Based on a range of sources including the records of the Departments of Indian Affairs and National Health and Welfare, interviews. print, and media, McCallum shows how state-run education and placement programs were part of Canada's larger vision of assimilation and extinguishment of treaty obligations. Conversely, she also shows how Indigenous women link these same programs to their social and cultural responsibilities of community building and state resistance.

Sweeping the Nation: Indigenous women and domestic labour in mid-twentieth-century Canada --Permanent solution: the placement and relocation program, hairdressers, and beauty culture -- Early labour history of community health representatives, 1960-1970 -- Gaining recognition: labour as activism among Indigenous nurses -- Wages of whiteness and the indigenous historian.