With the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, more Canadians than ever are aware of the ugly history of Canada's residential schools. Nearly twenty years earlier, UMP published John Milloy's A National Crime, a groundbreaking history of the schools that exposed details of the system to thousands of readers. Using previously unreleased government documents accessed during his work for the Royal Commission on Aborginal Peoples, A National Crime was one of the first comprehensive studies of the history of residential schools, and it remains a powerful indictment of the racist and colonial policies that inspired and sustained them.A National Crime convincingly argues that rather than bringing Indigenous childern into what its planners called ""the circle of civiziliation"" the schools more often provided an inferior eduction in an atmosphere of neglect, disease and abuse. As UMP marks its fifth decade, and Canada struggles towards truth and reconciliation, it is fitting to reissue A National Crime -one of our most influential publications and a cornerstone of our Indigenous studies list-with a new foreword by a scholar in the vanguard of Indigenous historians in Canada. Mary Jane Logan McCallum's foreword sets the story of A National Crime in the context of Indigenous historiography and her own family history, from the broad level of national Indian policy to its impacton individual lives lived.

I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry."" - Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923)""[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school."" - N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948)For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the ""circle of civilization,"" the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.

The first economic, military, and diplomatic history of the Plains Cree from contact with the Europeans in the 1670s to the disappearance of the buffalo from Cree lands by the 1870s, focussing on military and trade relations between 1790 and 1870. Milloy describes three distinct eras, each characterized by a paramount motive for war: the wars of migration and territory, the horse wars during the 'golden years' of Plains Indian life, and buffalo wars, which mark the trail to the reserves. Intimately linked to each era was a particular trade pattern and a military system that linked the Cree with other Plains tribes and non-Natives. By tracing these themes, Milloy charts the ability of the Cree to serve their economic interests by forging alliances or undertaking military or diplomatic offensives.