Bulletin n. 2/2016
December 2016
INDICE
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Langford Will
    Jean Lagassé, Community Development, and the “Indian and Métis Problem” in Manitoba in the 1950s–60s
    in Canadian Historical Review (The) , Volume 97, Number 3, Fall ,  2016 ,  346-376
    In the late 1950s, social worker Jean Lagassé oversaw a major survey of Indigenous peoples in Manitoba. His final report adapted the concept of “culture” to the “Indian and Métis problem” and proposed a program of community development to promote integration through acculturation. In doing so, he advocated an integrationist conception of citizenship that emerged as the dominant liberal paradigm for thinking about Canada. Community development was an idea adapted from the Third World. It held that people could be helped to solve their own problems through organization, democratic decision making, and cooperative action. Put into practice by Lagassé in the early 1960s, the technique was largely used in Indigenous communities in northern Manitoba, a region where government and capital also pursued hydroelectric dam construction and industrialized resource extraction. Lagassé intended for community development to catalyze the integration of First Peoples and Métis into liberal democracy and the capitalist economy. However, as events in Cedar Lake/Easterville and Thompson/Nelson House demonstrated, the practice worked instead to redirect political dissent and encourage local remedial social and economic action in the face of colonial dispossession, racism, capitalist social relations, and the unintended result of state-promoted high modernist development in northern Manitoba.
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