Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations

Winner of the 2009 Clio Prize for British Columbia
The history of Aboriginal-settler interactions in Canada continues to haunt the national imagination. Despite billions of dollars spent on the "Indian problem," Aboriginal people remain the poorest in the country. Because the stereotype of the "lazy Indian" is never far from the surface, many Canadians wonder if the problem lies with "Indians" themselves.
John Lutz traces Aboriginal people’s involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the first arrival of 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 19th 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."
Makuk invites readers into a dialogue with the past with visual imagery and an engaging narrative that gives a voice to Aboriginal peoples and other historical figures. It is a book for students, scholars, policymakers, and a wide public who care to bring the spectres of the past into the light of the present.