This book is concerned with reconciliation between 'settlers' and Indigenous peoples in Canada, a laudable, worthy, challenging, and necessary undertaking. Readers may gain understanding and perspective based on the author’s varied experiences with Indigenous individuals and whole communities as an art therapist and later as a government policy analyst. . . .This book is not really about Indigenous peoples, but rather about the author’s transformation. This is an important distinction, because cleaning up one’s own backyard is a critical aspect of the efforts implied by the above-noted chapter titles. Thus, for readers willing to engage from that perspective, the book is primarily useful for non-Aboriginal people to build respectful relationships. This is what makes it important. It may be most helpful for researchers, academics, and professionals, but others will find the many anecdotes and postcolonial analyses thoughtful encouragement to take a look in the mirror. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.

Choice Reviews

Presented through an eclectic assemblage of anecdotes and recollections, Ferrara translates her cathartic individuated efforts to build trust with therapy patients into her performance implementing policy with indigenous communities. The book provides a window into the world of a self-described bureaucrat who perceives herself as an advocate for indigenous people and who views them as individuals contextualized by cultural systems and a history of colonization.... Ethnographers and clinicians working with indigenous communities will find resonance in Ferrara’s account of the personal challenges and transformative nature of current practice. Contemporary personal narratives relevant to applied environments are hard to come by, and if read in the context of broader scholarly literatures on reconciliation, this book may be useful in indigenous studies classes and some applied programs in which students will go on to careers in government.

American Anthropologist

Don't let the ‘applied anthropologist’ perspective fool you. Nadia Ferrara in her treatise is anything but applying anthropology. Rather she takes the reader through a retrospective journey of life engagements that ebb and flow through enduring communities. The key that she unlocks is a deep respect and appreciation for community development, but in the spirit of what is called Indigenous planning. To paraphrase, it is about using identity and cultural values to inform ‘one’s competence, self-awareness, and knowledge to build effective relationships.’ It begins at first breath and it is nurtured until death. The community embodies that collective history in its worldview and it is through interrelationships across generations that this is nurtured. This is the relationship that the author imparts. It is one that must be heeded.

Theodore Jojola, University of New Mexico