With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada

With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada. Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. 376 pp. $32.95 sc. The editors of With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada state in the introduction that the overall goal of the book is to examine the joint efforts of Aboriginal people and individuals of European ancestry to shed light on the social and power that followed. While their intentions were good and noble, they were not good enough to stop the exploitation of Native Peoples because at the heart of their intention was the ulterior motive of 'civilizing' Aboriginal peoples, mostly through Christianization processes. They also declare that this is not a book about native history but rather about the history of European settlers on native lands. Like its editors, this reviewer found the essays relate the settlers' lives and dilemmas rather than about native history. In this sense, the various chapters offer insights into the lives of settlers with good intentions thereby turning the gaze from native to white peoples. And while the individuals acknowledged are fully implicated in the process of colonization despite their sensitivities, their positions as advocates for Native peoples also bring to light the challenges of their complex relationship with other colonizers who only sought the destruction of native communities. Herein lies the book's most notable contribution: a caveat for those who consider themselves allies to Native peoples' struggles to further reflect upon their intentions: is alliance building another way to colonize or romanticize Native peoples? Each of the authors adds fragments to our understanding of the history between immigrants, settlers and indigenous peoples during the time of overt colonization, therefore, the book gestures to our current situation of continued participation in a vast web of colonial relations (p. 2). By asking Whose traditional land are you on? the book challenges current dominant assumptions that colonization is in the past and that no one today should be held accountable for colonization or genocide. In the Introduction several points of reference are addressed to guide the reader through the actions and implications of the people discussed in the book. This frame of reference debunks how mainstream definitions of colonization and understandings of racialization and racism are partly responsible for upholding a colonial system that continues to act against Indigenous peoples. Simultaneously, this benevolent attitude dismisses colonization and our current complicity by relegating it to an event in the past. David Nock's piece not only addresses Hale's contradictory position of advocating for Aboriginals that challenged the dominant positions of Social Darwinism, it also illustrates how he maintained the colonial project of civilizing the native population. …

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