to this industry has focused on the political economy of equipment replacing people in direct production, and the weakness of linkages to equipment manufacture. The staples tradition has also focused on market fluctuations for resource products. Bob Russell has chosen to focus on work re-organization, including developments in managerial strategies associated with new production systems. That is not to say he has totally neglected the traditional issues. He notes that the mines he examines are on the edge of underground robotics since potash production lends itself to this, and rich uranium deposits in highly risky areas provide enormous inducement. Computerization certainly has a key role in the mills he examines. In common with earlier work, he notes what he graphically calls "job hemorrhaging," indicating workers’ concerns about seniority and bumping-rights in light of these forces.

      Russell organizes his analysis around the paradigms of the transformations contained in the abstractions of Fordism to post-Fordism and industrial to post-industrial work as forms of industrial governance. His main finding, and title for the book, is "More with Less," by which he means, the common theme regardless of the managerial "packaging" is more work for fewer workers who receive, relatively, less pay for more work expected. His focus is on four mining companies with five mine sites in Saskatchewan, four producing potash and one uranium. These companies and mines provide a natural experiment made messy by rapid corporate restructuring, including extensive privatization of crown corporations. His mode of analysis is not case studies but comparisons of sites and occupations. Russell claims the comparisons come from variations in the cultures of employment each provides with respect to the post-Fordist and post-industrial trajectories.

      This mode of analysis is related to the practices and implications for workers’ experiences as derived from extensive questionnaire-based interviewing. The unit of analysis is the workplace, not the community (as with Meg Luxton’s More than a Labour of Love, 1980).

      Russell analyzes the extent of post-Fordism, characterized by competitive flexibility, leading to an intensification of work effort whereby multi-skilling of workers is at the expense of the de-skilling of jobs. Given the range of cases in his comparison and rapid changes they undergo over time, at best there is a hybridization of Fordist models in use, as revealed by his comparison of five sites. Job reassignments and job expansions are common experiences for the reduced workforces at all sites.

      Post-industrialism Russell associates with two processes: "the social division of labour (what is produced) and changes in the technical division of labour (how items are produced)." (10) His study allows him to investigate only the second of these, which he equates to changing occupations and their requirements (operationalized as operator versus maintenance occupations in either mines or mills).

      He concludes: "The post-Fordist firms and the post-industrial occupations in our study show no more consistent propensity to adopt those practices that have been singled out as being responsible for the reskilling of labour than their counterparts. What then is behind the common trend pertaining to skill that runs across both occupational categories and employers’ managerial strategies?" (158) The common answer is job expansion as expressed in multitasking. With this insight, he casts new light on the complex concept of skill and the labour process debates surrounding it. He also addresses implications for production politics in the form of grievances, disciplining workers, union activism, sabotage, and job harassment. One of the most novel features is the remote mine at Key Lake which is characterized by "radically spacialized industrial relations" as workers shuffled in and out on two crews who work twelve-hours shifts for a week at a time.

      More with Less is recommended as a key reference work for those interested in post-Fordist and post-industrial debates about labour processes, skill, and managerial practices. It provides a strong base for these discussions and reveals the complexity of theoretically-informed empirical research, especially when the ground beneath our feet shifts so rapidly.

Gordon Hak, Turning Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia Coastal Lumber Industry 1858-1913 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

GORDON HAK’S BOOK is a welcome study about British Columbia’s forest industry during the 19th and early-20th centuries. The work begins with the impetus for substantial lumbering in British Columbia – the 1858 gold strike. It concludes in 1913 with the United States lowering its tariff barriers to wood from Canada, thereby opening a new era for provincial timbering. Largely an economic and political history, Professor Hak corrects popular misconceptions, refines the staples interpretive paradigm, and addresses the inadequacies of previous provincial forest industry studies. Framed within a capitalist paradigm, Hak weaves his history around the interrelated relationships of market exchange, government and lumber company policies, timber technologies, workers, and conservation impulses.

      Turning Trees into Dollars opens with a sound introductory overview. Chapters 1 to 3 look at the lumber industry from the perspective of mill owners. Chapter 1 shows the unfolding significance of local, continental prairie West, and international markets in framing the province’s timber industry until World War I, and the government’s role in shaping those three markets. The following two chapters focus on the structure of the lumber industry. Hak finds that coastal timber production was not so much characterized by monopoly capital as by entrepreneurial capital, ownership instability, and a wide variety in the sizes of mill companies. In terms of mill ownership, Hak discovers a significant pattern of British control until the 1880s, after which central Canadian entrepreneurial and local ownership became more pronounced. Paralleling the varieties and decentralized nature of mill ownership was the volatile, competitive nature of the industry that neither state aid nor trade associations were ever able to surmount.

      The next three chapters examine more closely the relationship between business and government in framing commercial lumbering. Chapter 4 looks at the limited role the Dominion government played in British Columbia forestry, but the importance the provincial government exercised over the province’s forest lands and industry. Retaining forest land ownership, except for the railway belts, meant the provincial government set the framework for the timber industry most directly through timber leases and licenses. Hak shows how the government also shaped the industry through such means as fire regulations and log-scaling policies.

      Chapter 5 discusses early social and political critics of forest use and practices in the province, as well as how and why those voices gave way to a scientific conservation movement in the 1890s. Here, as elsewhere in North America, the conservation movement grew from utilitarian fears about a timber famine, climate changes, streamflow, and the need to safeguard urban watersheds. To turn-of-the-century forest conservationists, waste created by timber theft, fire, and inappropriate cutting practices would be replaced by wise, rational, scientific management for sustained use. It was a position that the progressive wing of the lumber industry could and did support in their pursuit of stabilized markets.

      Chapter 6 largely explores the maturation of the scientific conservation perspective and its embodiment in the Forest Act of 1912. Rather than viewing the Forest Act as a reform measure, however, Hak argues that the act, and conservation measures in general, remained securely within a dominant cultural paradigm where market imperatives and business interests trumped biological considerations and where scientific, technological, and political decision-making followed suit. Still, Hak makes clear that although government and industrial lumbermen allied by the early 20th century to increasingly structure a more integrated and consolidated lumber industry in corporate hands, independent logging companies continued to be a viable and significant economic and political presence. Not until the 1930s would corporate capitalism exercise hegemony over the British Columbia timber industry.

      The final three chapters detail the growing industrialization of the timber industry, and the interplay between technology and labour in the production process for both milling and logging operations. Hak shows that industrialization not only increased production but speeded up labour exploitation as well as job-related accidents. In addition, he delineates the structure of the industry’s job hierarchies, including its ethnic and racial make-up; the marital status and the lifestyle of workers; why there was a notable lack of union and political activism among loggers and millworkers before 1913; and how and why the scientific management of people and machinery proceeded hand-in-hand.

      Like any study, Turning Trees Into Dollars cannot be all things to all people. Some readers will probably wish that Hak had been more attentive to environmental history. To have more thoroughly discussed environment attitudes, practices, policies, and consequences, and to have linked up more concretely resource and labor exploitation would have significantly strengthened the work. In addition, Hak could have done more with railroads, which seemed here, as in the Pacific Northwest United States, to be fitting symbols and agents of changes in the 1880s. Although he does discuss government subsidization for the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Esquimault and Nanaimo Railway, and the role both played in timber holdings and regulations, railroads did even more. The rails brought people, capital investment, new technologies, and business forms of organization, increased market access, and integrated British Columbia ever more tightly into structures of power beyond the province’s borders. Finally, other readers may be disappointed that although Professor Hak claims that the United States Pacific Northwest offers parallels to the British Columbia forest industry, his monograph does not seriously pursue a comparative perspective.

      Nonetheless, Turning Trees Into Dollars has achieved a great deal. Professor Hak set out to provide a history of the timber industry in British Columbia from the 19th to the early-20th centuries. He has done that, and in the process has offered interesting revisionist interpretations. Readers now have a sound preliminary work to Richard A. Rajala’s Clearcutting the Pacific Rainforest: Production, Science, and Regulation (UBC Press, 1998), which focuses on the post-World War I to 1965 era when corporate capitalists used changing technologies, management structures, harvesting practices, and influence over government forest policies to impose a factory management system on regional forests and the lives of workers. What Dr. Hak has accomplished will allow others to build on his work, and hopefully begin to construct comparative histories not only for the Greater Pacific Northwest but also between Canada and the United States.

Robert Bunting
Fort Lewis College

Kerry Badgley, "Ringing in the Common Love of Good": The United Farmers of Ontario, 1914-1926 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000)

IN SPRING 2001 thousands mobilized to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Québec City. Following the "battle in Seattle" in 1999 and protests in Europe, a new anti-capitalist current has arisen. It is a current that includes some inspired by democratic socialism, but mostly includes a new generation inspired by some form of populism, radical liberalism open to refinement as either anarchist or socialist.

      Kerry Badgley’s study of the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO) seems a long way away from Seattle or Québec, but his study of rank-and-file populism is clearly linked to the debates of the new activism. In particular, Badgley focuses on the radical experimentation of Ontario farm progressives in co-operation; the development of an autonomous farm women’s movement (the United Farm Women of Ontario-UFWO); and the rise and fall (due to the hegemony of traditional forces and a conservative UFO leadership) of an independent UFO politics through a brief provincial government (1919-1923); and the election of 24 federal MPs in 1921. To give force to his positive evaluation of the UFO experience, Badgley examines rank-and-file members in three counties: Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark.

      There are a number of positive features about this study. It is the first to seriously address the local dimension of the farm progressive challenge to Canada’s bourgeois elites – through co-operative enterprises, the church union movement, and moral debates about prohibition and betting; as well as from a spontaneous revolt against military conscription in 1917 to develop an independent politics breaking from the parliamentary clientelism of Conservatives and Liberals.

      This emphasis on the local has the merit of stressing how central self-activity and self-organization were in creating the energy and force to challenge bourgeois norms. By studying the UFWO and the many local farm co-operatives, Badgley also does a valuable service in stressing that farm progressives had a substantive radical practice that went beyond the more short-lived and contradictory politics of the UFO.

      What is also to be welcomed is Badgley’s sharp posing of the arguments about the meaning of the farm progressive movement then and now – the first mass break from bourgeois politics in Canada and the relevance of direct democracy to any radical project today. In Badgley’s opinion, the UFO movement was "unconsciously anarchist." For Badgley, what activists today can do is make the core political principles of the farm populist experiment a conscious challenge.

      As a Marxist, and as someone who has studied the UFO through the leadership of W.C. Good (one of three key figures in the movement along with E.C. Drury, farm premier, and J.J. Morrison, provincial co-operative secretary), I had a number of points for debate.

      First, Badgley’s account of the rise and fall of the UFO as a means to examine local organisations in Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark needs to be fleshed out. Where does it fit with C.M. Johnston’s account of the UFO government or the stories of the United Farmers’ Co-operative Company and the Ontario federal farm progressive caucus from the Good study? How did local UFO mobilization link with election results? (Appendix R) There is a powerful dialectical relationship between rank-and-file action and provincial leadership and structures; one cannot be examined without the other.

      Secondly, in rightly stressing the need for local studies of the farm progressive challenge, Badgley appears to have omitted arguments about context and how to make local choices to test that context. The central interpretive argument about UFO leadership from my Good study is that there were three (not two) currents: a reform from above argument by E.C. Drury about making the UFO a people’s party within existing market and parliamentary rules; a radical reform from below argument by W.C. Good to extend direct democracy methods in co-operation to politics through the single land tax, free trade, modest government economic intervention, and a transformed parliamentary system through a variety of direct democracy reforms like proportional representation and the single preferential ballot; and thirdly, a purely negative, sectional argument by J.J. Morrison for occupational self-defence through narrowly conceived co-operative action. Arguably, it was Morrison who triumphed as the sole leader remaining after 1926.

      Badgley’s accounts of local activist initiatives in co-operation and politics appear to illustrate all three of these tendencies as well as confirm how economically and socially representative UFO membership was. If anything, his local studies confirm anecdotal evidence in leadership studies about the importance of the single land tax to the most radical populists, the relative youthfulness of UFO activists, and the importance of pro-Union Presbyterians influenced by the Social Gospel.

      Another contextual question is: why choose Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark Counties? Badgley offers two reasons: their geographical representativeness and available evidence (the degree of local organization in Lambton, the only extant club records being for Simcoe, and the number of local papers in Lanark). However, as noted in the Good study, from a farm production system point of view, there were four regional farm economies in Ontario: the dairy belt (divided between eastern and western Ontario – Lanark being in the first); a mixed livestock system (Lambton and Simcoe); a few specialized areas such as the fruit farmers of Niagara or Prince Edward; and the agro-forestry system of Northern Ontario. The selection of local studies can be refined and tested further.

      Thirdly, what about interpretation? Badgley does a good job in summarizing how Ontario historiography has marginalized this mass, radical challenge to its dominant political culture. But he has to simplify the Marxist narrative and critique to deny there is a meaningful organizational and social context for local responses, which included all tendencies – from Simcoe County’s F.W. Webster and his explicit mention of anarchism to argue single land tax and radical electoral reforms, to the mainstream co-operative and political practice of most Simcoe UFO members who were led by E.C. Drury locally, to the negative sectionalism of Leslie Oke and the Lambton farm co-operative association.

      Despite these criticisms, this is a valuable book for two reasons. First, the Ontario farm progressive challenge was a radical, mass break from Canadian capitalist politics. The farmers’ achievement is well worth repeated, careful study from a variety of points of view.

      Secondly, the farm progressive challenge was more than a break from bourgeois politics. It also put forward a mass, democratic debate in practice on what will replace it. As a Marxist, I have argued that the nature of that break and alternative has to be class situated. A petit-bourgeois populist movement did challenge for power but it did not conquer it. Activists of the 21st century have to ask why.

Peter Campbell, Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third Way (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999)

PETER CAMPBELL invites us to reconsider the legacy of Canadian Marxists active in the first decades of the 20th century. He asserts that these Marxists "comprised one of the most important groups of thinkers and activists in Canadian history." (4) Campbell is particularly interested in those Marxists of this era whom he views as having defined themselves through their rejection of both the revolutionary politics of the Communist International and the gradualism of Canadian social democracy. The defining feature of Campbell’s "Marxists of the third way" was their commitment "to the heart and soul of Karl Marx’s historical materialism, his belief that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself." (4) He believes that the important "theoretical contributions" of these Marxists, especially their analysis of the "relationship between worker self-emancipation and the leadership question..." has been unfairly ignored by historians of the left. (9)

      The perspective of Campbell’s Marxists of the third way was rooted in British Non-conformism and the gradualist, positivist mechanical Marxism of the Second International. This was a Marxism that constructed revolution as an inevitable product of the internal contradictions of the capitalist order. Its adherents came to Marx through the classical texts: Darwin, and Spencer, rather than Lenin. Campbell adds the Hegelian Marxism of Italian Antonio Labriola, to this lineage. Through Labriola Marxists of the third way were drawn to a theoretical concern with ideas and consciousness as dynamics in the historical process. A close study of the Marxism of members of the Socialist Party of Canada reveals "a marked Hegelian and idealist influence." (21) Campbell links the Hegelian Marxism of Labriola (and the long shadow of Gramsci) with book notices contained in Cotton’s Weekly and Hank Bartholomew’s columns in the Western Clarion. Campbell’s claim that Marxists of the third way bequeathed a distinct body of Marxist theory poses a number of questions. What prompted them, rather than others in the Canadian Marxist tradition, to theorize the logic of worker self-emancipation and to evolve a voluntarist Marxism against the grain of existing determinist accounts? How did they apply the classical texts to their time? What evidence exists that the Hegelian legacy of Labriola liberated these Canadian Marxists from the thrall of a doctrine that posed few superstructural questions? How did their account of proletarian revolution differ from that embraced by militants who stood with the Communist International? Finally, did Campbell’s Marxists evolve an idiom and inflection of their own making?

      Campbell advances his argument through biographical accounts of the public careers and private lives of Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) activist William Pritchard, One Big Union (OBU), and Winnipeg General Strike leader R.B. Russell, west coast labour activist Ernest Winch, and Ontario’s Arthur Mould. Campbell’s selection of subjects turned on the question of whether their "political practice" was "derived from theoretical formulations in a conscious manner" and whether the activist left a "significant body of personal correspondence or writings in labour papers." (10) Such considerations were important because Campbell intended to treat "consciousness as an historical agent" and "to deal directly with Canada’s Marxists of the third way and their ideas, to take them seriously as thinkers." (10) Despite Campbell’s claims, readers expecting a book of close textual exegesis will be disappointed. This is not a book preoccupied with theory. Campbell’s emphasis is on practice.

      In the case of Ernest Winch, for example, Campbell explains that an account of Winch’s life provides an opportunity to "assess more thoroughly how effective Marxists of the third way were at involving rank and file workers in the process of creating a broad-based socialist movement, thereby putting their theory into practice." (31) We learn a good deal about Winch’s career in west coast labour and labour political organizations from 1910 to 1940. Yet the voice of Winch is largely absent from this narrative. Rather than textual analysis, Campbell offers speculation. On the fundamental question of the utility of the general strike, for example, Campbell asserts that Winch and other "Marxists of the third way supported industrial unionism and the general strike as a response to the repression of the capitalist state and the mobilization of the rank-and-file workers, but they were skeptical about its long-term benefits." (41) This finding is not disclosed and amplified through a consideration of texts containing the theory of Winch and others on this question.

      William Pritchard is credited with exercising great influence through "his ability to interpret and critique capitalist society, present the case for socialism, and convince workers of the need for education and organization." (74) How did Pritchard theorize his practice as an intellectual of the left? Though Campbell indicates a preoccupation with exploring the "consciousness" of his subjects, he provides no account of Pritchard’s theory of the role of intellectuals in the process of worker emancipation and the passage to a proletarian order. Pritchard supported a resolution at the Western Labour Conference in Calgary endorsing "the system of industrial soviet control" but, Campbell observes, everything Pritchard said or wrote before or after 1919 suggested that he did not agree with replacing parliamentary institutions with soviet-style government. No explanation bearing on his theory as a Marxist of the third way is offered for such apparent contradictions. Campbell contends that Pritchard was convinced that constitutional action could bring about socialism. What was needed was a "working-class majority ready and able to accept the responsibilities of power." (94) Yet, such an assertion discloses little about Pritchard’s adaptation of the classical texts to his time. Campbell’s account of Pritchard’s trial in the winter of 1920 incorrectly claims that criminal charges against Pritchard and the other strike leaders were based on "a spur-of-the-moment, trumped-up amendment to the Criminal Code." (93) The charges were based on the unamended Criminal Code in force in June 1919. Campbell seems ultimately disappointed with Pritchard as theorist. He notes that by the early 1920s, with the decline of the SPC, Pritchard "had little else to offer in its place beyond an unquestioned belief in worker agency that at times seemed more like a kind of religious faith than the product of an historical materialist reading of the state of the working class in Canada and elsewhere in the 1920s." (100)

      The road signs in Campbell’s account of the political pilgrimage of Arthur Mould are ambivalent. "It is not clear why" he became involved in the labour movement. (136) His changing political affiliations are attributed by Campbell to misplaced "faith he placed in J.S. Woodsworth in the early 1930s, and in Joseph Stalin in the ensuing years...." (167) Campbell offers the unflattering assessment that Mould was "a man who sometimes overlooked or chose not to see that he himself was at times incapable of the discernment he expected from the workers themselves." (167) Existential rather than theoretical imperatives appear to have settled his final turn to the left. However, even here we remain on the terrain of speculation, not theoretical exegesis. Campbell reports that Mould never provided an explanation for his turn to Communism and that it was unclear if he ever embraced Leninism. Still, he concludes that Mould embraced Communism because in Mould’s view the Communists were the only party "making a serious attempt to put the ideas of Marx and Lenin into practice." (160)

      The account of R.B. Russell centers on 1919. Russell did not see the strike as a prelude to a proletarian order. Russell "recognized the tremendous amount of educating and organizing of the workers left to do." (188) Broadening his argument, Campbell offers the view that for Russell, and other Marxists of the third way, 1919 was "only a moment of revolutionary potential in that much longer evolutionary process Marxists of the third way saw as the basis of all change in the organic world and in human society." (189) Yet on this important point it remains unclear who would educate and organize the workers, why education was needed, or how the education and organization of workers would threaten capitalist hegemony and lay the foundations of proletarian rule.

      Campbell asserts incorrectly that Russell was singled out for special prosecution in 1919. Like Pritchard, he was charged with seditious conspiracy under the Criminal Code in place in June 1919 and arraigned for trial with the other strike leaders. However, on 27 November 1919, the Crown chose to try Russell separately because A.J. Andrews was concerned that the available jury panel might be exhausted before a jury was selected if the defence exercised all the peremptory challenges at its disposal with eight defendants. Undaunted, the defence sought to extend its number of challenges by having Russell tried under the amended Criminal Code, assented to on 7 July 1919 and in effect since 1 October 1919. Conviction under the amended code could mean a sentence of twenty rather than two years for Russell. The threat of a longer sentence entitled the defence to greater peremptory challenges. The Crown rejected the defence bid.

      Marxists of the Third Way does not achieve the ambitious goals set out by its author. Nevertheless, it is a book well worth reading and thinking about. Campbell’s preoccupations remind us of the need to interrogate the theory bequeathed to the contemporary left and to consider how it has shaped our understanding and interest – or misunderstanding and disinterest – in the nature of capitalist hegemony. Such introspection is essential in thinking about and accounting for the historical possibilities and realities Gramsci alluded to when he asked, "What can an innovatory class oppose to this formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the dominant class?"

Jim Egan, Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence: My Life as a Canadian Gay Activist, compiled and edited by Donald W. McLeod (Toronto: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Homewood Books 1998)

JIM EGAN, Canada’s first gay activist, died at the age of 78 on 9 March 2000. In 1949 Jim broke the silence on gay rights in Canada when he started to write letters to newspapers, magazines, and government committees defending gay men and lesbians. At first, only the scandal sheets would accept his letters and columns, but by the 1960s some of the more "respectable" publications began to print them. Later, in the 1990s Jim and Jack Nesbitt, his life partner, took the Canadian government all the way to the Supreme Court in a major same-sex spousal benefits struggle. This was the case that led the Supreme Court to declare that the Charter of Rights includes sexual orientation protection.

      I met Jim a number of times throughout the 1980s and 1990s and learned a great deal from him. This review is written in memory of Jim, in celebration of his activism, and to claim him as a working-class hero. In Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence, gay historian Donald McLeod has skilfully woven together a series of interviews with Jim, informed by Jim’s own writings and other sources, to provide a rich and detailed account of "the social and personal circumstances that allowed Jim Egan to become Canada’s earliest known public gay activist."(13) In this autobiographical oral history Jim’s spirit comes through loud and clear. For those who knew him Jim comes to life in these pages as we again hear and feel his voice and passion.

      Jim’s early experiences were very much working class in character. He was born in Toronto in 1921 and his father was a fine cabinet maker. He recalls excitement when he went swimming naked with other young men in the Don River. Jim remembers that "I certainly had that feeling that many gays have that I was somehow different from the other boys."(17) He became somewhat of a loner and as he describes it "an absolutely omnivorous reader."(17) He became a largely self-taught working-class young man. His mother, who became the main force in his life when his father died, never questioned his reading and he devoured Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, and eventually discovered Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other references to same-sex passion and desire.

      When he was 13 or 14 Jim tells us:

I realized I was sexually attracted to males. I’d never heard the words "gay" or "homosexual." I think it must be difficult for someone today to believe that young fellows then had never heard these words, but it was certainly true in my case and amongst the boys I knew in working class, east end Toronto ... I became sexually active with some of the boys on the street ... when I was thirteen, somehow or other, ... we started sexual experimentation with each other.... One of the things I quickly discovered was that while they all liked to fool around, they certainly did not want to talk about it. And I realized fairly early on that it was something that could not be discussed, but it was a fun thing that you could do anytime the opportunity arose. (19-20)

Here we get a sense that Jim in his youth may have been participating in the type of largely pre-homosexual, working-class sexual culture that George Chauncey writes about in Gay New York. At the same time we get a sense of the early development of prohibitions on homosexuality as a topic of discussion and form of identification in working-class communities.

      When the war came, Jim tried to join the Army but was rejected because of a corneal scar. He then worked as a technician with the Toronto Department of Zoology where he learned how to preserve animal specimens, and as an assistant at Connaught Labs.

      He joined the merchant marine for the last two years of the war. As in the experiences of many others, and as Allan Berube describes in Coming Out Under Fire, it was the war mobilization and its shifting of the contexts of gender and sexual life that opened up new erotic possibilities for Jim. He discovered the gay world in various ports that he visited. For instance, he describes picking up an Army guy in Piccadilly Circus in London in 1944 or 1945.

      In 1947 he came back to Toronto and began to investigate the local gay world that had expanded during the war years. Although he had many sexual adventures, Jim wanted to meet another man and settle down. He met Jack Nesbitt, a hairstylist, in 1948. Later, in 1949, Jim and Jack moved to Oak Ridges to work for a man who owned a biological supply business. This began Jim and Jack’s love for living in more rural areas that would often take them away from larger urban centres.

      The late 1940s and the 1950s were a difficult time for many gay men with widespread police harassment and entrapment and media coverage marked by silence on homosexual experience in the mainstream media and heterosexist sensationalism in the scandal sheets. Jim stresses that even though "there was a homophobic climate during this period that cried out for change, I think it is important to note that the situation was not entirely bad."(43) Jim’s "fury" at the heterosexism in media coverage is what propelled him into major letter and article writing campaigns that took place in a series of waves from 1949 until 1964. As he put it, "There were never any articles published from the gay point of view, which in my mind equalled a conspiracy of silence on the true nature of homosexuality." (43) Jim set himself the task of breaking this silence.

      While the mainstream print media ignored his onslaught, some of the scandal sheets began to print his letters and articles. He had a series of columns published in True News Times called "Aspects of Homosexuality" and later in Justice Weekly titled "Homosexual Concepts." Jim wrote about the Cold War purges of homosexuals in the US State Department, the Kinsey Report, and the "causes" of homosexuality. In these columns Jim showed himself to be a profound gay working-class intellectual. Jim had contacts with the emerging homophile movement in the US and continued his "omnivorous reading" of materials relating to homosexual experiences.

      Although Jim later stubbornly resisted the insights of social constructionist approaches to sexuality, he was able to write to a Parliamentary Legislative Committee in 1955 such powerful lines as: "The Negro ‘problem’ was created by the white majority; the Jewish ‘problem’ by the Gentile majority, and the homosexual ‘problem’ by the heterosexual majority – who alone can take the necessary steps to bring this problem to a speedy end."

      Jim was also very aware of class divisions within the gay community. Here is his description of the "levels" in gay life:

Gay life in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s was on a series of levels, with your opera queens and the highly educated university types at the top, and the ribbon clerks at Simpson’s at the bottom. While there may have been a certain amount of overlap, we didn’t associate with anybody except from what we might refer to as the "lower orders." And I say that in the kindliest way, because we were part of it.(70)

      Jim also challenged class relations within gay community formation when he assisted Sidney Katz in 1963 in his articles on the gay community for Maclean’s. This public visibility for the gay community challenged the comfort of some middle-class gay men who lived most of their lives in the closet. A friend was asked to arrange a meeting for Jim with a man "who was just oozing money, position, and power." (84) Jim was asked to end his collaboration with Katz since "if you keep on publicizing this the way you are, it won’t be possible for any gay man to be safe. People will begin to get suspicious and gay men will be recognized as living a gay life."(84) Jim, of course, refused to end his collaboration with Katz since he had no investment in the relations of the closet and in contrast he wanted more publicity for gay experience. This points to our need for more historical work investigating class divisions and struggles within gay communities.

      Jim’s impressive activism, however, was at this time not actively supported by other gay men and he laboured largely in isolation. As McLeod points out, Jim’s activism "went in waves" often related to the dynamics of his relationship with Jack and in 1964 his early career as a gay activist ended when he and Jack decided to move to British Columbia. (11) This interaction between activism and our relationships is another area that needs much more focus in our theorizing of activism.

      Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence is a wonderful celebration of Jim’s life. Those who are interested in Jim’s life of activism should also consult: Jim Egan: Canada’s Pioneer Gay Activist, compiled and introduced by Robert Champagne (Toronto: Canadian Lesbian and Gay History Network 1987); and David Adkin, Jim Loves Jack: The James Egan Story (Toronto: David Adkin Productions 1996).

Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press 1998)

THIS WORK EXAMINES Aboriginal people’s bodies as sites of attempted colonization in a number of ways. The most interesting contribution that the author makes is in examining multiple sites of the attempted colonization of Aboriginal people. In her work, Kelm goes beyond attempted colonization as a personal or institutional tool to include colonization as situational, personal, institutional, and political, depending upon the perpetrators. The least effective portion of her work deals with Aboriginal people’s bodies as objects.

      In examining colonization as a situational response to factors inherent in settler societies, Kelm relies heavily upon oral histories and testimony provided by Elders in First Nations located in the territorial confines of British Columbia. In using Elders as historical sources to draw from, the author establishes the veracity of oral traditions as a given fact. This is valuable, respectful, and reinforcing of the understanding that First Nation historical traditions and the traditional preservation of histories are valid and useful tools.

      While the first chapter of this work does not rely heavily on these sources (dealing instead with government-generated population and mortality rates, and hospital admission information) the second chapter deals with the impact of colonization on Aboriginal diet and nutrition. It is important to note that Kelm examines not only the impact of colonial mentality on policy development and the intrusive nature of this policy, but she also makes sure that she addresses Aboriginal people’s responses to the same. She writes of First Nation lobbying and Aboriginal leadership’s negotiations, petitions, and responses (19, 47, 56, 152) in the face of attempted colonization. This is an essential part of the story of colonization that has been overlooked in many discussions of imperialism and its impact on First Nations. By choosing to examine the political response by Aboriginal leadership, Kelm demonstrates that the situational response is as important as the sites of colonization. Importantly, the story of colonization takes form not only in the recounting of colonial history, but also in the reconstruction of Aboriginal people’s personal and political responses to colonialism.

      Kelm also analyses colonization as personal. Aboriginal people’s health and illness are examined in terms of their impact on families, clans, and nations. (10) In this way, the story of attempted colonization is not one that details just the impact of disease and settler response to disease. The work becomes broader and studies not just the pressure exerted by health care and governmental officials on families but also the familial response to these impositions. This effort is laudable. The ripple effect of ill health and the political construction of Aboriginal health extend to the people impacted by both. By examining health policy in this context, Kelm is able to explore the effect on Aboriginal people as a collective. In assessing the ripple effect on the collectivity, Kelm handily defuses studies of disease that either individualize its causes or consequences, and/or attribute it to "cultural" factors divorced from political context.

      In examining the personalization of colonization, Kelm is able to scrutinize both the role of missionaries and the benefit accruing to missionaries as a result of Aboriginal illness. Faced with diseases Aboriginal cultures and doctors had never before experienced, missionaries were able to make a name for themselves with their "humanitarianism colonialism." (146) More specifically, the author effectively establishes that Aboriginal illness enabled missionary staff to administer spiritual and medical assistance - with the end goal being the disruption of the relationship between First Nation people and First Nation medical practitioners. (104)

      The author examines not only the role of individuals who earned their livelihoods from treating Aboriginal illnesses but also the position of medical staff who were "reluctant, even disinterested, colonizers." (135) This is an essential contribution to the colonization dialogue, particularly in an era when the attribution of responsibility is so often linked only to intentional acts. Kelm observes that action and inaction, and not intent, are essential components of a colonial condition.

      Beginning with Chapter 2, Kelm examines colonization as an institutional mandate. Initially, she reviews health and ill health in the context of the reserve system’s impact on traditional foods. What follows is an incredibly detailed discussion of the impact that the reserve system had on Aboriginal people’s ability to maintain health and fight foreign diseases. She addresses the poor soil provided and the exclusion of cultivated gardens in the selection and allocation of reserve lands. She also describes the impact that the immigration of non-Aboriginal trappers, provincial legislation dissociating water rights from land ownership, and fishery regulations had on Aboriginal people’s ability to maintain the health standards present in their communities prior to non-Aboriginal settlement in their territories.

      Predominant in the discussions of colonization via institutions is Kelm’s examination of the role of residential schools (Chapter 4) in creating and perpetuating illness in Aboriginal people. She writes that the establishment of residential schools was "predicated on the basic notion that First Nations were, by nature, unclean and diseased." With this in mind, "residential schooling was advocated as a means to ‘save’ Aboriginal children from the insalubrious influences of home life on reserve. Once in the schools, the racially charged and gendered message that Aboriginal domestic arrangements threatened physical, social, and spiritual survival was reinforced through health education." (57) Clearly evident in this comprehensive analysis are the high morbidity rate of Aboriginal youth in residential schools and the attempted "salvation" of the First Nation students who lived at the residential schools. Kelm’s approach to this topic is an interesting one. She examines not only the physical toll, but the emotional, cultural, and mental toll that residential schooling took on First Nation students, their families, and their communities. She draws our attention to the institutionalization of racially and culturally determinative and imperial understandings as they were entrenched in the residential school organizational structure. From health education and its role in cultural invasion, to the enforced application of western standards and its impact on Aboriginal societal standards, Kelm leaves no stone unturned. (62) She does not exonerate government or missionary societies from our understanding of this bureaucratic brutality. Government and missionaries are viewed as complicit with the residential school bureaucrats in this imperial intrusion which killed one quarter of the prairie First Nation students on residential school rolls. (64)

      Colonization as political will dominate Chapter 7 of this work. Disappointingly, the author is not as able with this research as she is with the research related to the role of missionaries and residential schools in the attempted colonization of Aboriginal people. Perhaps it is because it is difficult to gauge the impact of governmental policy from oral sources or because the political will and manipulation of the time is not evident in the records. In any event, Kelm seems unable to make the link between governmental and political decision making and policy, on the one hand, and the illness that swept through First Nations between 1900 and 1950, on the other. She does condemn the Department of Indian Affairs; Kelm states that the Department did not hire adequate staff and that they did not actively recruit experienced doctors. (129, 131) However, given the evidence related to the federal government’s obligation (treaty and/or fiduciary) to provide health care, Kelm does not make a thoroughly convincing case for the clear abrogation of responsibility by the settler government.

      Referring in passing to a lack of proactivity, Kelm never seems to make the link between disease, ill health, and Aboriginal people’s deaths and the inactivity of the government of Canada with much vigour. She refers to societal responses as "a society that sought control through knowledge and the creation of a colonizing archive of data, rather than overt displays of force" – rather than governmental non-responses in attributing responsibility for Aboriginal people’s health crises. (120) This tentativeness is unexpected and diminishes the strength of the work evident in earlier chapters.

      There is, however, a significant discussion of the role of departmental field matrons, which broadens the reader’s understanding of the shifting perceptions related to Aboriginal women/motherhood.

      Although she refers to disease as differentially understood by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, Kelm does review the attempted colonization of Aboriginal people in light of the understandings that non-Aboriginal people had and have about health and wellness. Disease is perceived as situational and in a Western context, isolated from holistic health and reviewed on a case-by-case basis. In addition, there seems to be an ill fit between the intellectual acceptance of and personal respect demonstrated towards Aboriginal healing. The author demonstrates an implicit acceptance of the fact that Aboriginal medicine exists, is effective, and is sometimes superior to Western medicine. However, there are three notable "tells" that seemingly establish that the author does not have a full understanding of the respect that should be accorded to Aboriginal health research grounded in Aboriginal understandings related to wellness and medicine.

      Just as some pictures and ceremonial accoutrements are not to be photographed in Aboriginal traditions, some stories are not to be related out of context. I am not certain where this line should be drawn as my history and knowledge of such stories may be unduly influenced by the fact that we had to send our sacred traditions underground or risk losing them. The fundamental understanding that comes from this is: if you do not know the protocol, then do not take responsibility for sharing the information. There are a few instances in this work where I was uncomfortable with the degree of information provided about sacred ceremonies. Because our education and health are intricately tied together and are based on experiential and protocol-governed teachings, those descriptions seemed contextually orphaned.

      Secondly, frequent references to Aboriginal "witchcraft" in the context of a discussion of medicine and curative and harmful powers de-legitimizes the skill as something less than medicinal.

      The third point corresponds to the monomania of Western medicine and its preoccupation with "curing the disease." In the holistic tradition of most Aboriginal societies, health was balanced with the alternative. Helpful powers balanced with disruptive. Because the goal of Aboriginal health was to live a good/balanced life, the eradication of one disease is not good health. The work makes passing reference to this but reviews and interprets health in the context of eradication of disease. Perhaps, in the Aboriginal context, the disease is the symptom and living out of balance is the disease. In any event, while this imbalance is referred to, a detailed examination of the Aboriginal understanding of health would have enhanced and grounded the work. In many Aboriginal societies, disease is perceived as animate and as an entity in and of itself. It is an indicator of a larger problem. As well, there is some discussion and separation of the human and non-human realm in this work. Perhaps the larger understanding, and one which would have provided context for the discussion, is that they cannot be separated effectively in an Aboriginal conception of health. As the connection between past and future is understood in a discussion such as this, so should the link b