The Community Apart: A Case Study of a Canadian Indian Reserve Community

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

This study is based upon more than two full years of field work on a Manitoba Indian reserve by the author, a Swedish social anthropologist. For a substantial portion of that period, he was in the employ of the band government. Details of his personal role in events and in band administration and political structure are sketchy at best, but the book is particularly strong in its description of internal reserve politics as well as in its description of the Indians’ views of the White world which surrounds them.

The author has used the name “Maple River” for the reserve, adhering to an established but irritating social science tradition of disguising the identity of local communities. These attempts seldom work, and indeed one need only consult the relevant issue of the Globe and Mail (or the relevant pages of the Hawthorne Report) as cited by Lithman to learn the identity of the reserve described.

Lithman addresses several questions in his study, although underneath them all lies the issue of the viability of the reserve itself. He examines movement to and from the reserve and presents telling motives for continued residence upon the reserve. This analysis is reinforced by his discussion of Indian-White interaction, which emphasizes situational differentials in power between members of the two races. This is probably the weakest section of the book, suffering from data disappointing in both quality and quantity. By contrast, the analysis of reserve politics, discussing both internal coalitions (“bunches”) and strategies employed in dealing with the Indian Affairs Branch (“collaborative” or “challenging”) is superb. The author clearly enjoyed close contacts with reserve politicians, and his description of local-level politics has a strong ring of authenticity. However, one might have wished to see this rich description and analysis placed in the context of the extensive political anthropological literature on local-level politics and factionalism (particularly on North American Indian reserves and reservations).

A source of irritation in reading this splendid case study are typographical and other errors in the text, unfortunately found in abundance. That English is not the author’s native language might be the origin of some of these; the majority seem to result from careless typesetting and proof-reading. This is regrettable; social anthropology of such high quality deserves editorial treatment of equally high quality.