The central argument of this book is that clergy, consultants, anthropologists and lawyers have come to form an “industry” that works for its own profit to retain the “stone-age” culture of Canada's “aboriginal population” and keep it in pre-industrial social and economic conditions, isolated from the Canadian mainstream. Members of the industry do their work in collaboration with “the native leadership” whom the authors refer to as “quislings” (10). The aim of the book is to disrobe the industry and reveal the wrongs it is inflicting on Canada's native peoples and the falsehoods on which its work is based. Widdowson and Howard allege that the greatest harm the Aboriginal industry has inflicted on native people is to encourage denial of the “development gap” they believe exists between their societies and advanced industrial societies.

The first thing to be said about the book is that it is not based on well-researched empirical political science. Most of the evidence for their thesis is anecdotal. Careful empirical research of any first nation community, on or off reserve is totally lacking. Broad historical propositions are advanced that distort history and provide an ill-informed basis for appraising current policy in relation to Aboriginal peoples.

An example of this early in the book is the authors' view that missionaries were “the first lobbyists for land claims” and. as a result, “the church increased its power by obtaining land, compensation, and special rights for the native population” (27). It is difficult to know where to begin unraveling the distortions embedded in this passage. Aboriginal “nations” and “tribes,” as they are referred to in British documents, pressed for recognition of their land rights from the time of their earliest contacts with European imperial powers and long before they encountered missionaries. “Land claims” is the term the federal government began to use in the 1970s in referring to Aboriginal peoples' objective of securing compliance with land rights which they have been able to have recognized under British and Canadian law. Recently, various religious organizations have supported land claims, but to suggest that church lobbyists have been major promoters or beneficiaries of land claims seriously distorts the genesis and results of Canada's land claims policies.

Widdowson and Howard are “historical materialists” and social Darwinists who believe that human societies can only progress along an inexorable evolutionary path. The key to this progress is becoming more materially productive. And the key to improving the lot of native people is to close the gap that exists between them and the mainstream industrial society. This view, they tell us, is not normative but is based on scientific fact. At this stage in their evolution, Aboriginal people should be content to be industrial workers, not capitalist owners. Thus land claim settlements or self-government developments that result in Aboriginal people owning and running enterprises are unscientific. It is here that they part company with Tom Flanagan because his advocacy of on-reserve private property ownership ignores the problem of “incorporating neolithic characteristics into the modern world” (252). The authors also take issue with Alan Cairns's view that interpretations of their past that have become part of the indigenous orthodoxy play a valuable part in enhancing the morale and self-respect of Aboriginal peoples. They see no evidence of the psychic gratification that Aboriginal pride in their traditions is supposed to yield and besides, they claim, it has been “fuelled by non-aboriginal condescension” (254).

Needless to say, Widdowson and Howard do not support the decolonizing thrust of recent policy developments. According to them, “All the talk about aboriginal nationhood and sovereignty are merely fallacious legal arguments made for the purpose of obtaining compensation from the government” (115). In their view, Canadians of Aboriginal ancestry should receive essential government services on the same basis as all other Canadians, not through race-based Aboriginal governments.

This reviewer, like many other colleagues who do scholarly research in this field, profoundly disagrees with the assumptions of these authors and their empirical characterizations of Aboriginal people's culture and capacities past and present. Nor do I, or any of the other scholars Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal with whom I work, subscribe to the romanticized views of native societies' histories or complacency about the social and economic malaise afflicting many native communities that Widdowson and Howard attribute to the Aboriginal industry. Many of us have been impressed by the social science evidence showing improvements in the lives of native peoples who have recovered effective responsibility for the well-being of their societies. Some of us have also seen how the settlement of land and treaty issues frequently results in integrating Aboriginal communities in mutually beneficial ways into the industrial economy. It is time these historical materialists gave careful consideration to this body of social science evidence.