With Good Intentions examines the joint efforts of Aboriginal people and individuals of European ancestry to counter injustice in Canada when colonization was at its height, from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These people recognized colonial wrongs and worked together in a variety of ways to right them, but they could not stem the tide of European-based exploitation. The book is neither an apologist text nor an attempt to argue that some colonizers were simply “well intentioned.” Almost all those considered here – teachers, lawyers, missionaries, activists – had as their overall goal the Christianization and civilization of Canada’s First Peoples. By discussing examples of Euro-Canadians who worked with Aboriginal peoples, With Good Intentions brings to light some of the lesser-known complexities of colonization.

Celia Haig-Brown is an educator and the author of the 1988 Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, winner of the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (BC Book Prizes). The book will be published in a new edition in fall 2022 as Tsqelmucwilc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School―Resistance and a Reckoning. Her other books include Taking Control: Power and Contradiction and With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada (both UBC Press). Recently, she has turned to documentary film and has been shown at the Smithsonian Film Festival in New York and the Irving International Film Festival in California.

Celia Haig-Brown's profile page

David A. Nock's profile page

Haig-Brown, Nock and the contributing authors are to be congratulated for presenting a work that is well-researched and competently argued.

H-Net Book Review, July 2006