An engrossing but dry account of Canada’s internal colonialism depredations.
A history book examines the deeply disturbing aspects of Canadian colonialism.
Canada may not have an equivalent of America’s Trail of Tears, the massacre at Wounded Knee, or the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but its history is stained by its shameful treatment of its Indigenous people and non-European immigrants. “If you leave them in the family, they may know how to read and write, but they remain savages,” one government official said in 1883 in justifying the costs of residential schools for First Nations people. Kishchuk frames this grim history as “internal colonialism” in a book that deftly weaves together primary and secondary sources. Internal colonialism in Canada was “achieved through forced uprooting and displacement, direct attack and subjugation, disdain, disrespect, and denial of rights, and embedded racism,” he argues. The volume goes as far back as the Chilcotin War in British Columbia, which broke out in 1864 after tribal members attacked a road construction camp on their land to show how “internal colonialism has been practised pervasively” in Canada. Some of the “most grievous acts” have been brought into the open in recent years, including the establishment of residential schools to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. “Indian boys and girls are dying like flies” one magazine reported in 1907. To his credit, the author also highlights such lesser-known horrors as the relocation of the Quebec Inuit to the high Arctic, the forced sterilization of Indigenous women, and the hanging of a Metis, or mixed race, leader in 1885 after John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first prime minister, said: “He shall die, though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.” But much of the prose reads like a textbook, with Kishchuk failing to put one character center stage and offering little historical interpretation. There are some odd omissions, too—a section on the homicides of Indigenous women does not mention the notorious “Highway of Tears” killings in British Columbia. Still, the work is a salutary corrective to Canadian pride, noting that “many of those affected by colonialism are alive today and are scarred for life.”
An engrossing but dry account of Canada’s internal colonialism depredations.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-910289-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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