Funny, You Don't Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway

David R. Hutchinson is an educator on the Peguis Reserve in Manitoba.

Drew Hayden Taylor’s latest offering is a collection of short
editorials previously published in a number of Canadian magazines and
newspapers. Taylor is renowned for his ability to uncover the irony and
racism that characterizes such contemporary aboriginal issues as
self-government, self-determination, self-identification, and cultural
appropriation. Readers who have come to enjoy Taylor’s satirical
musings on the Department of Indian Affairs, non-Natives’ naively
vying for membership in the “Wannabee Nation,” or the innumerable
faux pas of non-Native academics (and others) who subscribe to
stereotypic misconceptions of aboriginal peoples will not be
disappointed. As a proponent of anti-racist multicultural education in
cross-cultural communities, I often recommend Taylor’s work to my
Native and non-Native colleagues. He has the unique ability to reveal,
in plain English, how historically rooted European interventions
continue to function as tools of aboriginal colonization and
assimilation today. He does so with great humor and insight, and without
the verbiage attached to more “intellectual” studies of the
ideological and social institutional foundations of such critical
Canadian issues.

In sum, Taylor’s work is both entertaining and educational; it
deserves a wide readership.