by Robert Cree, with Therese Greenwood,
ECW Press,
2025/$26.95/264 pp.
“People from all across Canada were coming to our region to work in the oil sands,” recalls Elder and former chief of the Fort McMurray First Nation, Robert Cree. For Indigenous people in northern Alberta in the 1980s, he says, it was important to work together to stop the corporate “freight train from rolling over us.” So they did. With encouragement from his mentor Harold Cardinal, Cree organized Indigenous groups and signed a deal with the oil industry so that Indigenous staff would make up 13 per cent of the local workforce, and proposals from Indigenous- owned businesses would be given priority. At the time it was a radical change, and it’s one of the reasons why Elders called Cree “Great Man.” But he has had other names. As a child his mother called him “Bobby Mountain.” At the Ermineskin Residential School, where the RCMP took him at age 9, he was “Number 53.” Drawing strength from traditional teachings, Cree survived, helped his people and now shares lessons from his journey in this wise and evocative book.
Briefly noted by Alberta Views
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