Leading the charge against the recognition of aboriginal land rights in British Columbia, Canada's richest and fastest-growing province, are Globe and Mail columnist Gordon Gibson and former b.c. civil servant Mel Smith. In many columns, Gibson has railed against the terms of the Nisga'a Treaty, an agreement that he says entrenches racial discrimination in law.

Gibson's arguments, which have wide currency especially in the Canadian Alliance Party, are largely extensions of the themes in Smith's Our Home Or Native Land?, a little text that is on its way to becoming something of a cult classic among far-right activists organizing to oppose aboriginal rights. Smith cites selectively from various court rulings to advance the thesis that it is perfectly legal for governments and corporations to dispossess aboriginal peoples of lands and resources in Canada without their consent and without compensation.

Both Smith and Gibson join a long line of social Darwinists who have asserted or implied that North America has no lasting place for indigenous nations, and that natives must simply leave behind their aboriginal nations to enter the political and economic cultures of their colonizers as equal citizens.

Beneath this insistence that the security of "our home" depends on the extinguishment of "native land" lies an old tradition of ethnic cleansing in the Americas, the techniques of which have been cultural genocide and legal usurpation at best, and outright genocide at worst. No single experience better encapsulates this dimension of Canadian history than the story of the Beothuk of Newfoundland.

As Ingeborg Marshall details in A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, by the 1830s the indigenous people of Newfoundland had ceased to exist. Disease and other aboriginal groups played a role in the demise of the Beothuk, but Marshall makes it clear that the major factor in their disappearance was "ruthlessness and brutality by the English" combined with the newcomers' "total disregard for the humanity of the native population."

Marshall's big book on the Beothuk represents the scholarly efforts of what must be the larger part of a working lifetime. The footnotes alone fill 122 pages. The approach is that of a very old school of classical ethnography, the kind of study that used to be sponsored by organizations such as the Geological Survey of Canada.

While anthropological fieldwork was obviously out of the question, Marshall has seemingly scoured the planet seeking every primary source imaginable that in any way touches on the lives of the Beothuk. She has arranged the fruits of this research into two large sections, one a chronological account of various Beothuk sightings and encounters, the other describing the Beothuk way of life under such headings as clothing, tools, food, language and world view.

The result is a narrative that sometimes is profoundly insightful, sometimes more like a catalogue of finely organized but undistilled information. This is not a volume for everyone, but it will long stand as the essential and standard reference on the Beothuk, adding significant scope and depth to the important earlier contributions of James p. Howley and the pioneering historian of Canadian Indian policy, L. F. S. Upton.

One of the reasons given by Marshall for the genocidal outcome of native-newcomer relations in Newfoundland was the lack of intermediaries between the communities, such as missionaries, fur traders and government Indian agents. In fact, the first Beothuk to develop relatively close and extended relations with the European settlers was the last of her tribe, the legendary Shanawdithit.

Between 1823 and 1829, when she died, Shanawdithit lived under the protection of William E. Cor-mack, who foun-ded the Boethuk Institution with the hope of establishing friendly relations with her people. He acted too late. The young Indian wo-man proved to be the only witness to describe for the outside world a Beothuk perspective on reality. What she left were a few drawings, maps and paper cuttings, depicting both symbols of her culture and the appearance of St. John's in the 1820s.

These few representations, reproduced among the book's many rich illustrations, constitute the only detailed echo of what Marshall calls "the missing Beothuk voice." Her own isolation from the human community at the end of the ethnographic microscope was especially apparent in the chapter entitled Burial Places and Mortuary Practices. The desecration of Indian burial grounds by archeologists has been an extremely sensitive question ever since activists of the American Indian Movement called attention to the practice in the 1970s, so it astonished me to read such observations by Marshall as this: "The Beothuk, like other North American Indians, thought that the spirits of the dead in their altered state of existence were in need of nourishment, spare clothing, weapons, and tools, as well as protection from evil powers. In keeping with this belief they placed a variety of grave gods with the dead."

The practice of executing or describing grave robbery in the persona of the "objective" scientist speaks of the persistence of certain professional attitudes that have done much to discredit archeology, anthropology, museology and ethnography in the eyes of many native people. Some of their own academic figures, such as the Sioux theologian Vine Deloria Jr., have condemned the implicit or explicit description of native Americans' most sacred beliefs and customs as mere superstition.

Massechusetts, the Pocanokets, and many otheronce powerful tribes of our race? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white men, as snow before the summer sun."

Tecumseh was killed in the War of 1812, while trying to secure a permanent nation state for the Indian Confederacy. (As Robert Allen has recently shown, Tecumseh's quick mobilization of Indian fighting forces helped protect Canada from annexation by the United States.) These days, the primary agencies for the Americanization of the Indian country of Canada are not armies, but the Darwinian ideas imported from the land of the long knives in concentrated form by the likes of Mel Smith, Gordon Gibson and the Canadian Alliance. The ghost of the Beothuk hangs all over their proposals for termination of aboriginal rights as the final solution for the Indian question.