Traditional Knowledge and Law

"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.

"The Nlha7kápmx people are among the original inhabitants of the Fraser, Thompson, and Nicola river valleys in southwestern British Columbia. In this collection of traditional oral narratives and legends, which have been passed from generation to generation for centuries, the elders tell the story of their people.

"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.

"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.

"‘Wendat’ was the word used by the five confederated nations of Wendake, the Wendat name for Huronia, the Ontario territory that the French -- mainly the Jesuits -- knew and described between 1615, when the Recollet Joseph Le Caron and Samuel de Champlain arrived, and 1649, when the Wendat confederacy collapsed. Champlain was the first to make consistent use of the disparaging term ‘Huron’ in naming the Wendats, and until recently that was still the name used by scholars and others in referring to these indigenous people.

"The arc of land and water forming the North Pacific Rim is a cut lace work of rivers running to the great ocean. The salmon, sacred to people who lived along the pathways of its journey, once engorged these rivers, but no more. Thirteen writers from cultures profoundly connected to salmon were asked to write about 'the fish of the gods' from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.

"How did a Belgian Oblate missionary who came to Canada to convert the aboriginals come to be buried as a Cree chief? In Dissonant Worlds Earle Waugh traces the remarkable career of Roger Vandersteene: his life as an Oblate missionary among the Cree, his intensive study of the Cree language and folkways, his status as a Cree medicine man, and the evolution of his views on the relationship between aboriginal traditions and the Roman Catholicism of the missionaries who worked among them.

"A monolingual Cree speaker from Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, Kâ-pimwêwêhahk / Jim Jim Kâ-Nîpitêhtêw was a highly respected orator; in later years he served as senior member of the Council of Elders at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in Saskatoon. His discourses have great force an authority, and no speeches of similar scope of depth have ever been published in their original form. In these eight speeches, Kâ-pimwêwêhahk speaks of his concerns for young people, the proper performance of rituals, and also gives an account of the signing of Treaty Six.

“Born in 1912, Mrs. Alice Ahenakew grew up in a traditional Cree community in north-central Saskatchewan. As a young woman, she married Andrew Ahenakew, a member of the prominent Saskatchewan family, who later became a well-known Anglican priest and Cree healer.

"Of the many remarkable histories of Canada's Native peoples, few match the extraordinary historical, social, political, and cultural ups and downs of the James Bay Crees. For some 5,000 years, these remarkable people have inhabited the eastern and interior regions of James Bay, a domain of close to 350,000 square kilometres of subarctic forest, rivers, and lakes. This land that has sustained them both physically and spiritually from ancient to modern times has, in the last century, been subject to radical change.