The Canadian sub-arctic is a world of forest, prairie and muskeg; of rainbow trout, moose, and caribou; of Indian hunters and trappers. It is also a world of boomtowns and bars, oil rigs and seismic soundings; of white energy speculators, ranchers and sports hunters. Hugh Brody came to this dual wold with the job of 'mapping' the lands of northwest British Columbia as well as the way of life of a small group of Beaver Indians with a viable hunting economy living in the path of a projected oil pipeline.

Maps and Dreams is his account of an extraordinary 18-month journey through the world of a people who have no intention of vanishing into the past. Brody's powerful commentary retraces the history of the ever-expanding white frontier, from the first eighteenth-century explorer to the wildest corporate energy dreams of the present day.

'A wonderful book... Most of all, it is superb anthropology, challenging many of the accepted notions about the lives of hunters.' Paul Theroux

Hugh Brody was born in 1943 and educated at Trinity College, Oxford. He taught social anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast. He is an Honorary Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate of the School for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.$$$In the 1970s he worked with the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and then with Inuit and Indian organisations, mapping hunter-gatherer territories and researching Land Claims and indigenous rights in many parts of Canada. He was an adviser to the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry, a member of the World Bank's famous Morse Commission and chairman of the Snake River Independent Review, all of which took him to the encounter between large-scale development and indigenous communities. Since 1997 he has worked with the South African San Institute on Bushman history and land rights in the Southern Kalahari.