Incidents in the Life of Marcus Paul - David Adams Richards

The novel centres around a native reserve near the mouth of the Miramichi.  There is an unexplained death and conflict around a piece of property beside the reserve.   Markus Paul, a native from the reserve who later becomes an RCMP officer, solves the death/murder many years later, but not until an innocent man is killed and several other people's lives are ruined.
Richards explores many hard questions and issues around this storyline.  Some of the more obvious are native issues around poverty, disenfranchisement, reserve governance, relations between police and natives.  Through the story he is also harshly critical of both sides of the media and how they play to prejudice and public expectations.  As the conflict unfolds, he also exposes the uglier side of reserve politics with lying, corruption and theft hiding beside a facade of aggrieved indignity.  Politician, both at the provincial level and on the reserve, are portrayed as self-serving actors with little regard for anything except personal advantage.
In a nutshell, Richard explores how everyone's actions - politicians, journalists, individuals, business people, community leaders - is motivated by naive ideology, prejudice, personal advantage and a desire for power and action.  They all use this death of an upstanding, innocent native boy to further their own agenda. 
Richards is especially harsh on socially left media - it is the journalist's preconceived ideas of race relations and reserve politics that leads to the ugliest events of the story.  An examination of how you can be trapped in your own ideological narrative to the point where you are unable to see what is happening, and if you do, you are unable to write it, to express it.  Liberal "bleeding heart" ideology opens the journalist to being manipulated by the worst elements on the reserve.

The only sympathetic character in the book is the old chief, who is sidelined by all the other scrabblers.  He is the only fully human character in the book.  He sees, not symbols and ideas, but the real people and their real actions and tries to find a way through all these complex threads.

Worth a reread.