Colin Samson

The dispossession of the Innu and the colonial magic of Canadian Liberalism

This article examines the legal and philosophical grounds which are used by the nation state of Canada to dispossess aboriginal people who have not ceded land through treaties. Using the Innu people of the Labrador‐Quebec peninsula as an example, my thesis is that, far from being a neutral doctrine of rights and citizenship, liberalism functions as a magical, yet ethnocidal, instrument of colonial domination and land usurpation. I demonstrate this by looking at the way in which policies such as Comprehensive Land Claims and Environmental Impact Assessment, ostensibly for the protection of the Innu and other aboriginal peoples, predetermine that land will be legally ceded and ways of life based on it exterminated. The roots of this approach are traced through an examination of the imposition of sovereignty in colonial policy and its continued assertion in Canadian court cases, including the recent Delgamuukw decision. In conclusion, I draw attention to the affinities between the ideas of contemporary liber...

Inequality, the New Right and mental health care delivery in the United States in the Reagan era

This essay draws upon research on mental health treatment and provision in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988, and is part ofa wider US-UK com parative study. The main concern is to examine the linkages between pub lic policy and inequalities in mental health care delivery in one local area. In opposition to the concept of the welfare state, a primary stance of the New Right and of the Reagan administration has been the belief in the necessity ofsocial hierarchies based on wealth. The consequences of poli cies predicated on these beliefs were studied at a local mental health sys tem, where it was found that economic factors strongly influence access to and experience in the system. Principally through drawing upon data from 42 in-depth focussed interviews with mental health professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area, I examine how the poor are excluded from treat ment, how patients are dumped from the private sector, and how a com plex triage system in both public and private treatment settings has come into being.