Book Reviews
BOOK REVIEWS Abel, Kerry: Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History. Montreal: McGill- Queen's University Press, 1993, xxviii + 339 pp., black and white photographs, tables, maps, bibliography, index. [McGill-Queen's Stud- ies in Ethnic History series.] ISBN: 0-7735-0992-5, Cloth CDN $44.95; 0-7735-1150-4, Paper CDN $19.95. Kerry Abel grew up in northern Canadian resource towns but, not surprisingly, learned little from her schooling about the north and its Aboriginal residents. This personal experience inspired her research focus as an historian. With this book, she hopes "... to readjust the balance of historical writing" (p.x) and "... to answer the question of how these northern people have been able to maintain a sense of cultural distinctiveness in the face of overwhelming economic, political, and cultural pressures from the European newcomers to their homelands" (p.xi). While she does not claim to be writing an ethnohistory or history from Dene perspectives, she does incorporate a wide range of social, economic, and political topics. Dene or Athapaskan peoples are widely distributed across the western Subarctic, from Hudson Bay to interior Alaska. They live in northern California and in the southwestern United States. The Dene of this history are those occupying the Mackenzie River drainage, especially that part of it that later became the Northwest Territories, with some discussion of contiguous regions. A map showing the general population divisions used in this book would have been helpful. The narrative begins by outlining the history of human occupation of the Mackenzie Drainage to the point of contact with Europeans, drawing upon archaeological evidence and Dene oral traditions (Chapter 1) followed by a very broad-brushed picture of Dene life in the 18th century on the eve of contact with European traders (Chapter 2).
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