Showing papers in "British Journal of Canadian Studies in 2006"

Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination/Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs/A Breach of Duty: Fiduciary Obligations and Aboriginal Peoples/Advancing Aboriginal Claims: Visions/Strategies/Directions/Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty Making in British Columbia

Abstract: Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), xii + 328 pp. Cloth. $85. ISBN 0-7748- 1186-2. Richard Daly, Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), xix + 384 pp. Cloth. $85. ISBN 0-7748-1074-2. Paper. $29.95. ISBN 0-7748-1075. James I. Reynolds, A Breach of Duty: Fiduciary Obligations and Aboriginal Peoples (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd, 2005), xxv + 336 pp. Paper. £38. ISBN 1-8958- 3025-7. Kerry Wilkins (ed.), Advancing Aboriginal Claims: Visions/Strategies/Directions (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd, 2004), 320 pp. Paper. $38. ISBN 1-8958-3024-9. Andrew Woolford, Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty Making in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), ix + 248 pp. Cloth. $85. ISBN 0-7748-1131-5. It is about ten years since completion of the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. In the intervening years, litigation, the treaty process and other negotiations have continued slowly. The background to these proceedings includes scholarship by anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, and others, independently and on behalf of Aboriginal peoples. These five books are contemporary markers of understanding of Aboriginal knowledge and traditions and indicators of the legal context of negotiations. They reveal the contributions of social research to legal and political decision-making, provide accounts of discussions of strategies for promoting Aboriginal rights and raise questions about ways forward for Aboriginal communities. Do Glaciers Listen? considers Aboriginal views of agency and change in the environment, bringing together themes from social anthropology, history and environmental studies in its analysis of local knowledge, colonial encounters and environmental change. The period of human encounter analysed by Julie Cruikshank coincides with the later phases of the 'Little Ice Age' (1550-1850). The territory it covers is the Yukon and Alaska. Cruikshank is critical of instrumental usage of 'Traditional Ecological Knowledge', raises questions about how people relate to the natural world, and makes cautionary comments about policies for environmental protection. As Cruikshank makes clear, colonial exploration and settlement in northwestern North America occurred at the same time as the environment was changing. There were contrasts between European conceptions of division between nature and culture and those of indigenous peoples, whose 'oral traditions frame glaciers as intensely social spaces where human behaviour, especially casual hubris or arrogance, can trigger dramatic and unpleasant consequences in the physical world' (p. 11; emphasis in original). She argues that the contrasting views of the environment in oral history of local people and the historical records of the colonisers have consequences for current debates about the environment, climate change, and indigenous peoples' rights. Life histories from elderly Aboriginal women who lived in southern Yukon Territory treat glaciers as active and dynamic. These accounts are compared to those by European scientists and travellers, with illustrations from maps, photographs, and drawings. The consequences of different views of the environment and associated policies are made clear. Cruikshank remarks, for example, that recent designation of areas occupied by Aboriginal people as national parks has 'disenfranchised indigenous hunters at the stroke of a pen' (p. 253). Land rights and boundary issues are at the heart of Daly's ethnographic account of the lives of the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en peoples of northwest British Columbia. Whereas Cruikshank's study is about relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans, Daly's project raises questions about relations between indigenous peoples, particularly with regard to differing Nisga'a and Gitksan- Witsuwit'en concepts of landholding and contested territory. …

Smoke and Mirrors: Globalized Terrorism and the Illusion of Multilateral Security

Abstract: Frank P. Harvey, Smoke and Mirrors: Globalized Terrorism and the Illusion of Multilateral Security (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), xiii+342 pp. Cloth. $33.00. ISBN 0-8020-8948-8. At the core of the heated rhetoric swirling around debates about the foreign policy of the presidential administration of George W. Bush is a vacuum. Needed to fill that vacuum is a reasoned, balanced, and contextualised examination of the administration's approach to the world outside its boundaries. Unfortunately, Smoke and Mirrors: Globalized Terrorism and the Illusion of Multilateral Security, by Dalhousie University academic Frank Harvey, is not that book. Harvey primarily explores questions related to globalisation and security and multilateralism and unilateralism through cases studies of two Bush administration policies: its pursuit of Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) and its decision to invade Iraq. In following this course, the overall weaknesses of the monograph become apparent. In the case of ballistic missile defence, he generally avoids the most telling arguments against it: namely that the system will not work and that the resources devoted to it would be more effectively spent on ensuring the security of Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles and American ports. Nor does Harvey examine the long ideological context to the current drive to develop and deploy missile defence, specifically the fact that since the Reagan administration it has been on the wish list of American conservatives. It is in the section on Iraq, however, where the book really runs into difficulty, especially since some of Harvey's points, apparently written soon after the fall of Baghdad but before the full rise of the current insurgency, now seem hopelessly out of date. Again, as with BMD, what is missing is any sort of contextualising of the Iraq issue. Absent is a discussion of the ideological underpinnings of the decision to invade Iraq of the type provided in James Mann's book Rise of the Vulcans. Indeed, to put it more bluntly, the section on Iraq clearly demonstrates that this book should not have been written at this time. With the passage of a decade, for example, more documents and memoirs, such as Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris, will have emerged, allowing for a more nuanced account of what occurred with respect to Iraq and the invasion's relationship to wider questions of unilateralism and multilateralism. …

Science for the People: Northern Field Stations and Governmentality

Abstract: Noah Piugaattuk, one of Igloolik's most celebrated Elders, was a local icon of indigenous wisdom. Piugaattuk (Figure 1) passed away a few years ago in his mid-nineties, having lived to witness Igloolik life for nearly the entire twentieth century. Among his many experiences, he had travelled the region as a catechist and guide to the early missionaries, witnessing many of the profound changes to Inuit culture from these early days. His knowledge of the language and skills of the land was probably second to none. He was a living repository of Inuit language, history, and culture. I had the honour to get to know Piugaattuk a little when I spent some months in 1988 living in Igloolik studying how new technologies were transforming oral traditions and recording voices and sounds for a photography exhibition. When I met Piugaattuk, he already had a reputation as a unique source of Inuit traditional knowledge. Equipped with a tape recorder and microphone, I followed in the tracks of previous researchers, listening to stories about his life and times, and asking questions to understand how Inuit expert knowledge about Arctic travel is stored and taught through their oral tradition. Piugaattuk seemed to me not to possess the habit familiar to many of us of communicating dry information; he was too much of a leader and teacher, possessed of a wry sense of humour, which forced us 'researchers' - a label broadly applied to people who incessantly ask questions, whether natural scientists, social scientists or journalists - to reflect on the nature of the questions we put to him. I remember one instance when Piugaattuk (personal communication June 1988) was telling me that contrary to what I had read in the scholarly literature about the remarkable accuracy of Inuit topographical knowledge, he did not consider maps, mental or material, to be a traditional Inuit technology, on the grounds that they were too unreliable a medium for storing geographical knowledge safely. As if to prove their marginal importance, he wryly recalled that that his first map had been given to him by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, who, searching for a lost person, needed Piugaattuk to show him his own location on his map, and then to direct him towards the area where the missing person had last been sighted. One reason I still remember the story of the RCMP officer is that it captured a truth about knowledge in small communities such as Igloolik: knowledge is virtually always mediated. This flew in the face of a pervasive myth about travel, that one can find out what a distant place is really like by going there to see it first-hand. My own journey to Igloolik had been motivated by a burning desire to see life in a northern community. Much of what I had read back in Cambridge had seemed distanced, dated, removed. I wanted to see things for myself and form my own judgements. What I discovered that summer in northern Canada was that access to life in the community, and no less 'out on the land', away from it all, was mediated by gatekeepers. Perhaps this should not have come as such a surprise for me. In previous summers, I had visited other communities while working as a satellite communications engineer for Telesat, a private company - thereby becoming known to locals as the 'Telesat man'. Sensing that Inuit kept a distance from transitory visitors, I had imagined that behind the scenes was an Inuit culture that, under other circumstances, I would be able to join in as myself once I had shed my professional baggage. This was to prove naive because the institutionalisation of Inuit culture had been taking place for decades in complex ways that I did not yet understand. Most Inuit had direct experience with institutions both new (e.g. government officials, the Hudson Bay trading post) and old (social institutions such as the extended family). Although some institutions, such as residential schools, were the source of many Inuit problems, other institutions could provide some of the solutions. …

The North and the Great Expanse. Representations of the North and Narrative Forms in French-Canadian Literature

Abstract: Etude des representations du Nord et de leurs formes narratives dans la litterature quebecoise.

Naming in Nunavut: A Case Study in Political Onomastics

Abstract: The study that forms the basis for this article revisits and substantially updates my earlier work on Inuit names and naming experiences, within the framework of a politics of naming. I have been developing the sub-discipline of political onomastics, or politics of naming, since the early 1980s. Inuit experiences with decades of colonialist-Outsider interventions provide a case study within which to examine the political implications of naming and renaming. 'There is no social agent who does not aspire ... to have the power to name and to create the world through naming', wrote the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 105). He called official naming 'a symbolic act of imposition [that makes] the state the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence' (Bourdieu 1991: 239). The experience of Inuit in Canada is both unique and universal. While the particular religious institutions, individuals, and ways of bestowing missionary-given (baptismal, Christian) names and the renaming programme called 'Project Surname' were unique to Canadian experience, there are similar reidentification programmes elsewhere in the Arctic and in virtually every part of the world. Inuit Naming Traditions Names are the heart and soul of Inuit culture. Over the years, visitors have studied and observed, praised and criticised, confused and distorted, regulated and registered, revised and amended Inuit names. In the intricate, multi-layered Inuit naming system, names are passed from one generation to the next to commemorate and continue the lives of members of the community. The name can belong to a male in one generation and a female in another. What is crucial is that it continue to be passed along the multi-generational continuum. As Minnie Aodla Freeman (1978: 50) explains: 'Our belief is that no one really dies until someone is named after the dead person. So, to leave the dead in peace and to prevent their spirits from being scattered all over the community, we give their names to the newborn. The minds of the people do not rest until the dead have been renamed'. A child is not a complete person until he or she receives an atiq - a namesake name. The whole naming system is based on sauniq - namesake commemoration so powerful it amounts to a form of reincarnation. The namesake, or atiq, can continue life through many people of either gender. When a child is named, he or she becomes the sauniq or 'bone' of all those who have shared that name. People linked by names are bound together in a complex and permanent set of relationships. The namesake ties are so strong that kinship terms, dress, and behaviour often follow the relationship rather than the individual's biological sex. Napatchie Akeego MacRae described how cross-gender naming worked in her family (Alia 2005: 5-8): 'A lot of the names are about a hundred years old that I know of ... My father's sisters call me Akeego. When I was born, [a man] had just recently died ... called Napatchie [pronounced 'Napat-see'] ... Napatchie was a man - the person I'm named after - his relatives call me his younger brother'. Her identities are even more complicated because, in addition to being a 'younger brother', she is also a 'younger sister': 'My middle name is Akeewok, after my dad's youngest sister ... My grandfather showed his love towards me more than towards my other siblings because I was named after his youngest daughter'. Her biological family treats her as female, but the family whose brother is her namesake treats her as male: 'The older brother would ask me if I want to go hunting with him, or catch my first caribou or seal ... but the way I saw myself, I was more female, so I didn't want to do that. It's kind of hard to explain how it really works'. Alexina Kublu tells a story that shows the strength of the namesake connection. Her daughter's namesake died in a plane crash, but her daughter was never told about it. When my daughter was about eleven, we were flying down to Winnipeg from Rankin and it was pretty turbulent. …

Accounting for Environmental Degradation in Hudson's Bay Company Fur Trade Journals and Account Books

Abstract: the Wigs or Nabobs are getting so avaricious - that they are getting into a System of economy that ere long they Will starve themselves to death. altho the returns are still increasing, the Outfits are courtailed . . . (Letter from Norway House, 22 June 18321)