Market Solutions for Native Poverty: Social Policy for the Third Solitude

David Mardiros is an anthropological consultant in Kars, Ontario.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading: only one of its three
essays deals with issues surrounding the generation of employment and
income through market-based sources. That essay, by Richard Schwindt,
makes a case for giving priority to a Native commercial fishery on the
Pacific coast. The essay reveals the lack of conservation concerns (and
the difficulty of applying the less-than-perfect existing knowledge
about the ecology of the fishing resource to managing that resource)
within the currently highly politicized regime governing the allocation
of the resource and provides important insight into how a Native
commercial fishery could work.

Brian Lee Crowley’s essay—a discussion of what he sees as the
difference between Native and “Western” concepts of
property—contains numerous generalizations about “Aboriginal
cultures”; he seems unconcerned that an uncritical comparison based on
the use of anthropological descriptions of, for example, West Coast and
Plains societies may not be particularly apt. Crowley goes on to develop
a model corporation for controlling and managing the resources that
would come out of land and resource settlements with Native peoples. His
model, called a “Talking Circle Society,” while innovative, makes no
reference to the problems with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act,
which was established under a similar corporate framework.

Helmar Drost’s essay uses a statistical analysis to show that Natives
in Western Canadian cities are unemployed at a significantly higher rate
than non-Native people, and that the disparity cannot be accounted for
by reasons of age, level of educational attained, or employment history.
John Richards, the commentator in this volume, is prepared to dismiss
racism as a contributing factor for this and some of the other social
ills documented in the book. Richards fails to justify this opinion in
any real way, however. This is unfortunate, for while the book generally
contributes to the growing literature on Native self-reliance, the
failure to acknowledge institutionalized impediments devalues the
analysis.