Towards Constructive Change In Aboriginal Communities

The widespread failure of so many interventions in First Nations and Inuit communities across Canada requires an explanation. Applying the theoretical and methodological rigour of experimental social psychology to genuine community-based constructive change, Donald Taylor and Roxane de la Sablonnière outline new ways of addressing the challenges that Aboriginal leaders are vocalizing publicly. To date, the decolonization process in Canada has led to programs that focus on the struggling individual. However, colonization was and still is a collective process and thus requires collective solutions. Rooted in years of research, teaching, and experience in First Nations and Inuit communities, the authors offer necessary solutions. They contend that survey research can be uniquely applied as a means to initiate constructive community change, demonstrating how their intervention process uses such research to foster positive social norms by feeding the results back to the community. Ultimately, Towards Constructive Change in Aboriginal Communities outlines how field research can be used to give a voice to First Nations and Inuit community members and serve as a platform for constructive social change.

The widespread failure of so many interventions in First Nations and Inuit communities across Canada requires an explanation. Applying the theoretical and methodological rigour of experimental social psychology to genuine community-based constructive change, Donald Taylor and Roxane de la Sablonnière outline new ways of addressing the challenges that Aboriginal leaders are vocalizing publicly. To date, the decolonization process in Canada has led to programs that focus on the struggling individual. However, colonization was and still is a collective process and thus requires collective solutions. Rooted in years of research, teaching, and experience in First Nations and Inuit communities, the authors offer necessary solutions. They contend that survey research can be uniquely applied as a means to initiate constructive community change, demonstrating how their intervention process uses such research to foster positive social norms by feeding the results back to the community. Ultimately, Towards Constructive Change in Aboriginal Communities outlines how field research can be used to give a voice to First Nations and Inuit community members and serve as a platform for constructive social change.

Aboriginal People and Other Canadians discusses a wide variety of issues in Native studies including social exclusion, marginalization and identity; justice, equality and gender; self-help and empowerment in Aboriginal communities and in the cities; and, methodological and historiographical representations of social relationships. The contributors attempt to gauge whether the last decade of the twentieth century was a time of constructive transition and whether new patterns of relations are emerging after the recent challenges to the colonial legacy by Aboriginal people.

"Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future" looks to both the past and the future as it examines the foundational work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and the legacy of its 1996 report. It assesses the Commission’s influence on subsequent milestones in Indigenous-Canada relations and considers our prospects for a constructive future. RCAP’s five-year examination of the relationships of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples to Canada and to non-Indigenous Canadians resulted in a new vision for Canada and provided 440 specific recommendations, many of which informed the subsequent work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Considered too radical and difficult to implement, RCAP’s recommendations were largely ignored, but the TRC reiterates that longstanding inequalities and imbalances in Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples remain and quite literally calls us to action. With reflections on RCAP’s legacy by its co-chairs, leaders of national Indigenous organizations and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, and leading academics and activists, this collection refocuses our attention on the groundbreaking work already performed by RCAP. Organized thematically, it explores avenues by which we may establish a new relationship, build healthy and powerful communities, engage citizens, and move to action.

Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its Calls to Action in June 2015, governments, churches, non-profit, professional and community organizations, corporations, schools and universities, clubs and individuals have asked: “How can I/we participate in reconciliation?” Recognizing that reconciliation is not only an ultimate goal, but a decolonizing process of journeying in ways that embody everyday acts of resistance, resurgence, and solidarity, coupled with renewed commitments to justice, dialogue, and relationship-building, Pathways of Reconciliation helps readers find their way forward. The essays in Pathways of Reconciliation address the themes of reframing, learning and healing, researching, and living. They engage with different approaches to reconciliation (within a variety of reconciliation frameworks, either explicit or implicit) and illustrate the complexities of the reconciliation process itself. They canvass multiple and varied pathways of reconciliation, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives, reflecting a diversity of approaches to the mandate given to all Canadians by the TRC with its Calls to Action. Together the authors — academics, practitioners, students and ordinary citizens — demonstrate the importance of trying and learning from new and creative approaches to thinking about and practicing reconciliation and reflect on what they have learned from their attempts (both successful and less successful) in the process.

Since the 1970s, Aboriginal people have been more likely to live in Canadian cities than on reserves or in rural areas. Aboriginal rural-to-urban migration and the development of urban Aboriginal communities represent one of the most significant shifts in the histories and cultures of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The essays in Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities: Transformations and Continuities are from contributors directly engaged in urban Aboriginal communities; they draw on extensive ethnographic research on and by Aboriginal people and their own lived experiences. The interdisciplinary studies of urban Aboriginal community and identity collected in this volume offer narratives of unique experiences and aspects of urban Aboriginal life. They provide innovative perspectives on cultural transformation and continuity and demonstrate how comparative examinations of the diversity within and across urban Aboriginal experiences contribute to broader understandings of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state and to theoretical debates about power dynamics in the production of community and in processes of identity formation.

This study examines the historical context of aboriginal (Indian, Métis, Inuit) socio-economic development in Canada, depicts current trends and future developments, offers models for the formulation of successful development strategies and looks at longterm prospects, and serves as a text for those studying the field for the purpose of professional training.

From the John Holmes Library Collection.