Book Review: Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State, by Alan C. Cairns

• Main Author: Imai, Shin
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Osgoode Digital Commons 2002
• Subjects: Aboriginal; Cairns; Canada; Indian; indigenous; self-government; First Nations
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/scholarly_works/736; https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1737&context=scholarly_works

Cairns is critical of suggestions of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. In his view, they pushed for a "maximum amount of self-government" for First Nations, while neglecting the "civic relation of Aboriginal peoples and individuals to federal and provincial communities and their governments." Legal academics, he observes, have a "pervasive tendency" to "undervalue, underestimate, or overlook the continuing links,"and have become members of an"intellectual social movement." This book review is critical of Cairns for failing to provide details on an alternative and for taking a mono cultural view of what it means to be "Canadian".