Enough Talk

First Nations Gaming in Canada is billed as the first multidisciplinary study of aboriginal gaming in Canada. The book lives up to this description: its twelve essays span the historical, sociological, economic and political aspects of the issue. Contributors, including editor Yale Belanger, are all suitably credentialed and have written on this subject before; Belanger in particular is the author of Gambling with the Future: The Evolution of Aboriginal Gaming in Canada.

But despite—or perhaps because of—its ambitious breadth, reading First Nations Gaming in Canada generates a sense of incompleteness and frustration. A great deal of its research is self-admittedly inconclusive, or reveals the failure of current aboriginal policy to achieve successful outcomes. Although perhaps unintended, the work leaves the reader with a sense of the overwhelming, urgent need to change Canada’s relationship with First Nations people, not only to...