In Citizens Plus, Alan C. Cairns notes that Pierre Trudeau spent more time on Indian policy during his first year as Prime Minister than on any other issue, and that Jean Chretien, the PM's Quebec lieutenant, began his long stint in Ottawa as his minister of Indian Affairs. The outcome of their first collaboration was a white paper on Indian policy, a document that introduced many key aspects of our legal identity crisis, establishing the basis of our national politics up to this day.

Cairns's most recent work, the product of four decades of deep reading and reflection, advances the thesis that he and his colleagues hit the mark more than 30 years ago, when they worked on The Hawthorne Report. Issued in 1966, it came out only six years after Indians were finally allowed to vote in federal elections, and it introduced the term "citizens plus." Not only should registered Indians be recognized as full citizens in Canada, but there could be many different kinds of program innovations aimed at recognizing the special place of First Nations.

In Citizens Plus, Cairns seeks a vision of Canadian citizenship that reflects both pluralism and a need for common symbols of shared identity.

Having once demonstrated the colonial nature of Canada's assimilationist Indian policy between 1857 and 1969, Cairns now looks at subsequent developments as the local expression of a worldwide rejection of the white man's self-declared burden. Citizens Plus presents a Canadian variant on the global movement for decolonization. The liberal-conservative centre in Canada has largely rejected assimilationist aboriginal policy, equating it with wrongful extinguishment of the basic right to express cultural pluralism. The residue of support for assimilation is on the far right, whose adherents speak with a tone Cairns identifies as "harsher, more defensive and more strident" than that of former proponents of the so-called civilizing mission.

In First Nations? Second Thoughts, Calgary political science professor Tom Flanagan illustrates the stridency of the new assimilationists, unabashedly celebrating Indian policy before 1969 as a valid effort to elevate primitive savages toward civilization. For Flanagan, the answer to the socio-economic disaster on many reserves is not self-government, but less government and more assimilation into the homogenized, competitive individualism of the globalized marketplace. He brings to Canada's oldest and most complex human-rights issues the neo-liberal arguments popularized in the United States by Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama. History is seen primarily as a chronicle of triumph, a "demonstrable increase in power over nature and over uncivilized societies."

The vanquished have little choice but to accept the inferiority of their heritage and the necessity to remake themselves in the image of their conquerors.

This kind of clichéd apologetics goes back at least to 1492, but there is some hard truth-telling in parts of Flanagan's book. I appreciated his chapter on the scandals about some Indian bands being administered for the benefit of a privileged few. But do these episodes justify the assimilationists' zeal to discredit the whole project of self-government? I also agree with Flanagan that the culture of welfare dependency on most reserves is "the greatest policy disaster in Canadian history."

Then there's Bruce Clark, the disbarred, criminalized expert on imperial aboriginal law whose memoirs form the basis of Justice in Paradise. The culmination of the book's lively narrative, and of Clark's own tumultuous legal career, took place in the b.c. Interior in 1995. At the centre of the controversy was the Battle of Gustafsen Lake. That confrontation over the legal status of a sacred ceremonial site mushroomed to become by far the largest police and military action in the history of the province: about 20 armed native and non-native sundancers surrounded by 400 RCMP officers and soldiers including, it seems, a secret anti-terrorist unit.

In his unorthodox representation of his clients in the native encampment, Clark attempted to raise the provocative legal thesis that the international genocide convention has been violated through failure to develop British Columbia in conformity with Canada's existing law of aboriginal rights. Government officials evaded engaging Clark's arguments, and the media replicated the campaign of ridicule and demonization orchestrated by the B.C. attorney-general and the RCMP, deflecting serious consideration of Clark's thesis: that the issue of unceded Indian title to b.c. lands has implications in international law.

The RCMP produced a training tape of their behind-the-scenes operations during the Battle of Gustafsen Lake, portions of which were released as evidence at the trial of the militant sundancers. The surprising contents included a police media liason officer seeking journalistic assistance for what he described as the RCMP's "disinformation and smear campaign."

Mountie Dennis Ryan calmly announced that his superiors had decided "to kill this Clark and smear the prick and everyone with him."

These and many other chilling snippets have been repeatedly aired on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in a full-length documentary, Above the Law, Part 2, which corroborates some of the seemingly incredible episodes in Clark's memoir. Readers can judge for themselves whether Clark is a lunatic or a courageous messenger bearing sad news about the Canadian judiciary.

In fact, officialdom's ruthless handling of Clark and his clients shows that the Indian wars in North America persist. The propagandistic ruses employed by the Crown at Gustafsen Lake in 1995 followed the same basic tactics used at Oka in 1990 and at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973.

The five-centuries-old conflict with First Nations for control of lands and resources continues. The repressiveness of the covert tactics employed to marginalize the militant wing of the First Nations sovereignty movement belies the academic character of the debate between Cairns and Flanagan. Both fail to set their sights firmly on the need for institutional innovations at the international level. As Clark insists, that is where we need a new regime of global protection for the rights of indigenous people on all continents. Domestic initiatives alone are not enough.