Reservations Are for Indians. Rev. ed.

Andrew Vaisius is a Winnipeg daycare director.

“The complete switch from subsistence on the land to subsistence based
on government handouts took only ten years,” writes Robertson in this
revised edition of a 1970 book (the only “revision” being the
addition of a preface concerning the nature of the book).

The book is not sated with information about the deceit practiced by
the white governing nation or with information about the resistance
practiced by aboriginal people to the above-noted realignment of the
means of survival. (This is, after all, a white, liberal, piece of
journalism.) Rather it is a book rife with opinions, anecdotes, stories,
and quotes that offer few reference sources for verification. Moreover,
it supplies a whole lot of swagger, as when Robertson claims “the
Indian’s world, like ours, divides into God and Devil.” Oh, yes? All
tribes subscribe to this separation like ours? Where does Nanobosho the
Trickster enter into this scheme?

Robertson’s critique seems entirely contemporary in that it is
without much of a past; it has been written without researching
aboriginal culture, which predates the white cultural and political
intrusion by centuries!

Reservations Are for Indians is a white writer’s response to
aboriginal people and only tells part of the story.