Makk

John Lutz traces Aboriginal peoples involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing on an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the roots of todays widespread unemployment and welfare dependency date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices what Lutz terms the white problem drove Aboriginal people out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as compensation.