The White Man's Gonna Getcha

In The White Man's Gonna Getcha Toby Morantz examines threats to the cultural and economic independence of the Crees in eastern James Bay. She argues that while their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur-trading relationship with the Hudson's Bay Company had been mutually beneficial, Canada's twentieth-century interest in administering its outlying isolated regions actually posed the greatest challenge to the Cree way of life.

Toby Morantz

The Crees are actors, not victims, in this story. They adapt and survive. This very significant study is based on first rate scholarship, has an excellent balance of archival accounts and Cree narratives, and is as up-to-date and comprehensive as could be hoped for. John S. Long, assistant professor, Aboriginal Education Program, Nipissing University Morantz is the prime scholar of this region for the classic fur trade period and she has now extended her work forward another century, demonstrating that the radical social, economic, and cultural changes of the 1900s emerged from the unintended effects of ameliorative government interventions in health, education, and welfare delivered to the Crees as if they were mainstream southern Canadians. This is a crucial test case of colonial theory as it has been applied to the Canadian north. Richard Preston, professor emeritus, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University