WHILE I WAS growing up on the Curve Lake Reserve just north of Peterborough, Ontario, my mother used to work for a rather prosperous family who owned and ran a lucrative arts and crafts business in the village. It catered mostly to tourists and other white people with money to spend, since the majority of local Ojibway people couldn`t afford to buy the bulk of expensive commodities displayed. And as part of the charm of the place, the owners used to display crude Ontariomade totem poles, questionable Plains Cree teepees, and - most memorable in my mind -they would hire local young boys to dress up in buckskin and "hang around" the shop adding local colour and authenticity. I used to watch and envy these boys because I had sandy-coloured hair and blue eyes. None of the tourists knew I was Native and I guess I resented not being able to dress up like the boys. This was an Ojibway community flashing all the stereotypical though inaccurate "artefacts" of being "Indian." Prior to reading Daniel Francis`s new book, The Imaginary Indian, I never really understood why all that happened. Francis has done an amazing job of tracing down through Canadian history the perceptions, both real and supposed, both good and bad, that the dominant culture had and has of this country`s aboriginal people. I`ve always been a little leery of the multitude of books out there being written by non-Natives about Natives. We must be the most written-about minority in Canada, some of it accurate, some of it not. Yet as Francis makes clear in his introduction, while Indians are the subject of this book, Native people are not. This book is about the images of Native people that White Canadians manufactured, believed in, feared, despised, admired, taught their children. It is a book about White - and not Native -cultural history. And the book is just that. Beginning several hundred years ago and winding up in this century, it shows the development of "the imaginary Indian" through the years; from the trustworthy ally of the early 1800s to the disappearing alcoholic wretch of the early 1900s. Reading the book is an interesting journey through Canadian history in that we meet such familiar characters as E. Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr, Grey Owl, Duncan Campbell Scott, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and a host of others who in some way were touched by the public`s romanticized view of Native people. For instance, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, who starred in many silent films and wrote a best-selling autobiography about his life as a Blackfoot chief, was actually a North Carolina man of white, black, and a little Native blood thrown in. He just found it a lot easier to be Indian in Canada than "coloured" in the Carolinas. Francis leaves no avenue of exploration untouched. Hollywood and its effects on Canadiana (aboriginally speaking, of course) are investigated with some interesting conclusions. And one of the real joys of this book is Francis`s examination of the delicious ironies that seem to pepper Native history. My personal favourite was the comment made by Pierre Trudeau, then prime minister, in his famous White Paper on Indian Policy in 1969: In terms of realpolitik, French and English are equal in Canada because each of these linguistic groups has the power to break the country. And this power cannot yet be claimed by the Iroquois, the Eskimos, or the Ukrainians. Yet on the same page, Francis refers to Elijah Harper changing the direction of the country "with the wave of a feather," and to the effects of the incidents at Oka. A lot of the observations in this book make sense, and a lot seem obvious; but until they are placed in front of you to digest and understand, you won`t realize how much you`ve been affected by the image of the imaginary Indian, even in today`s society. If you want an example, Francis suggests you ask a child, or even an adult, to draw an image of an Indian. Chances are they will draw somebody in buckskin, wearing a war bonnet, riding a horse. That kind of "Indian" is imaginary. I know that as I sit here writing this review, sitting on a chair, typing on a computer, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Now that is a real "Indian."