Review of "I Thought Pocahontas Was a Movie": Perspectives on Race/Culture Binaries in Education and Service Professions. Edited by Carol Schick and James McNinch.

Authors

Tracy L. Friedel, University of British ColumbiaFollow

Date of this Version

Winter 2011

Citation

Great Plains Research 21.1 (2011), p 119

Comments

© 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

This edited volume argues that a race/culture binary lies at the heart of Canada's ongoing relationship with the descendants of the country's First Peoples. In looking at the service professions, editors Carol Schick and James McNinch trouble taken-for-granted assumptions based upon racial, cultural, and ethnic difference, arguing that representations of Indigenous peoples as culturally inferior, a trope that has replaced the idea of biological inferiority, is highly instrumental in the social positioning and unequal power relations that exists today in Canadian society. In turn, the editors tie this discussion back to Canada's colonial history and the social, material, and ideological conditions produced in previous eras.