Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History. 2nd ed.

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan. His latest works are Reflections on Native-Newcomer
Relations: Selected Essays and Lethal Legacy: Current Native
Controversies in Canada.

When first published in 1993, Drum Songs was welcomed as a volume that
filled a major gap in the scholarly literature on Native–newcomer
relations. At that time there was not much published historical, as
opposed to anthropological, scholarship on the Dene of the subarctic
North. Kerry Abel, then a historian at Carleton University and now
retired, filled that gap with her masterful coverage of those relations
in the fur trade, missionary encounter, early state treaty-making, and
the later coming of state-encouraged resource development and welfare
programs. Throughout the influential volume, Abel found that the Dene
had displayed an extraordinary “aptitude for creative adaptation” to
change brought on by those successive non-Native incursions into their
territory. In general, Abel was optimistic in 1993 about the future,
though she did worry that the forces of globalization might overcome the
adaptive abilities of the Dene in the near future.

It is a sign of the soundness of Abel’s scholarship that her original
analysis has been retained without revision in this new edition. She has
provided a new introduction that positions her work in the
historiography of Native–newcomer relations, including scholarly works
published since 1993. This new edition, with its perceptive new
introduction, makes a most useful work of even greater significance and
utility to students of indigenous societies and their interactions with
immigrant peoples in Canada.