Ep 61: How Canada's first Indigenous policy was founded on famine

This week, an extended interview with James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. The award-winning book is a harrowing, historical account of Canada's original Aboriginal policy—re-location via starvation.

In this conversation, originally recorded in 2014, Daschuk discusses his investigation into the roles that disease, climate and politics played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of Aboriginal people in the late 1800s, an era when Canada’s first prime minister—John A. Macdonald—relentlessly pursued his so-called 'National Dream.' A pursuit that coincided with the often nightmarish existence of first peoples on the Plains. // Our theme is 'nesting' by birocratic.