Taking Control: Power and Contradiction in First Nations Adult Education Celia Haig-Brown Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995. xiv + 288 pp. $45.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper) Reviewer: A.D. Fisher University of AlbertaTaking Control is a narrative-like account of what some participants had to say about Native Education Centre (NEC) in Vancouver. The author focusses her attention on political concept of of Indian and on and contradiction in relation to people she interviewed at NEC. The author says that, is a critical ethnography. It is an investigation of ways that people associated with a particular First Nations adult educational institution talk and act on their understandings of First Nations control (p. 16).The book's nine chapters are divided into three parts. There are five chapters in first part, which is theoretical and methodological. There are three chapters in second, narrative part. The last part comprises one chapter.Haig-Brown represents views of her interviewees well. Indeed, second part of book is primarily composed of their words, and research document was returned to them for review. However, these words seem disconnected from theoretical perspective adopted in this, her dissertation, research. This is probably because Foucault's power did not fit easily into discussions with NEC staff and students about Indian control.In concluding chapter there is another unfortunate disconnection. Here Haig-Brown says, was I, non-Native researcher, who found contradiction to be integral to study (p. 231). A primary contradiction was struggle between necessity of building and using an awareness of Native perspective (or being Native), on one hand, and, on other, necessity of achieving training and employment goals of program and its funding agencies.At several points, she mentions Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's work regarding contradiction, but nowhere in this work does idea attain central position it holds in Freire's Pedagogy of Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). Freire's book is about post-literacy stage of adult education and generatire themes in it. Early in its investigation, dialogue uncovers the nuclei of principle and secondary (p. 104) around which one could organize an educational-action program. Freire says that a program based on these observed contradictions would be more likely to succeed than one based on decisions from top (p. 105).Here is where we find disconnection between Haig-Brown's theory about and narrative about Indian control. The book is a report on Ph.D. research--where theory almost inevitably comes from top--rather than a report on applied research or educational action in a Freirean sense. This is also crunch of contradiction. Haig-Brown can take concept no further than to say that it is useful to academics trying to understand Indian of Indian education, while for Native Peoples trying to wrest of their education from dominant society, contradiction is a name for tensions and discomfort they experience in process. …