Skin for skin : death and life for Inuit and Innu /

This ethnographic analysis of Innu and Inuit experiences of changing historical violence begins with European contact and the fur trade (accounting for the title), and outlines colonial and postcolonial policies and practices as context for these indigenous peoples' communal self-destruction. Sider (emer., anthropology, Graduate Center CUNY) presents two histories "about the struggles between order and chaos." This history of chaos is not unique in documenting colonial domination and contextualizing contemporary social and political conditions in six of the book's eight chapters. The history of order of course includes that from above, from those who sought to govern, control, use, or "save." The author's use of primary documents is definitely strong and extensive. What makes the book truly compelling is twofold. The two final chapters acknowledge the author's own evolution as an anthropologist and researcher who came to better understand how to witness and reflect indigenous peoples' capacities to resist cultural, economic, and political domination. Secondly, there is a complex, nuanced recognition of those Inuit and Innu who have struggled to create some kind of new and reestablished old order out of the chaos that comes with imposed colonial and neocolonial order. --Gord Bruyere, University of Manitoba- Aboriginal Focus Programs