Walking a Tightrope

Ute Lischke teaches German literature, film studies and cultural perspectives at Wilfrid Laurier University where she is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies. Lischke is the author of Lily Braun, 1865-1916 German Writer, Feminist, Socialist (2000). Her most recent books, edited with David T. McNab, include Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Actions of Peace and the Temagami Blockades of 1988-89 (2003), Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and their Representations (2005), and The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories, (2007) all with WLU Press. David T. McNab is a Métis historian who has worked for three decades on Aboriginal land and treaty rights issues in Canada. McNab teaches in the School of Arts and Letters in the Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies at York University in Toronto where he is Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies. He has also been a claims advisor for Nin.Da.Waab.Jig., Walpole Island Heritage Center, Bkejwanong First Nations since 1992. In addition to more than seventy articles, McNab has published Earth, Water, Air and Fire: Studies in Canadian Ethnohistory (editor) (1998) and Circles of Time: Aboriginal Land Rights and Resistance in Ontario (1999) as well as the co-edited (with Ute Lischke) Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Actions of Peace and the Temagami Blockades of 1988-89 (2003), Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and their Representations (2005), and The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories, (2007) all with WLU Press.

"Much of the material cogently reinforces central themes, one of which is that stereotypes, either negative or positive, often say more about the propagators of the stereotype than about the Aboriginal peoples and societies that are respresented. Another central theme is the role that non-Aboriginal respresentation of Aboriginal peoples has had in shaping the identities of Aboriginal people. This is a work that can be recommended for a general readership as well as for students of history, anthropology, and Aboriginal studies. A variety of perspectives, topics, and cultures are discussed in a way that aids understanding of the centuries of mirepresentation, and lack of appreciation, of the complexity and diversity of the indigenous cultures of Canada." -- David Mardiros -- Canadian Book Review Annual, 2006, 200702