Wow, this is racist...

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Vi...459/story.html

How that book is selling, with the author able to take it on a tour around the country to high-profile locations, is very fucking disturbing. If it concerned any other race, it would be more widely condemned and the author would actually be spat upon in the street. If it had actually been published to begin with.

The thesis of the book is that there is no aboriginal culture and thus "they" have "made themselves" irrelevant to society at large - and this is why a race has been marginalized. It's partially equivalent to, for example, burning every hip hop record because they're all made by those strange black people. This is the same attitude that early colonialists had - the latter point sidestepping any racism there is towards aboriginal peoples, (keeping them out of the cultural dialogue) of which there certainly is.

Yes, the synopsis reads much more nicely, like a serious work that's concerned with human welfare. And it is! If only those brown people wouldn't be so uppity about their shacks in the north! And stop banging drums or wearing those clothes! Wait, no, those drums can't exist, Aboriginal people can't have drums if they don't have culture - see how ignorant this is going?

Here's a book review with comments including one of the authors. And more analysis:
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2009/01/16/2304/

Early in his comments he describes aboriginal people as comparable to children.

I could type some book excerpts, sure.

The author even says we need to "defeather" the aboriginal reviewer's "counter-productive" activism.

And let's not forget that the book assumes culture is inherited and not learned.