Long time no update!

It’s not that I haven’t been reading since the last update; I’ve just been a little busy what with moving and all; plus I haven’t had really consistent Internet access. Since this blog thing wasn’t at the top of my priority list lately, it slipped.

Before I left Canada, I read three books that I haven’t put up, and of course I’ve forgotten the titles and authors of two of them.

The last book was Robert Ludlum’s The Sigma Protocol. The typical Ludlum plot convolutions made it interesting enough, but for some reason the book wasn’t as gripping as some of his other, earlier books. Maybe he’s getting tired of writing, or after writing so many books he can’t help recycling. Anyway, it was a nice quick read that didn’t take too much thought to get through.

Before that were two books on the history of the First Nations in Canada. One was written by a land claims lawyer in BC, and it was a good read. I don’t think he was Native himself, but he demonstrated a real sensitivity to the history and issues in his story. If I recall correctly, he wrote his book in response to having, again and again, to give history lessons in court where he was called as an expert witness. I think the main point of the book was that the white man should kick himself every time the First Nations are conceived of as being a singular, homogenous nation across North America. In reality, there were lots of different groups, and groups within groups, and each group adapted to the environment where it predominantly lived.

The second book was much more painful to read. It was an edited volume, that is, different people wrote the different chapters. The volume concentrated on the history of Ontario First Nations, and had the potential to be interesting. The history is interesting (to me, anyway). The book was not. I found it to be more of a digest of the archaeological record than a history. The number of times the authors stopped short in a description or analysis claiming that “There is no archaeological record known to us” was immensely frustrating. The book is presented as a history – there’s more to the history than what a small number of white men have been able to surmise from pottery fragments. I recognise the rigour of the scientific method that they are applying to their archaeology and analysis, but couldn’t there be some correlation between the data and the oral history? The book really made First Nations history feel like some sort of dead or petrified artefact that gets looked really really closely so that someone can with great authority proclaim that it really was there, but we don’t know anything about it.