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Alberta and Me

From a land of oil, true enough

Amanda Perry

Referendum? What Referendum?

A constitutional expert argues that the federal insistence on clarity has paid off

Sujit Choudhry

The Grey Plateau

When the world stopped five years ago

Stephen Marche
Our Contributors

Robert McGhee

Robert McGhee is an archaeologist who has worked across Arctic Canada and occasionally in other circumpolar regions. His most recent book is The Thousand-Year Path: The Canada Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2008).

Articles by
Robert McGhee

Demythologizing the Fur Trade

The living standards of Cree trappers in the 18thcentury were more European than we think December 2010
The fur trade has long been a cliché of early Canadian history. It lodges in our minds as a romantic but slightly tedious haze of canoes, beads and blankets, beaver hats, carefree voyageurs, stolid Scots traders, untamed Indians and, of course, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For Canada the fur trade might play the role of the Wild West in American historical…

Blowing the Whistle

Two academics take on the Canadian eliteswho profit from aboriginal poverty March 2009
The problems that beset the majority of Canada’s aboriginal communities are so large, diffuse and apparently intractable that few citizens—aboriginal or non-aboriginal— and fewer government agencies have the energy and fortitude to pursue solutions. Arguably the last federal government that had a clear plan of action was that of Pierre Trudeau in 1968–72. Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien’s 1969 white paper was the final push in an effort at assimilation that had animated Canadian aboriginal policy for a…

A Different North

The Russian Arctic sees extraordinary changes over half a century December 2008
Chukotka is Russia’s most distant and most isolated territory. Separated from Moscow by nine time zones, it lies 4,000 kilometres north of the Pacific railhead at Vladivostok. This was the last fragment of eastern Asia to be added to the Russian empire, and only during the 1950s were the Soviets able to effectively colonize the territory and collectivize its…