Clearing The Plains Book Summary

In his book, Clearing the Plains: disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of aboriginal life (2013), James Daschuk claims the effects of infectious diseases, much of that spread by the new European colonists, and the intentional suppression of many aspects of Native customs by early Canadian government, combined to produce a “creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day.” Charlie Angus, member of the Canadian parliament for Timmins-James Bay, wrote Children of the Broken Treaty in 2015 in which he demonstrated the lack of federal governmental support for enriched schooling for Native children in northern communities. He discussed the school problems at several northern towns, especially at Attawapiskat, Ontario and detailed the efforts of the school children and their parents in the struggle to build a new elementary school. He also highlighted the efforts of …show more content…
At the end of the Pleistocene, during the approximate 3,000 years (roughly from about 13,000-10,000 calendrical years BP), between 35 and 40 species of large mammals went extinct in North America according to E. C. Pielou, a Canadian paleoecologist (1991, After the Ice Age) and her referenced sources. Not all went extinct at the very end of the Pleistocene, but (from a later source; Steven Mithen…After the Ice, 2003) mammoth, mastodon, camel, horse, tapir, Shasta ground sloth and sabre-toothed cat apparently all did. Also, during the fading years of the Pleistocene, other large North American herbivores such as two genera of deer, two genera of pronghorn, stag moose, woodland muskoxen and shrub oxen and, in addition, large carnivores such as American lion and dire wolves also