FieldNotes

Celebrating the Donner prize nominees, the Toronto Star has published a short excerpt (maybe a series of consolidations?) of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry by Widdowson and Howard.

(I have discussed this book on the blog before. Albert Howard weighed in.)

Phil Fontaine responds:

The Donner Prize is supposed to reward “excellence and innovation in Canadian public policy writing.” Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry is neither excellent nor innovative. It is a diatribe cloaked in a thin veil of “research.”

(In both articles, as is usually the case, the comments reveal all sorts of perspectives on aboriginal issues.)

Also:

Beliefs and rituals of Aboriginal peoples are not merely “atavistic cultural” survivals that are holding them back, as book’s authors claim

Book recycles paternalistic native stereotypes (TorStar)