Inuit hunters from a small community in Nunavut are demanding a reassessment of a proposed expansion to an iron ore mine. Baffinland Iron Mines intends to build a port and railway to Steensby Inlet, near the Inuit community of Igloolik, as part of a plan to quadruple production at its Mary River Mine. The port and railway were originally approved by the Government of Canada in 2012.

These struggles in the remote corners of our country are consequential and often we in the south hear very little about what actually happened, when we hear anything at all. Thanks to this book the story of the so far successful battle against uranium mining in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut has a compelling container.

Having long ago established himself as a foremost scholarly interlocutor of Canadian Indigenous history, Arthur Ray, with a career that spans those ’70s books on my shelf (two magisterial studies: Indians in the Fur Trade and with Donald Freeman Give Us Good Measure) to new books including Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History, one would have thought he would be happy with what could be called “vanity projects.”

Lowman and Barker’s Settler really dwells on the dominant culture in Canada as a settler-colonial culture. Hence it is not “about” Indigenous peoples per se, but rather the bad faith of a culture constructed on ongoing colonial dispossessions. It is my own view that we do not yet have a fully developed theory of the specificity of settler colonialism, though such a theory no doubt is coming and can be found in nascent forms in earlier writing on colonialism.

No doubt for a younger generation of activists, Palmater’s Indigenous Nationhood will be a first choice. Her cadences — and anger — capture the mood of an emerging generation of social justice, broadly Left-oriented, ground level activists. When she writes that one of her goals is to “help us kick the colonizers out of our heads,” (4-5) she puts her finger on an enduring problem within and around Indigenous social movements.

This year ’s “Indian Country” theme issue of Canadian Dimension deals with a specific group of indigenous people in Canada, the Inuit.

Since the mainstream Indigenous political organizations have to varying degrees been institutionalized and have a muted role in the actual struggles taking place, it’s thought that a different kind of organization is needed, one that comes from the dissident communities, the communities engaged in direct, non-violent opposition to the state.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this book, which purports to be a kind of “expose” of the use of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in policy making and ranges far afield into a critique of the idea of Indigenous rights and a survey of problems in the fields of Aboriginal healthcare, education, self-government, land claims, and so on.

The current policy paradigm surrounding Aboriginal issues is locked within a very narrow compass of possibility. The two major ideas that emerged in the last decade were the proposals around the Governance Act, rejected by most First Nations leaders, and the Kelowna Accord, endorsed by the Assembly of First Nations, but dead in the water thanks to the current regime.

The recent struggle over lands in southern Ontario near Caledonia points to the continuing problem with land-claims policy in Canada. This sentence could be used to begin an article every few years, only the place names change: the recent struggle at Grassy Narrows, the recent struggle at Stoney Point, the recent struggle at Oka. While there is a sense in which the current land-claims policy goes back to the beginnings of colonialism in Canada, the recent permutations are worth attention. Any understanding of contemporary conflicts needs to be informed by a strong and detailed sense of what has happened historically, as well as what is happening today.