Herie, Euclid. Journey to Independence: Blindness, the Canadian Story. Toronto, Ontario: The Dundurn Group. 2005. 215 pgs. Cloth, $50. ISBN-10: 1-55002-559-7; ISBN-13: 978-1-55002-559-0.

Reviewed by Diane R. Pawlowski, Ph.D., Wayne State University

Euclid Herie explains that his goal is to simply tell the story of an experiment in Canadian philanthrophy. The author accomplishes far more in this top-down history of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), one of the world's largest and most influential organizations of its kind. Journey is a valuable sourcebook not only for disability scholars, but for social scientists studying topics related to organizational studies, the cultural construction of work, and the cultural construction of disability itself. In accord with many disability scholars' insistence that research and writing adhere to the philosophy of "nothing about us without us," this is an exemplary case study of an organization founded by the blind, and largely managed, directed, and run by highly educated blind individuals. Herie presents an insider's view. He was one of CNIB's blind executives, and writes as a retired CNIB managing director.

Research included access to archival sources, personal papers, diaries, and interviews conducted by two other scholars with CNIB staff, volunteers, and historical figures. First interviews were done from 1940 to 1960. A second series of 130 interviews were completed in 1978. Herie conducted approximately 50 additional personal interviews, thus preserving significant aspects of disability history, as nearly half his respondents have died.

The book comprehensively discusses the background, education, and training of CNIB's founders, executive leaders, and policy makers and how their decisions shaped the organization, as well as educational and employment opportunities for blind Canadians for decades. Herie explores early efforts to educate the blind in Europe and the U.S. preceding CNIB, and how the organization evolved in response to outside forces, including World Wars, depressions, recessions, financial and fundraising competition, technological advances, and social and economic changes profoundly influencing employment and residential patterns, as well as changing demands for new and relevant services voiced by a vibrant and independent disability movement.

Because of its focus, this book takes a unique view of a particular part of the disability community over a long period of time. In short, Euclid Herie writes not about disability or blind culture, but about the work of people with vision impairments fashioning an organization that would, quite literally, construct and fashion a cultural milieu enabling others like themselves to fully enter into the education and work life of far flung rural communities and urban trade centers of a great nation. It is an amazing chronicle of changing roles of education, work, and opportunity from a period when blind men and women were routinely excluded from all aspects of life, often left in extreme poverty to beg or survive on generosity of family or friends. From life with no pensions or support, CNIB formed residential schools and institutions, sheltered workshops, and businesses supporting inclusion of the blind into today's world of legally mandated equal opportunity.

Written from the point of view and voice of a corporate insider who is also a disability consumer, the CNIB story reviews a time prior to an era when home teachers traveled for days into remote areas and into the Artic Circle to live with families of newly blinded individuals needing instruction. CNIB's home teachers instructed women to cook and sew and carry on their family lives as before. Sadly, no maps are included to show how far these teachers traveled by wagon and rail, and later motorcar, without snowmobiles or airlines. This search and educate mission continued to recent times when a CNIB social worker located, in 1958, 60 unregistered and unserved blind adults hidden in the patient population of an Ontario mental hospital.

The focus is on a highly visible organization that achieved remarkable goals. Where there were no jobs for blinded veterans returning from World Wars, CNIB set veterans up in their own businesses operating newsstands in federal and other office buildings. CNIB founded and ran contract businesses and a thriving catering business.

Although Herie points out CNIB's flaws, he sometimes glosses over in-depth discussions of organizational shortcomings, including the eventual failure of the highly successful Caterplan enterprise, and later CNIB's hesitancy to move beyond sheltered workshops; fierce competition for funding; and turf wars with other agencies including Canadian Federation of the Blind. Gender bias within CNIB is inadequately explained, although Herie decries barriers CNIB female leadership staff faced. One issue that is discussed, and Herie regards as a CNIB failure, is the lack of public funding for free library resources for the blind.

Such a detailed history of an organization affecting millions of people over Canada's vast distances cries out for maps to help readers understand CNIB's physical context. There are few pictures to give readers the feeling of what it must have been like for CNIB's home teachers and rehabilitation specialists to travel hundreds of miles alone to live and work in areas above the Artic Circle.