An eye-opening description of Aboriginal culture as it was in the 1880s John McLean was a Christian missionary who lived for nine years with the Blood (Kainai) Indians in present-day Southern Alberta, learning their language, customs and traditions. In 1889, at the request of the Smithsonian Institution, he wrote The Indians of Canada, a balanced…
Canadian elites accepted the old-world model of political and social organization based on identification with racial groups
Columnist and author Richard Gwyn wrote that the 1950s was a time “when Canadians came to realize and believe that a ‘new nationality’ could be political rather than ethnic, or composed of values and attitudes, rather than races.” Gwyn, author of Nation Maker – Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, a biography of Canada’s first prime…