Rethinking Inequality in a Northern Indigenous Context: Affluence, Poverty, and the Racial Reconfiguration and Redistribution of Wealth

Abstract

[...]the easiest measures of inequality are wages of workers versus wages of chief economic officers, for example, a relative measure that has particularly deteriorated in the neo-liberal era. In the essays collected in Customs in Common, the great British social historian Edward Thompson had rather a lot to say about the struggle over tearing people from their means of subsistence, noting, for example, that "perhaps in the first six decades of the eighteenth century disputes about deer and other game, about fishing rights, about timber, about the exploitation of quarries, sand pits and peat, became more frequent and more angry" (106).