The Native Game: Settler Perceptions of Indian/Settler Relations in Central Labrador

J.R. Miller is a professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan
and author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada.

Plaice’s book breaks important ground for students of ethnicity and of
indigenous-immigrant relations. Based on field observation and
interviews in North West River, Labrador, the study examines how
Euro-Canadian “settlers” of partial Inuit ancestry perceive their
ethnic identity. The author found that both the role of the nearby
Indian population of Sheshatshit and relations between Indians and
settlers were critical to settlers’ sense of themselves and to the
images they chose to present to the world. Settlers’ ethnic identity
was multifaceted, fluid, and socially constructed. It assumed many
different faces at different times and in different settings, but for
all of them the Indian was important either as contributing factor or as
foil.

Plaice persuasively argues that settlers play a “Native game” that
consists of “retaining sufficient distinctiveness [from the aboriginal
population] to maintain individual communal identity” while
simultaneously “expressing enough affiliations with Indians to qualify
for some kind of [Native] status in the eyes of the outside world.”
Her argument would have been even more powerful had she given more
weight to the role of class in differentiating between settlers who were
more, and less, inclined to embrace their Native heritage. She might
also have taken greater account of the diminishing ties of economic
co-operation between Native and immigrant in explaining why, in the
North West River area in recent decades, greater residential proximity
between Indian and settler has meant greater social distance between
them. Finally, this interesting study, which might usefully be emulated
elsewhere, would be even more valuable if it contained an index.