Taking Control is a critical ethnography of the Native Education Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. It presents an intimate view of the centre, focusing on the ways that people who work there – First Nations students, board members, teachers, and non-Native teachers – talk about and put into practice their beliefs about First Nations control. As Michael Apple comments in the preface, their stories “provide concrete evidence of what can be accomplished when the complicated politics of education is taken seriously.”

Celia Haig-Brown is an educator and the author of the 1988 Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, winner of the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (BC Book Prizes). The book will be published in a new edition in fall 2022 as Tsqelmucwilc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School―Resistance and a Reckoning. Her other books include Taking Control: Power and Contradiction and With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada (both UBC Press). Recently, she has turned to documentary film and has been shown at the Smithsonian Film Festival in New York and the Irving International Film Festival in California.

Celia Haig-Brown's profile page

Haig-Brown presents her research in a manner that demonstrates honour and commitment to those efforts.

Canadian Journal of Education

This book provides a comprehensive picture of an institution devoted to community-based adult education that will add depth to the shorter accounts. Such interdisciplinary work, combining history, ethnography, and education, is sorely needed in rethinking those institutions.

American Indian Culture and Research Journal