Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement

John Stanley is a policy advisor at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

A Shuswap raised in the B.C. interior by his grandparents in the 1920s
and 1930s, George Manuel was to become a leader of national Native
organizations. This frank portrayal shows us a politician who has
embraced the traditional teachings of his grandfather, yet at the same
time is a master of mainstream confrontational and backroom politics; a
man with “a knack for walking into a room of ten strangers and leaving
with ten friends,” and yet also a neglectful husband and father.

McFarlane skilfully interweaves two stories: one personal, the other
national. There is the success story of a man with two years of formal
education who fought racism and the crippling effects of tuberculosis of
the hip to become a respected logjam buster. Manuel then took to the
political stage, becoming, at various times, president of the North
American Indian Brotherhood, the National Indian Brotherhood, and the
World Council of Indigenous People.

The other story is of the glacier-paced progress in the relationship
between Natives and the Department of Indian Affairs. We are taken from
Arthur Laing’s bootstrap community development, to Chrétien’s
disastrous White Paper, to Native control of their own education, to
James Bay and the constitutional stays given to First Nations in the
early 1980s. Throughout, George Manuel was a driving force.