Drum Songs

de Kerry Abel

"The Dene nation is made up of of eighteen thousand people speaking five distinct languages and spread over 1.8 million square kilometres in the western Canadian subarctic. In the 1970s and 1980s, the campaign against the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, support for the leadership of Georges Erasmus in the Assembly of First Nations, and land claim negotiations with the federal government put the Dene on the leading edge of Canada's Native rights movement. Drum Songs reconstructs important moments in Dene history, offering a sympathetic treatment of their past, the impact of the fur trade, their interaction with Christian missionaries, and evolving relations with the Canadian federal government."--BOOK JACKET.