Denendeh

An in-depth exploration of the lives and culture of the Dene.

Published to mark the 15th anniversary of the Dene organization. Excerpts from the writings of the Dene and Father Fumoleau's photographs (135) capture the spirit of this people.

No detailed description available for "Indigenous law and the state".

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

This impressive collection brings together the results of June Helm's fifty years of studying the culture and ethnohistory of the Dene, Athapaskan-speaking Indians of the Mackenzie River drainage of the western subarctic. In addition to her previously published essays - with updated commentary where necessary - The People of Denendeh includes unpublished field notes, archival documents, supplementary essays and notes from collaborators, and narratives by the Dene themselves. Helm begins with a broad-ranging, stimulating overview of the social organization of hunter-gatherer peoples of the world, past and present, that provides a background for all she has learned about the Dene. The chapters in part one focus on community and daily life among the Mackenzie Dene in the middle of the twentieth century. After two historical overview chapters, part two moves from the early years of the twentieth century to the earliest contacts between Dene and white culture, ending with a look at the momentous changes in Dene-government relations in the 1970s. Part three considers traditional Dene knowledge, meaning, and enjoyments, including a chapter on the Dogrib hand game. Throughout, Helm's encyclopedic knowledge combines with her personal interactions to create a collection that is unique in its breadth and intensity. The People of Denendeh will be of interest to those studying North American Indians, hunter-gatherers, and subarctic ethnohistory and provides a historical resource for the people of all ethnicities who live in Denendeh, Land of the Dene.

This story is a heady mix of human drama, adventure, passion, murder, and love between a man and woman of different cultures. It radiates a warmth that transcends the treachery, pain and anguish abounding in a land geographically, culturally, socially and climatically diverse. The poignant love story is threaded through the fabric of true facts in relation to the land, flora, fauna and descendants of the people who first inhabited it. Eric is catapulted into a land where the ravages of time have left their mark geographically and socially; where visions and dreams are as fleeting as the colourful flowers on the tundra, and the struggle for control of ones destiny flutters and is blown, like a golden fall leaf from the tree, without direction. Erics fascination, with stark beauty and political turmoil of the land, leads him into a cultural liaison with a family whose roots are deeply embedded in a spiritual way of life, but the saplings have rejected the strength of the root. He is ensnared in a love that tears him apart emotionally and physically as it sews the seeds of jealously and mistrust. The result is a drama of murder with devastating consequences. Can Eric emerge as the victor, with the help of the abounding love of a woman whose strength is as stalwart as the land in which she was born.

Part ethnography, part narrative, Like the Sound of a Drum is evocative, confrontational, and poetic. For many years, Peter Kulchyski has travelled to the north, where he has sat in on community meetings, interviewed elders and Aboriginal politicians, and participated in daily life. In Like the Sound of a Drum he looks as three northern communities -- Fort Simpson and Fort Good Hope in Denendeh and Pangnirtung in Nunavut -- and their strategies for maintaining their political and cultural independence. In the face of overwhelming odds, communities such as these have shown remarkable resources for creative resistance. In the process, they are changing the concept of democracy as it is practised in Canada.