About

Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View
Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View
Author	Howard Adams
Publisher	Fifth House Books
First published	1995
Type	Book
Source	https://annas-archive.org/md5/4fd29782d5c99223b04a801974ab3e50

Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View by Howard Adams is a Métis Marxist account of how Canada was built through the colonization and ongoing oppression of Indigenous and Métis peoples, told through both his own life and a re-reading of Prairie history.

Adams begins with his childhood in a poor Métis community in St. Louis, Saskatchewan, describing racism, police harassment, wage theft, and how schools and churches taught him to despise his own “Indianness.” He shows how colonial institutions produced deep psychological shame and “underdevelopment” in Indigenous people, not just poverty on paper.

A big chunk of the book retells major 19th‑century events from a Native/Métis viewpoint—especially the Red River Resistance (1869–70) and the North-West Resistance (1885). He argues these were national liberation and class struggles led by Métis and Cree against land theft and capitalist expansion, not “rebellions” by “savages” as in school textbooks.

Adams traces how the fur trade and companies like Hudson’s Bay laid the basis for capitalist control over the Prairies, reshaping Indigenous economies and social relations long before full settlement. He examines the role of churches and mission schools in destroying Indigenous cultures and internalizing white supremacy, including residential schools as tools of cultural genocide.

He argues that colonial governments created and funded a layer of Indigenous leadership (chiefs, band councils, organizations) that often ended up serving state interests more than community liberation, turning real self‑government into top‑down administration. This is what he calls a form of “neo‑colonial” management.

Adams attacks Canadian historiography, schooling, and media as ideological state apparatuses that center capital, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and white politicians while erasing Indigenous and working‑class experience. He shows how these institutions continually reproduce pride in settler society and shame in Indigenous communities.

Using historical materialism, dependency theory, and Third World anti‑colonial thinkers, he argues that Indigenous and Métis peoples in Canada have more in common with colonized nations in Africa and Asia than with white Canadians. He calls for a bottom‑up Indigenous nationalism linked with socialist class struggle, rejecting faith in Canadian parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP) or state‑funded “representative” bodies to deliver real liberation.