First nations?: second thoughts

Abstract

Controversial and thought-provoking, Tom Flanagan's First Nations? Second Thoughts dissects the prevailing orthodoxy that determines public policy towards Canada's peoples. Flanagan argues that this orthodoxy enriches and empowers a small elite of activists, politicians, administrators, middlemen, and well-connected entrepreneurs, while bringing further misery to the very people it is supposed to help. Over the last thirty years Canadian policy on issues has come to be dominated by an ideology that sees peoples as entitled to specific rights. Indians and Inuit now enjoy a cornucopia of legal privileges, including rights to self-government beyond federal and provincial jurisdiction, immunity from taxation, court decisions reopening treaty issues settled long ago, the right to hunt and fish without legal limits, and free housing, education, and medical care as well as other economic benefits. Underpinning these privileges is what Flanagan describes as orthodoxy - a set of beliefs that hold that prior residence in North America is an entitlement to special treatment; that peoples are part of sovereign nations endowed with an inherent right to self-government; that Aboriginals must have collective rather than individual property rights; that all treaties must be renegotiated on a nation-to-nation basis; and that Native people should be encouraged to build prosperous Aboriginal economies through money, land, and natural resources transferred from other Canadians. In First Nations? Second Thoughts Flanagan combines conceptual analysis with historical and empirical information to show that the orthodoxy is both unworkable and ultimately destructive to the people it is supposed to help.

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