Guy Lanoue - Brothers: The Politics of Violence Among the Sekani of Northern British Columbia

Guy Lanoue

The creation of a huge artificial lake in western Canada led to the flooding of prime hunting and trapping territory of the Sekani Indians, thus depriving them of their traditional occupations and livelihood. This caused considerable social distress resulting in drastic increases in alcohol consumption and violence and seriously disrupting social relationships. While some Sekani have made efforts to create new ties of solidarity through the adoption of Pan-Indianism, it is an ideology which is not proving very effective, being marred by the same factionalisms which characterized their personal relationships, as the author concludes in his provocative analysis of this nativist movement.

Guy Lanoue is a lecturer at the Universita di Chieti 'G.D'Annunzio' at Pescara.

The Politics of Violence among the Sekani of Northern British Columbia

First published 1992 by Berg Publishers

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Lanoue, Guy
Brothers: the politics of violence among the Sekani of northern
British Columbia / Guy Lanoue.
p. cm. (Explorations in anthropology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-85496-746-X: $49.50
1. Sekani IndiansSocial conditions. 2. Sekani Indians
Economic conditions. 3. Indians, Treatment ofBritish
ColumbiaWilliston
Lake Region. I. Title II. Series.
E99.S26L36 1991
971.1'004972dc20 91-18433
CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lanoue, Guy
Brothers: the politics of violence among the
Sekani of Northern British Columbia.
- (Explorations in anthropology)
I. Title II. Series
305.897

ISBN13: 978-0-8549-6746-9 (hbk)

The research upon which this book is based was the product of luck, both good and bad. In 1977 and 1978 I had originally hoped to undertake research in Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories, studying the political implications of Hare social organization. After a two-month preliminary visit during the spring of 1977 I returned to Toronto and wrote a research proposal for my doctoral dissertation based on information gathered and impressions formed on this trip. Tensions were running high in the middle of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline inquiry on establishing the feasibility of pipeline construction and the economic development of the Northwest Territories, and for perhaps the first time many northern Athabaskan people were in the political spotlight. In December I learned that permission to conduct the proposed research had not been granted by the Settlement Council. Since there was only one other community that was primarily composed of Hare Indian residents and it had been the subject of a major study by Savishinsky, I was unsure of what to do.

J.S. Savishinsky, 'Stress and Mobility in an Arctic community: The Hare Indians of Colville Lake', Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, 1970.

Roger McDonnell, then at the University of Toronto, suggested that I study the Sekani of Fort Ware in northern British Columbia (see The National Museum, which had provided me with funds for the proposed Fort Good Hope study, agreed to the change in location. In early 1978 I left Toronto for Fort Ware. Once I arrived in Vancouver I learned that another Sekani band, at McLeod Lake, wanted a researcher to undertake some of the initial background work so that a land claims proposal could be initiated by the band. I contacted the Chief and council, explained my circumstances and established myself in the community.

Although he visited the area in 1924, the results were not published until 1937. D. Jenness, The Sekani Indians of British Columbia, Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, Bulletin No. 84, 1937.

I had planned on spending six months in McLeod Lake in order to acquaint myself with the Sekani language and learn some of the basic issues which were important to them and which, I thought, formed the basis of their system of social categories. I would then proceed for a longer stay in Fort Ware, which, because of its greater isolation from White influence, would be more traditional in its cultural expression. At least, this is what I had planned.

Once I was settled in McLeod Lake Reserve I discovered that learning the language would entail more work than I had anticipated. Although older people could still speak and understand some Sekani, they could not always agree on the English meanings. This was not so much due to their imperfect knowledge of English as to their increasing loss of Sekani. English was the lingua franca of the community; there was only one old monolingual Sekani speaker, and he died a few months after my arrival. Furthermore, while "high proportion" may be a statistically true statement, the fact that there were only about sixty-five people in the community meant that only a handful of adults were potential instructors.

The small size of the community was also a clue to the significant social dynamics; there were other problems at McLeod Lake besides my difficulties in learning the language. In 1968 a huge artificial lake (Williston Lake) had been created by damming the Peace River at the town of Hudson Hope. The lake flooded the Finlay and Parsnip river drainage basins, both of which had contained Sekani traplines, and one Sekani community, Fort Grahame. People had been physically displaced, and the flooding of prime hunting and trapping territory had created considerable social distress as well. While in McLeod Lake I discovered that Fort Ware, about 80 miles by air north of the head of the lake, had also been affected, although in some ways not as severely as McLeod Lake. English was also primarily spoken in Fort Ware; I was beginning to think that doing anthropology might have been a mistake. A lay missionary who had spent a total of eight years among the Sekani told me at the time that his work (translating the Bible into Sekani) was no longer possible nor desirable since the level of spoken Sekani had continually dropped to the point where he could only hope to record a dying language, something he did not want to do. Since that time a trained linguist has recorded the language. Whether this will affect people's speech habits remains to be seen.