IN HIS wonderful book The People's Land: Eskimos and Whites in the Eastern Arctic, Hugh Brody makes the point that most white Canadians who come in contact with Eskimos and native Indians are immediately driven to see them as individuals so different from themselves that they might as well be Martians. As Brody describes it, this drive to differentiate is unpleasant to think about, being the result of a kind of sentimental fascination on the one hand, a half?conscious desire to remain "untainted" and superior on the other. Unpleasant as it is, however, it is a reality.

Throughout Canada, a vast, incessant stereotyping goes on, and while the reasons for it are ugly, this doesn't make the process of stereotyping any less powerful, or less tragic in its results. Probably the only cure for this process will involve whites and native people living side by side, as they already do in the poorer sections of cities in Western Canada; but until that day comes the best corrective to the wretched nonsense that fills the ?air is knowledge. Alan D. McMillan's Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada(Douglas & McIntyre, 340 pages, $34.95 cloth), is a scholarly book that provides a historical overview of all the native peoples of Canada, from the Iglulik in the Eastern Arctic to the Nootka in Southern B.C.; it is well illustrated, impersonal in style,. and more or less encyclopedic. Native Peoples is a feat of research rather than of writing or thinking, and it can be hard to get through (there is a bland, rather glassy tone of sympathy throughout the book that eventually begins to grate); nevertheless, it presents the facts, and as with all good scholarly works, its final effect is to make you see differences and particularities where before you saw a homogeneous phantom. The book includes an exhaustive bibliography.