Aboriginal Well-Being: Canada’s Continuing Challenge (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aboriginal Well-Being: Canada’s Continuing Challenge James Frideres Jerry White, Dan Beavon, and Nicholas Spence, eds. Aboriginal Well-Being: Canada’s Continuing Challenge. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2007. 246 pp. $36.95 sc. The volume is one of a series of publications produced by the Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium which is housed at the University of Western Ontario and headed by Dr. Jerry White. While the goal of this book is to provide the reader with information on the health and well-being of Aboriginal people in Canada, it approaches the topic from a methodological perspective. Put another way, while the reader will certainly learn about the well-being of Aboriginal people, the authors are really focused on trying to develop appropriate, comparative, and reliable measures of well-being. There is some contextual information about Aboriginal people in Canada, but the authors are more focused on developing a set of indicators. Why do I mention this? I do so because the reader needs to be forewarned so that s/he not approach the manuscript with expectations that will not be fulfilled. However, it is an ambitious volume concerned with the analysis of the well-being of Aboriginal [End Page 218] groups in Canada as well as around the world. The work is truly exceptional on many counts. The book’s wide comparative breadth, the methodological sophistication, the up-to-date references, and the critical analysis of the data make this book a notable accomplishment. The book is a wonderful compilation of information regarding the well-being of Aboriginal people in Canada and in other “settler” societies. Given that the chapters are written by different authors, who in turn use different measures of “well-being,” specific comparisons are difficult. Nevertheless, data from the census, administrative units, e.g., Indian Affairs, and other sources are used to empirically assess the concept of well-being. Throughout the book, the authors acknowledge these methodological issues and focus on patterns and trends that illuminate the results. The authors, having access to data that might not otherwise be available to other researchers, make the best use of their databases as they mine the data to its fullest. The volume is comprised of ten chapters placed within three parts. The first part introduces the concept of “well-being” and introduces general theoretical and methodological issues that researchers have to deal with when measuring the concept. This section provides an excellent theoretical discussion of the concept of well-being, why it is important, why it needs to be measured at different levels, and the implications of introducing such a concept into the language when dealing with Aboriginal people. Part 2 looks at a Registered Indian Human Development Index and considers changes that have taken place between 1981 and 2001. This section also examines sex equality and well-being. Finally, it provides a four-country (Australia, Canada, United States, New Zealand) comparison of Aboriginal people’s well-being. Part 3 moves to a more macro level of analysis and focuses on developing a community well-being index. This section begins by outlining what a community well-being index is, why it is important, and how one might empirically measure it. An initial application of the model is used for measuring community well-being of Inuit. Later, a comparison of well-being in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities is provided. The penultimate chapter assesses the impact of specific claim settlement on community well-being and finds little effect. The final chapter reviews the empirical results presented in the preceding chapters and provides the reader with an assessment and critique of the objective and subjective dimensions of the concept “community well-being.” While space prevents a detailed discussion of each chapter, some of them deserve special mention. The comparative chapters are particularly important in that they allow both intra-group comparisons as well as inter-group comparisons. For example, one chapter provides a comparison of well-being between First Nations communities from one time period to another. In another case the authors compare Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Canada. I might add that [End Page 219] Indian Affairs, at one point in time, provided similar comparisons, but...