Drawing from an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, John Lutz traces Aboriginal people's involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. He argues that the roots of today's widespread unemployment and 'welfare dependency' date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices drove Aboriginal people out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as 'compensation'. Makuk invites readers into a dialogue with the past with visual imagery and an engaging narrative that gives a voice to Aboriginal people and other historical figures. It is a book for students, scholars, policymakers, and a wide public who care to bring the spectres of the past into the light of the present.