Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse

By Andie Diane Palmer

In many North American indigenous cultures, history and stories are passed down, not by the written word, but by oral tradition. In Maps of Experience, Andie Diane Palmer draws on stories recorded during travels through Secwepemc ? or Shuswap ? hunting and gathering territory with members of the Alkali Lake Reserve in Interior British Columbia. Palmer examines how the various kinds of talk allow knowledge to be carried forward, reconstituted, reflected upon, enriched, and ultimately relocated by and for new interlocutors in new experiences and places.

Maps of Experience demonstrates how the Secwepemc engagement in the traditional practices of hunting and gathering create shared lived experiences between individuals, while recreating a known social context in which existing knowledge of the land may be effectively shared and acted upon. When the narratives of fellow travellers are pooled through discursive exchange, they serve as what can be considered a ?map of experience,? providing the basis of shared understanding and social relationship to territory. Palmer?s analysis of ways of listening and conveying information within the Alkali Lake community brings new insights into indigenous language and culture, as well as to the study of oral history, ethnohistory, experimental ethnography, and discourse analysis.

More: Here
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Ethnographies for British Columbia Native Cultures

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From Tad McIlwraith:

Anderson, Margaret and Marjorie Halpin, editors. 2000. Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon’s 1945 Field Notebooks. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Atleo, Richard. 2004. Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Blackman, Margaret B., with Florence Edenshaw Davidson. 1992. During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Blackstock, Michael. 2001. Faces in the Forest: First Nations Art Created on Living Trees. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

Boas, Franz. 1975. Kwakiutl Ethnography. Helen Codere, editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brody, Hugh. 1981/1988. Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier.Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre.

Culhane Speck, Dara. 1987. An Error in Judgement: The Politics of Medical Care in an Indian-White Community.Vancouver: Talonbooks.

Daly, Richard. 2005. Our Box was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Dinwoodie, David. 2002. Reserve Memories: The Power of the Past in a Chilcotin Community.Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Furniss, Elizabeth. 1999. The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community.Vancouver: UBC Press.

Kramer, Jennifer. 2006. Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity.Vancouver: UBC Press.

McDonald, James A. (2003) People of the Robin: The Tsimshian of Kitsumkalum. CCI Press

Mills, Antonia. 1994. Eagle Down Is Our Law: Witsuwit’en Law, Feasts, and Land Claims. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Palmer, Andie. 2005. Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Pryce, Paula. 1999. Keeping the Lakes’ Way: Reburial and Re-creation of a Moral World among an Invisible People.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ridington, Robin. 1988. Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Roth, Christopher. 2008. Becoming Tsimshian: The Social Life of Names .Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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Bibliography of Tahltan Materials

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An Annotated Bibliography of Tahltan Language Materials

John Alderete - Simon Fraser University, Department of Linguistics

Thomas McIlwraith - Douglas College, Department of Sociology & Anthropology

The purpose of this paper is to list and summarize materials on the Tahltan language, including linguistic and anthropological research papers, dictionaries, collections of stories, and teaching materials. We hope that the bibliography will give language teachers, linguists, anthropologists, and all others interested in Tahltan language and culture (and Athabaskan languages in general) an awareness of what materials exist and how they might be useful in a range of scholarship.

Read the Full Paper (PDF): Here
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Hunting and History in Northern B.C

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‘But We Are Still Native People’: Talking about Hunting and History in Northern Athapaskan Village

by Thomas McIlwraith Ph.D

Abstract:

My dissertation is a study of hunting in the northern Athapaskan village of Iskut, British Columbia, Canada. Hunting serves as a cultural system uniting Iskut people in a place where ethnic identity is not as easy to identify as outsiders might expect. Moreover, non-natives sometimes suggest that Iskut hunting activities reflect cultural and economic poverty. Still, interest in Iskut knowledge about animals and the land persists in and outside of Iskut. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is in demand in bureaucratic settings, for example, but Iskut knowledge about food and animals resists easy interpretation. I turn to the ‘ethnography of speaking’ as a way of learning about hunting and of moving beyond the fact-finding often associated with bureaucratic TEK projects. I attend to hunting stories and group history to understand why Iskut people talk about hunting with such passion. Studying talk of hunting and its etiquette reveals a wide range of lived experiences and practices at Iskut Village. It shows how Iskut people draw their history into contemporary resource conflicts. And, it illustrates a cultural system in a place where different family histories exist.

Read More (PDF): Here
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The Sociality of Water

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As concerns over climate change intensify, anthropologists have emerged as key participants in conversations about water use. Such work is crucial not only to assess the implications of floods, droughts and water rights conflicts today, but also the ways in which water has always been a mediated resource, and how communities’ relationships with water might change in the future.

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The following commentary series focuses on water governance and management, examining water access and power relationships, development initiatives, water conservation and availability, water as commons and commodity, and emerging trends in sustainable water management.

John Wagner
Water Governance Today

Barbara Rose Johnston
Water, Culture and Power Negotiations at the UN

Antina von Schnitzler
Gauging Politics: Water, Commensuration and Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Eleanor E Shoreman
Muddy Waters: Water Conservation and Environmental Ethics in the Mississippi Delta

Ashley Carse
Moral Economies of Water Management: Tensions in the Panama Canal Watershed

Jessica Cattelino
Citizenship and Nation in the Everglades

Carla Roncoli
Participatory Models and Exclusionary Frames in Water Management* More photos by Carla Roncoli related to this article are available on Flickr.

Kathryn Hicks, Nicole Fabricant and Carlos Revilla
The New Water Wars: Collective Action after Decentralization in El Alto, Bolivia

Nan Bress
The Water Spigot: Water Access, Safety and Perception Near the Ashokan Reservoir* More photos by Nan Bress related to this article are available on Flickr.

Simanti Dasgupta
Transactions in Transparency: Water, Market and Politics in the Indian Silicon Plateau


SOURCE: http://aaanet.org/publications/articles.cfm
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Deep North
By Wade Davis

It took more than an hour to find the old grave, now hidden beneath a spruce sapling, its wooden headstone no longer legible, its picket fence a mere shadow on the soil. "Love Old Man Antoine Died 1926" was the simple inscription. I knew it from memory, having stumbled upon the site as a young park ranger, part of the first team hired in 1978 to explore and map the newly created Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Park. Often described as the Serengeti of Canada, the Spatsizi is British Columbia's largest roadless preserve, more than 1.6 million acres (650,000 hectares) encompassing the headwaters of the mighty Stikine, the river known to the native Tlingit as simply the Great River. The mist and rain that swirled about Antoine's grave would in time swell the headwater lake of Laslui, giving rise to a wild mountain stream that flows first east and north before turning west and finally south on its 400-mile (650-kilometer) run for the sea.

Along the way the river plunges into the depths of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, a raging torrent that flows more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) beneath cliffs of basalt and sedimentary rock rising a thousand feet (300 meters) straight up from the water's edge. Below the canyon the river runs wide, cutting through the glaciers and jagged peaks of the coast mountains before finally reaching a pristine estuary where each spring bald eagles gather by the thousands to feast on sparkling runs of smelt. When John Muir traveled the lower third of the Stikine in 1879, he called it a Yosemite a hundred miles (160 kilometers) long, and he counted some 300 glaciers along its tortuous course. It's a land where Canada could hide England, and the English would never find it.

My job description had been vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two seasons I saw a handful of visitors. My partner and I explored the park freely, mapping the trails used by outfitters and by caribou and sheep.

In these wanderings we had come upon Antoine's grave, perched on a bench above the willow and birch thickets that hugged the shore of Laslui Lake. Curious about the history of the grave, I had crossed the lake to the mouth of Hotlesklwa Creek, where Ray and Reg Collingwood, outfitters for the Spatsizi, had established a hunting camp. There I found Alex Jack, a legendary native guide, whose birth name means He Who Walks Leaving No Tracks. Alex knew of the grave, and he knew who had laid the body to rest: his own brother-in-law. Old Man Antoine, Alex told me, was a shaman, crippled from birth but filled with the power of clairvoyance.

Intrigued by this link between a living elder like Alex and a shaman born in a previous century, I left my job with the government and went to work for the Collingwoods. As Alex and I cut wood and fixed fence and led the odd hunter after moose or goat, I would ask him to tell me the old stories of the land and his people. He talked of his youth, of hunting trips and winter trading runs by dogsled to the coast. But of the myths of his people he appeared to recall nothing. He spoke often of survival, of winter winds so strong the caribou froze, of times when his people ate nothing but spruce bark. I remember passing an encampment on a sunny afternoon, and Alex acknowledged that his people had settled there for several years, but he didn't describe it as a place they had lived. "Here," he said simply, "is where we survived."

Read More: Here
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Tahltan EthnoBlography Project

The purpose of this blog is twofold:

1. To express solidarity with the Tahltan people in their (and our) battle with imperial, colonial and corporate encroachments on vital natural ecosystems.

2. To collect and organize available Tahltan-related material and relevant anthropological literature - as part of an ongoing ethnographic research project.

* PLEASE NOTE: this project is in a very early state, and revisions and extensions will be frequent.

If you have any questions, thoughts or concerns please leave me a message here, and I will respond as soon as possible.

Thank you.
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