The Crooked Path: Colonization to Decolonization

Comprehensive in scope and enlivened with personal anecdotes, The Crooked Path brings together observations and insights from Brian Hawker’s two decades as an educator in Northwestern Ontario. Within his first year, he realized that his training program could not realistically achieve its goals. He was training people who, with few exceptions, brought complex personal issues and health-related problems to the classroom. Like many non-Indigenous specialists working in the North, Brian became aware that the sheer number of problems, the jurisdictional wrangling over who was responsible for solving them and the history of past failures was almost overwhelming. In the process, he realized he had been totally unprepared for the work he had been asked to do. This is the book he would have needed and that other professionals will find uniquely valuable.
His book reviews the history of how things came to be the way they are and points critically to the gridlock between the federal system and the majority of Canada’s 634 First Nations. And how First Nations are unable to contribute to their own communities due to the failure of the current system to understand, honour, update and implement historic agreements. In it Brian shows how uncoordinated federal, provincial, and First Nations levels of jurisdiction have historically created obstacles that make it impossible for Indigenous children to grow up with the fundamental supports they need.