And finally on this topic for today. This book was release a few tears ago and was promoted through the reserves. I imagine that our starving chief may have read it.

Doug Bland, a retired lieutenant-colonel and now chair of Defence Studies at Queen's University's School of Policy Studies,released his first novel,Uprising,a barely fictionalized account of a nationwide insurgency by young aborigionals, led by a charismatic Louis Riel-like figure and a small cadre of para -military warriors.

Tapping into the poverty, anger and resentments of the Indian, Metis and Inuit populations, Bland depicts a small band of warriors taking on the government and the armed forces in an attempt to carve out their own self-governed homeland.

It's a politically sensitive topic that no level of government is eager to discuss, particularly after clashes between natives and government in Oka, Caledonia, Ipperwash and Akwesasne over issues that are still not settled.

Bland says that, as he sees it, all the raw materials are in place for the kind of insurgency that has already become the 21st century's way of warfare, pitting irregular combatants against conventional forces not in a battle over territory but influence.

"This is really a threat assessment," said Bland of his novel, which paints a picture of natives raiding army bases for weapons, taking over the James Bay hydroelectric development and paralyzing the nation's economy in a series of blockades reminiscent of the real-life Aboriginal Days of Action.

"I spent more than 25 years in the military doing threat assessments, which are always a sort of fantasizing or a fiction about what we think the other side is going to do, but they are always based on facts," he said.

"And one of the facts in this case is that there are a lot of angry people out there."

The idea to write the book occurred to him after the 9-11 attacks, and in the years that followed he spoke to native elders, activists, chiefs and young people, who embodied that anger and who believe the traditional federal Indian Act and its chief-centred structures were betraying the people.

The Indian population of Canada is staggeringly young -- the median age is 25 -- and is the fastest-growing group in Canada.

It is also overwhelmingly poor and has a fast-growing criminal subculture, ranging from the smugglers in the Cornwall area, who move guns, drugs, cigarettes and people through the Canada-U.S. border, to the well-organized aboriginal street gangs in major cities, most notably Winnipeg.

He says put to an academic analysis, it is the same sort of root causes that lie at the root of uprisings, insurgencies and acts of terrorism elsewhere in the world.

Rather than an academic monograph outlining the threat, he decided to put it into a political novel, a form reminiscent of Richard Rohmer's fact-based Canadian "what-ifs" of the 1970s and 1980s.

"I originally saw myself writing this as an academic sort of book with 27 pages of footnotes, but then I thought no one is going to read that, and certainly not ordinary Canadians," he said.

"This is an issue that people need to be concerned about and we need to be talking about it."

His book also paints the ineptness of the federal government in responding to such a determined yet dispersed series of attacks.

That speculation isn't far from the reality -- his book prominently highlights former prime minister Paul Martin's comment before a Senate panel that all the government could do was hope that such a series of events never happened, and the government has appeared shaken and powerless in the face of small-scale native blockades.

Martin's position is underscored by the the quote from Chief Terrance Nelson from 2007 on the cover of the book: "It's time to quit being loyal Canadians ... There are only two ways to deal with the white man. Either you pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money."

And such an uprising disrupting highways and pipelines -- separating the white man from his money -- could be led by small cells of insurgents working within a population that supports and conceals them, supported by effective logistics and leadership that plans operations from a distance -- if it sounds familiar, it is a chapter from the al-Qaida playbook.

He has already spoken about the issues raised in his book to aboriginal audiences and found them not offended by the idea but grateful that he was drawing attention to the issues of poverty, isolation, racism and despair that characterize life on many reserves.

"I had one older aboriginal woman, with tears in her eyes, take my hand after a talk in Winnipeg and she said, 'Thank you for writing this book,' " he said.

And while he doesn't believe natives as a whole are considering revolution, he says insurgencies are fed by a small number of activists who take matters into their own hands if they feel mainstream methods of solving social issues and addressing grievances are not working -- and Bland makes it clear he doesn't believe those methods are working.

His book is published by Toronto's Blue Butterfly Press and he has used its website, www.bluebutterflybooks.ca,to put up real-life background of such an uprising as well as historical context and, of course, the footnotes he would have used if it had been an academic publication.

The book costs $39.95 and is available through the publisher or at major booksellers