Battle Grounds

Base closures, use of airspace for weapons testing and low-level flying, environmental awareness, and Aboriginal land claims have focused attention in recent years on the use of Native lands for military training. But is the military's interest in Aboriginal lands new? Battle Grounds analyzes a century of government-Aboriginal interaction and negotiation to explore how the Canadian military came to use Aboriginal lands for training. It examines what the process reveals about the larger and evolving relationship between governments and Aboriginal communities and how increasing Aboriginal assertiveness and activism have affected the issue. -- Jonathan Vance, author of Building Canada: People and Projects that Shaped the Nation Whitney Lackenbauer's Battle Grounds surveys the complex world of Native-military relations in twentieth-century Canada. Skillfully parsing the diverse forces at work in this relationship, his account is an astute reinterpretation of government-Aboriginal interactions that greatly enriches scholarly writing on relations between Natives and newcomers. -- J.R. Miller, author of Lethal Legacy: Current Native Controversies in Canada

Using a case study approach, this work explores how the Canadian military came to use Aboriginal lands for training purposes, how negotiations over the use of those lands revealed the evolving relationship between Aboriginal groups and the government, and how the growth of Aboriginal assertiveness and activism has affected the land rights issue.Base closures, use of airspace for weapons testing and low-level flying, environmental awareness, and Aboriginal land claims have focused attention in recent years on the use of Native lands for military training. But is the military’s interest in Aboriginal lands new? Battle Grounds analyzes a century of government–Aboriginal interaction and negotiation to explore how the Canadian military came to use Aboriginal lands for training. It examines what the process reveals about the larger and evolving relationship between governments and Native communities, and how increasing Aboriginal assertiveness and activism have affected the issue.