Rediscovering the First Nations of Canada

John Steckley teaches human studies at Hunter College in Toronto.

Intended as an accessible introduction to the history and traditional
cultures of First Nations in Canada, this book betrays its author’s
lack of solid grounding in anthropology and history.

Six of the ten chapters focus on describing a somewhat arbitrarily
redrawn model of the seven “culture areas” that appear regularly in
the anthropological literature. For no apparent good reason, Friesen
eliminates the usual Western and Eastern Subarctic areas. The Athabaskan
or Dene peoples, who are typically identified as Western Subarctic, are
categorized here as “Northern Neighbours of the Plains” and
“Arctic.”

More serious are the book’s (sometimes glaring) factual errors, which
stem in part from Friesen’s uncritical use of unreliable secondary
sources like Peter Such’s Vanished Peoples. Especially egregious is
his treatment of the Beothuk. He has their ancestors, the
Palaeo-Indians, living with “dinosaurs,” and he accepts from Such
the discredited assertions that the Beothuk were “unusually tall”
and that 300 or 400 were slaughtered in the so-called Hant Harbour
Massacre.

In his treatment of the Plains Cree, Friesen makes at least three
errors that suggest a lack familiarity with John Milloy’s important
work, The Plains Cree. First, he states that the Plains Cree did not
have horses in the 1770s; in fact, they were trading in horseflesh by
1770. Second, he has their number decreasing from 4000 to 1000 between
1835 and 1858, while the more accurate Milloy has them increasing by
about 5600 during that period. Third, he asserts that the last fight
between Blackfoot and Plains Cree occurred in 1866; in fact, the two
peoples continued fighting until the peace of 1871.