Description
On Being Here to Stay: Treaties and Aboriginal Rights in Canada by anthropologist Michael Asch, professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, offers readers and examination of the numbered treaties in a unique manner. He asks the questions: What, other than numbers and power, justifies Canada’s assertion of sovereignty and jurisdiction over the country’s vast territory? Why should Canada’s original inhabitants have to ask for rights to what was their land when non-Aboriginal people first arrived? The question lurks behind every court judgment on Indigenous rights, every demand that treaty obligations be fulfilled, and every land-claims negotiation. Addressing these questions has occupied anthropologist Michael Asch for nearly thirty years. In On Being Here to Stay, Asch retells the story of Canada with a focus on the relationship between First Nations and settlers. Using Treaty 4 as his case study he proposes a solution to settler and Indigenous relations as they play out in Canadian history.