Indians: The Urban Dilemma

D. Paul Lumsden was Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University, Toronto.

This readable work is an unrevised reprinting of the original 1972 edition, itself largely based on 1968-69 data on “the adaptation process” undergone by Indians and Metis resettled in Saskatoon. The author’s special contribution is the delineation of social stratification within the category of urban native peoples, as this reflects too the formative factors of on-reserve family status and of patron-client dependencies between white bureaucrats and native “favourites.” He speaks of “three distinct ‘classes’ or groupings” within Saskatoon’s Indian/Metis population, each being “associated with specific levels of the white class structure.” Of these urban sub-categories he remarks, “The many linkages between the native social system and the larger society place a high premium on apathy among the Welfare and Anomic, and a carefully controlled rhetoric in the Affluent grouping.”

Chapter 1 provides some background to the then-current structure of dependency and co-optation, on up to the federal government’s “Chretien Proposals” of 1969. Chapter 2 characterizes the relatively Affluent “self-conscious elite” of some 25 Indian/Metis non-Christian families forming Saskatoon’s “Indian bourgeoisie” — a reserve’s “leading family” is also discussed. Chapter 3 discusses the skid row Indians and Metis; it is concluded that “alienation is not a major problem in this grouping”, yet, “The human cost for children is very high.” Chapter 4 remarks on the category in flux between the Affluent and the Welfare groupings, the Anomic natives who go on to achieve either upward or downward social mobility in Saskatoon or who “return dejectedly to the reserve.”

Chapter 5, on “Urban Poverty Programs,” discusses federal and provincial government programming for off-reserve natives, and takes a swipe at Salvation Army attitudes. Chapter 6 bitingly comments on Indian Affairs as a bureaucracy: “a truly amazing monument to inefficiency and personal tyranny.” Chapter 7 further discusses bureaucratic “Perpetuation of the Poverty Cycle,” with one family case-study. Chapter 8 on “Leaders Without Followers” includes criticism of the Metis “radical,” Howard Adams — see his own provocative 1975 book, Prison of Grass. The final chapter advances Dosman’s “enclave” proposal, one advocating a “well-designed, self-governing, native, residential community inside the city.”

Be that as it may, the 1972 edition contributed to our understanding of elite formation and the social construction of the urban poor among Indians and Metis. However, the publication of a completely unrevised and thus greatly outdated edition in 1982 is of less value. So much is missing: the fate of the 1969 Proposals, the whole career of the Native Council of Canada, any changes in Saskatoon’s own municipal politics (cf. p. 100), the more current statistics in Indian Conditions: A Survey (Ottawa, 1980), and much else. The book continues to address the assessment and amelioration of the “costs” of being an Indian or Metis in Canadian society — but what is today’s price?