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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Makúk

A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations

John Lutz traces Aboriginal people’s involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing on an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the roots of today’s widespread unemployment and “welfare dependency” date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices – what Lutz terms the “white problem” drove Aboriginal people out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as “compensation.”


460 pages | © 2008


Table of Contents

Preface: Makúk

1 Introduction: Molasses Stick Legs

2 Pomo Wawa: The Other Jargon

3 Making the Lazy Indian

4 The Lekwungen

5 The Tsilhqot’in

6 Outside History: Labourers of the Aboriginal Province

7 The White Problem

8 Prestige to Welfare Remaking the Moditional Economy

9 Conclusion: The Outer Edge of Probability, 1970-2007

Postscript: Subordination without Subjugation

Appendices

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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