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A Way of Life That Does Not Exist: Canada and the Extinguishment of the Innu, by Colin Samson. London, UK: Verso Books, 2003. 388 pp. $27.00 cloth. ISBN: 1-85984-525-8.
For many U.S. sociologists, the word "Canada" evokes images of a kinder, gentler North American society concerned with universal human rights, healthcare, and the environment. For critics of American excesses, Canada is seen as an example of what the United States could be, were it more egalitarian and less scarred by racism, militarism, and rampant capitalism.
If you hold such views, Colin Samson's intriguing book on Canada's shoddy treatment of the Innu will be an intellectual cold shower. Drawing on years of research and activism in Canada's remote northeast regions, Samson takes aim at Canada's rosy image, arguing that government officials, industrialists, priests, teachers, health personnel, and social workers have all conspired, both knowingly and unwittingly, to engineer the Innu's dispossession. In the process, Canada has created a rootless, deeply unhappy community irrevocably damaged by the loss of their way of life and of a natural environment on which their well-being depended. The book attributes most Innu social problems to the severing of their links to the land, claiming that spiraling rates of suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, dependence, and lethargy all stem from the imposed shift from nomadic...