Kiumajut Talking Back ─ Game Management and Inuit Rights 1950-70

"Progress is necessarily a totalization, for it is the pursuit of the restoration or establishment of a totality." So observed Jean-Paul Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sharing this perspective, Kulchyski (Native studies, U. of Manitoba, Canada) and Tester (social work, U. of British Columbia, Canada) examine Canadian government policy, legal history, so-called modernization, resistance, and the development of Inuit rights in the first 70 years of the 20th century. They discuss the emergence and development of the science of wildlife management as it affected Inuit populations and the management regime for key species important to Inuit culture and survival, arguing that totalization in relation to the Inuit meant, for the state, "the transmutation of need away from relations to animals and towards what so-called progress had to offer: wage employment, permanent housing, settlement living, and all that they entail." Distributed in the US by the U. of Washington Press. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Peter Kulchyski is a professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, co-author with Frank Tester of Tammarniit [Mistakes]:Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic 1939-63, and author of Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut. Frank James Tester is a professor in the Faculty of Social Work and Family Studies at UBC and is the co-author of Tammarniit [Mistakes] and co-editor of Critical Choices: Turbulent Times.