Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier

Edwin G. Higgins was a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.

This is Hugh Brody’s fifth book dealing with the impact of economic change on native peoples or isolated communities. It resulted from his experience on a research team studying the effects of the proposed Alaska Highway natural gas pipeline on the economy and lifestyle of the natives living in north eastern British Columbia.

As a member of this government-financed study, commissioned in 1978, Brody lived for 18 months with one of the Beaver Indian Bands of the Athabascan cultural group. Their reserve is in an area of foothills, muskeg, and prairie between Fort Nelson and Fort St. John.

This is an account of Brody’s experience and his reflections after the submission of the research report. Odd-numbered chapters are accounts of life with the families on one reserve. The alternate chapters deal with the subject in a more academic style.

By involving him in their daily activities throughout the seasonal cycle, the band members demonstrated how their hunting/gathering economy worked. The narrative, together with Indian maps of hunting, trapping, fishing, and berrying areas, along with income and other tables, gives sympathetic insight into a people whose way of life has been followed in this area for at least 30,000 years. Although their world view and thought patterns are significantly different from ours, our understanding of a very old and flexible life style is broadened by this book. Their way of life is now seriously threatened by the inroads of settlement, oil and gas explorations, sport hunting, the highway and proposed pipeline.

Even-numbered chapters, which treat the effect of white attitudes and encroachment onto the traditional lands of these people in a more scholarly style, will be of interest to readers involved in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and political science.

This is an informative, provocative account of the people in a little-known area and of white-native relationships. The vulnerability of the Indians to a more technically advanced culture is obvious; the opening sentence of the Preface makes it clear: “The hunting societies of the world have been sentenced to death.”