In case you haven’t noticed, I like buying (and reading) books. Usually history or “ideas” books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell or Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, or 1491 by Charles C. Mann (a really awesome book if you are interested in the history of the Americas). Often I buy books when I’m travelling somewhere. Some

Here’s a novel idea I found while using Stumbleupon. (In case you don’t know, SU walks you through a series of websites according to topics of interest you have previously chosen. It also learns what you like as you go along. You find websites that you probably wouldn’t have otherwise found in a hundred years.)

My primary objective in the first few posts in this series is to explore how Canadian natives changed from being autonomous self-governing people to becoming subjects of the British crown? This change in status is extremely important. By the time of Confederation (1867) natives – at least in Eastern Canada – were no longer free

As I suggested in a previous post, the Indian Residential School issue in Canada is a fairly good focus for a discussion of what went wrong with the dominant white culture’s relationsihp with Canadian natives. While the Residential School issue really belongs to the previous two or three generations of Canadians, the problems that school

In this series of posts I consider some of the historical, political, anthropological and philosophical background to Canadian “native” issues. Along the way I touch on some interesting things I have recently (and not so recently) discovered about the native Indian presence in Canada. (Note: I use the term “native” to cover those people normally

My golfing buddy and I have been playing golf together for more than ten years now. At least once a week during golf season, and often two or three times a week we drive together to one of the courses we play at. The outing usually involves at least a half hour drive. So we have lots

One of the books I have been reading most recently is called “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt. The subtitle is “Why We Drive The Way We Do (and what it says about us)”. This is not the kind of book you would normally think of as an entertaining read. But like most people who drive a

Talk about stereotypes! There’s this classic image of a guy and a girl sitting across from each other at a cafe. It’s been lampooned in any number of commercials and sitcoms. The girl is yapping non-stop about who knows what and the guy sits there nodding, “Uh huh, Uh huh, Uh huh,” while the bubble