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Tom Flanagan, Christopher Alcantara, and André Le Dressay. Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. 224 pages. ISBN 9780773536869. $34.95 hardcover.
This book takes an economic and structural approach to Aboriginal poverty in Canada. Blaming Indian Act restrictions, the authors argue that the lack of absolute property rights on reserves creates barriers to financial investment and economic development, retarding Native people's capacity to gain access to credit and therefore raise revenue. The authors' argument rests on the assertion that, "Market economies are built on the exchange of property rights" (171 ).
But deep poverty can also spring from property rights when ownership distribution is radically uneven. Missing from this book is any consideration of the very unbalanced geography of ownership in Canada from a Fourth World perspective: Indigenous peoples struggling to gain control of their lands against the colonial stronghold of the Canadian state.
Tom Flanagan's ideological commitments to the free market economy are well known. He is also the author...