Opportunity or Temptation?

“Call it assimilation, call it integration, call it adaptation, call it whatever you want: it has to happen.” These words come straight from the pages of Tom Flanagan’s 2000 work First Nations? Second Thoughts and sum up his conviction that since First Nations in Canada are uncivilized and their governments produce “wasteful, destructive, familistic factionalism,” they should not be entitled to self-governing powers, special tax exemptions or federal funding, but should be assimilated and their reserves divided up into parcels of individually owned, “fee simple” lands available for sale to non-aboriginal people and corporations.

A professor in the University of Calgary’s political science department since 1968 and a former advisor to Stephen Harper, Flanagan has unsurprisingly generated considerable controversy with his policy recommendations regarding aboriginal peoples.

First Nations received a great deal of attention from both...