Culture and Law

"Otter’s Journey employs the Anishinaabe tradition of storytelling to explore how Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization. Indigenous languages and laws need bodies to live in. Learning an endangered language and a suppressed legal system are similar experiences. When we bring language back to life, it becomes a medium for developing human relationships. Likewise, when laws are written on people’s hearts, true revitalization has occurred.

"Cultural tourism is frequently marketed as an economic panacea for communities whose traditional ways of life have been compromised by the dominant societies by which they have been colonized. Indigenous communities in particular are responding to these opportunities in innovative ways that set them apart from their non-Indigenous predecessors and competitors.

"Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native population into Canadian society.

"The story of James Sewid, a twentieth-century Kwakiutl Indian Chieftain, brings to life the experience of one man caught in conflict as the traditional Kwakiutl culture gave way to the demands of an expanding Western society in British Columbia. Born in 1910 into a rapidly disintegrating Indian culture, Sewid as a young child received unusually intensive training and special treatment from his elders because he was their heir to many 'names,' which he early learned carried great responsibility with them.

"This is the first major body of annotated texts in James Bay Cree, and a unique documentation of Swampy and Moose Cree (Western James Bay) usage of the 1950s and 1960s. Conversations and interviews with 16 different speakers include: legends, reminiscences, historical narratives, stories and conversations, as well as descriptions of technology. The book includes a detailed pronunciation guide, notes on Cree terms, informants’ comments, dialect variations, and descriptions of cultural values and customs.

"Among Anglo-Canadian fur traders of the early nineteenth century, George Nelson stands out for his interest in the life and ways of the native people he encountered. In 1823 Nelson was serving as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk in charge of the post at Lac la Ronge, an outpost of Ile a la Crosse in northeastern Saskatchewan. During that time he kept a letter-journal, addressed to his father, in which he related his observations of Cree and Northern Ojibwa religion and myth. This document is reproduced here for the first time.

"Over years of teaching, it became increasingly apparent to the editors of this book (the Aboriginal Education Council at Trent University) that students in their Native Studies classes were dissatisfied with many of the texts they were assigned, which were usually anthropological in nature. Their response was to propose a new text that would provide an overview of the thought-worlds of Aboriginal cultures from the inside.

"Most writing on Métis history has concentrated on the Resistance of 1869-70 and the Rebellion of 1885, without adequately explaining the social and economic origins of the Métis that shaped those conflicts. Historians have often emphasized the aboriginal aspect of the Métis heritage, stereotyping the Métis as a primitive people unable or unwilling to adjust to civilized life and capitalist society.

"The heyday of anthropological collecting on the Northwest Coast took place between 1875 and the Great Depression. The scramble for skulls and skeletons, poles, canoes, baskets, feast bowls, and masks went on until it seemed that almost everything not nailed down or hidden was gone.

"Preserving What is Valued: Museums, Conservation, and First Nations by senior conservator at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Miriam Clavir, explores the highly charged topic of cultural property and the repatriation of cultural materials. As a museum conservator with a duty to preserve objects, the author recognizes the conflicting interests of museum preservation and First Nations efforts to preserve and access cultural heritage. She begins the discussion with the standard account of museums and their historical development of conservation practices.