The commonplace history of Quebec and the Maritime Peninsula tells us that Canada and the US were decisively shaped by the defeat of Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham in 1759. This brilliant new history takes us back almost a hundred years earlier, examining French and English warfare, trade, diplomacy, and settlement on Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, and Wolastoqiyik Lands. In doing so, Thomas Peace demonstrates how these Peoples maintained their Homelands, while, at the same time, after 1759, the broader historical context established in the early chapters of this book set the stage for a rapid influx of colonists on their Lands.

The commonplace history of Quebec and the Maritime Peninsula tells us that Canada and the US were decisively shaped by the defeat of Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham in 1759. This brilliant new history takes us back almost a hundred years earlier, examining French and English warfare, trade, diplomacy, and settlement on Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, and Wolastoqiyik Lands. In doing so, Thomas Peace demonstrates how these Peoples maintained their Homelands, while, at the same time, after 1759, the broader historical context established in the early chapters of this book set the stage for a rapid influx of colonists on their Lands.

As the settler state of Canada expanded into Indigenous lands, settlers dispossessed Indigenous people and undermined their sovereignty as nations. One site of invasion was Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien’kehá:ka community and part of the Rotinonhsiónni confederacy. The Laws and the Land delineates the establishment of a settler colonial relationship from early contact ways of sharing land; land practices under Kahnawà:ke law; the establishment of modern Kahnawà:ke in the context of French imperial claims; intensifying colonial invasions under British rule; and ultimately the Canadian invasion in the guise of the Indian Act, private property, and coercive pressure to assimilate. What Daniel Rück describes is an invasion spearheaded by bureaucrats, Indian agents, politicians, surveyors, and entrepreneurs. This original, meticulously researched book is deeply connected to larger issues of human relations with environments, communal and individual ways of relating to land, legal pluralism, historical racism and inequality, and Indigenous resurgence.

Canada is a bounded land – a nation situated between rock and cold to the north and a border to the south. Cole Harris traces how society was reorganized – for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike – when Europeans resettled this distinctive land. Through a series of vignettes that focus on people’s experiences on the ground, he exposes the underlying architecture of colonialism, from first contacts, to the immigrant experience in early Canada, to the dispossession of First Nations. In the process, he unearths fresh insights on the influence of Indigenous peoples and argues that Canada’s boundedness is ultimately drawing it toward its Indigenous roots.

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A comprehensive study of recent African history, examining the political, social, and economic effects of colonialism.