Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations: Selected Essays

by J.R. Miller

The twelve essays that make up "Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations" illustrate the development in thought by one of Canada's leading scholars in the field of Native history - J.R. Miller. The collection, comprising pieces that were written over a period spanning nearly two decades, deals with the evolution of historical writing on First Nations and Metis, methodological issues in the writing of Native-newcomer history, policy matters including residential schools, and linkages between the study of Native-newcomer relations and academic governance and curricular matters. Half of the essays appear here in print for the first time, and all use archival, published, and oral history evidence to throw light on Native-Newcomer relations.

Miller argues that the nature of the relationship between Native peoples and newcomers in Canada has varied over time, based on the reasons the two parties have had for interacting. The relationship deteriorates into attempts to control and coerce Natives during periods in which newcomers do not perceive them as directly useful, and it improves when the two parties have positive reasons for cooperation.

"Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations" opens up for discussion a series of issues in Native-newcomer history. It addresses all the trends in the discipline of the past two decades and never shies from showing their contradictions, as well as those in the author's own thinking as he matured as a scholar."

314 pages, Paperback

First published July 21, 2004

About the author

J.R. Miller is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Saskatchewan. He is the author of numerous works on issues related to Indigenous peoples including Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens and Shingwauk’s Vision, both published by University of Toronto Press.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really admire this guy, about as much as I often disagree with him (it is the prerogative of the academic). Miller does not shy away from the major issue that those of us who work in studies of subaltern peoples often uncomfortably confront: our allies' myths, because all histories have political myths. Miller is a principled liberal here and deploys the best that empiricism has to offer: he tells it as the evidence as broadly defined presents it, even if this means being at odds with the politics of the curent struggles.

Some of the papers in this collection of distinctly academic essays are excellent – I like very much the two about indigenous peoples' sense of a pesonal relationship with the Crown (BTW, a fundamental problem for republicans in colonies of settlement to confront). Others don't work so well, partly because they are of their time, and only a couple of the essays come with a date of publication. In one place Miller's liberalism reaches its limit, this is his critique of postmodern methodological approaches to history. I will concede that his points about who may speak for whom grapple with a real problem for historians, and that the reliance on relativism approaches to truth become problematic for Truth (a good thing) but also for academic freedom.

All in all though, this is a useful and valuable collection of a set of very important essays about colonial relations in Canada that those of whose focus takes us elsewhere should attend to.