Taking Control is a critical ethnography of the Native Education Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. It presents an intimate view of the centre, focusing on the ways that people work there-First Nations students, board members, teachers--and how they talk about and put into practice their beliefs about First Nations control. Selected words of the people interviewed figure prominently in the descriptions of everyday life in the centre. As Michael Apple comments in the preface, their stories ?provide concrete evidence of what can be accomplished when the complicated politics of...

With Good Intentions examines the joint efforts of Aboriginal people and individuals of European ancestry to counter injustice in Canada when colonization was at its height, from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These people recognized colonial wrongs and worked together in a variety of ways to right them, but they could not stem the tide of European-based exploitation.

The book is neither an apologist text nor an attempt to argue that some colonizers were simply "well intentioned." Almost all those considered here -- teachers, lawyers, missionaries,...