Skin for Skin: Death and Life for Inuit and Innu (Narrating Native Histories) - Softcover

Sider, Gerald M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355361 ISBN 13: 9780822355366

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

Since the 1960s, the Native peoples of northeastern Canada, both Inuit and Innu, have experienced epidemics of substance abuse, domestic violence, and youth suicide. Seeking to understand these transformations in the capacities of Native communities to resist cultural, economic, and political domination, Gerald M. Sider offers an ethnographic analysis of aboriginal Canadians' changing experiences of historical violence. He relates acts of communal self-destruction to colonial and postcolonial policies and practices, as well as to the end of the fur and sealskin trades. Autonomy and dignity within Native communities have eroded as individuals have been deprived of their livelihoods and treated by the state and corporations as if they were disposable. Yet Native peoples' possession of valuable resources provides them with some income and power to negotiate with state and business interests. Sider's assessment of the health of Native communities in the Canadian province of Labrador is filled with potentially useful findings for Native peoples there and elsewhere. While harrowing, his account also suggests hope, which he finds in the expressiveness and power of Native peoples to struggle for a better tomorrow within and against domination.
 

About this title

About the Author

Gerald M. Sider is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. His books include Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland and Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina, both in second editions.
 

Review

"In this provocative and insightful book, Gerald M. Sider addresses the complex issue of epidemic self-destruction among Canada's Innu and Inuit communities. Combining careful, innovative research and socially engaged ethnography, Skin for Skin is a valuable contribution to the field of indigenous anthropology. Writing in an accessible narrative style, Sider utilizes a holistic approach to understanding the historical violence experienced by indigenous peoples and its consequences, while also creating spaces for hope to be nourished." (L. Jane McMillan, St. Francis Xavier University)

"Skin for Skin is a remarkable work. Gerald M. Sider challenges both anthropological and more general understandings of what 'culture' is. In this deeply respectful engagement with the Innu and Inuit of Labrador, Sider turns their perpetual oppression into a devastating critique of the Canadian state. At the same time, he makes an exemplary contribution by identifying potential opportunities for better lives for the increasing number of people designated the residuum of our ravaging world." (Gavin Smith, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, and author of Confronting the Present and Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics (forthcoming))

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822355361
• ISBN 13: 9780822355366
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 312