CLEARING THE PLAINS NEW EDITION
Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life JAMES DASCHUK Foreword by ELIZABETH A. FENN The award-winning book about how Canada’s first prime minister starved Indigenous peoples in the pursuit of nationhood
James Daschuk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina and a researcher with the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit.
In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics—the politics of ethnocide—played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of Indigenous people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Dream” during the latter half of the 19th century. This new edition of the book that revealed that Canada’s first prime minister used a famine against Indigenous peoples has a forward by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth A. Fenn and explanations by leading historians of the book’s profound influence. Called “one of the most important books of the twenty-first century” by the Literary Review of Canada, it was named “Book of the Year” by The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, The Writers’ Trust of Canada, and won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, among many others. “[A] great work of history...James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains is colossal. This is excavation of an authentically Canadian past from under layers of colonial myth, performed with a scalpel, and illuminated by searing prose. —The Globe and Mail “[C]learly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of Indigenous North America.” —J.R. McNeil, author of Mosquito Empires
February 2019 384pages • 6 x 9 Paper • 978-0-8897-7622-7 • $22.95S Cloth • 978-0-8897-7621-0 • $89.00X Indigenous Studies | History University of Regina Press WW W.NY U P R ESS.ORG
S PRIN G 2019 • NY U PRE S S
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