Indigenous self-government -- Canada, Indigenous self-government, Indigenous peoples -- Canada -- Government relations, Indigenous peoples -- Government relations, Indigenous Peoples -- Canada -- Politics and Government, Indigenous peoples -- Politics and government, Indigenous peoples -- Legal status laws etc. -- Canada, Indigenous peoples -- Legal status laws etc. 

"For the politicians and bureaucrats, lawyers and consultants, the search for ways to accommodate the needs of native Canada is a $6-billion per year industry. The country's most powerless people pay the price.

"A native kid in 1990s Canada still has nowhere the chances in life a non-native has," observes Dan Smith. "Alcoholism, gasoline and solvent sniffing, and family violence are pandemic in native Canada. More Inuit under the age of 25 kill themselves than any other group on earth.... Most aboriginal communities, downtown or in the bush, still endure social conditions that are a collective howl of pain. The challenge facing native Canada is how to change that reality, how to offer the young a sense of hope."

Change is coming, in fact, at an astonishing pace. Across Canada, native communities are taking responsibility for education, health, justice, and municipal services. There are native-run social agencies, trust companies, police forces, health centres.... all pieces that, taken together, amount to self-rule.

The changes are so sudden that they are creating new tensions. Between native women and an established male leadership, between traditional beliefs and Western material values, between dependency on the Indian Act and the risk of self-rule, native peoples are struggling to shape the new political game.

Dan Smith's impassioned exploration of this compelling story is based on more than a decade of research. This eye-opening book is an eloquent, moving, and indispensable survey of native affairs as they really are."--Back cover.