In her new book, Maggie Siggins, author of the Governor General’s Award-winning Revenge of the Land, sets out to reveal the human face behind native issues by writing a history of the Pelican Narrows Cree of northern Saskatchewan. The prologue promises to use the case of Michael Bomek, the white Flin Flon lawyer jailed for sexual exploitation of his Pelican Narrows Cree clients, to demonstrate “the entire sad history of white-Indian relations.”

Siggins weaves the history with exhaustive interviews of contemporary community members and centuries of anthropological sources, down to the log entries of the Hudson’s Bay Company. She covers everything from first contact between the Cree and Europeans, the fur trade, the religious colonization by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, the history of local residential and day schooling, the local struggle for political sovereignty and civil rights, to, finally, the story of Michael Bomek.

Siggins’ use of the Woodland Cree translation of each chapter title and number reminds readers that this is the story of a living people, oppressed historically but not defeated by history. There is no nostalgic past tense in her treatment here, as contemporary characters go about living modern Cree lives, using the Cree language, and recalling historical events within the context of their own lives and communities.

Siggins does sometimes resort to generalizations to introduce and frame historical anecdotes and anthropological background. The generalizations are flattering or apologetic to the Woodland Cree, but they are used to drive home conclusions that the reader has already deduced from the anecdotal and documentary evidence. Siggins is writing against an often racist and one-sided history of native people, but her generalizations undermine the far more complex realities that her research demonstrates to the reader. Furthermore, the overlapping layers of native history, each centred on a crucial topic, are not really tied together until the final chapter. In the end, though, the historical document Siggins has created is of incalculable value, as is the precedent that it sets for future historians.