Keith Thor Carlson - Towards a New Ethnohistory

TOWARDS A NEW ETHNOHISTORY

NAXAXALHTSI (ALBERT SONNY MCHALSIE)

There are certain kinds of work we can (and should) do ourselves, and then there are the sorts of work where we have to humble ourselves and reach out and ask other respected people to do the work for us. That is an ancient and deeply held tradition in St:l society. When one of our St:l families hosts a potlatch feast to transfer a hereditary name across generations we always hire a speaker from another family to conduct the ceremony (work) and to be the voice through which the family communicates its history. When a loved one passes away, the people who conduct the funeral ceremony, and those who dig the grave, have to come from outside the family. Its also like this when we clean our cemeteries. As communities, we work together each year to clear away the brush and grass thats grown up, but we cant clean our own family members individual graves. That history is too close too us. Its too strong. We need someone else to be in-between. These traditions show that there is important work that we need our friends and allies to do with us and sometimes for us. I see the work that Keith and John and the students do with us through the Ethnohistory Field School as fitting into this tradition. We have history and we live and communicate that history every day through our ceremonies and our oral traditions. But there are times when it is appropriate to have someone you trust communicate aspects of that history to others on your behalf. Doing it this way allows us to humble ourselves, and it enables others to see that the historical interpretation has passed through another set of eyes and ears. I understand thats what they call peer review in the Xweltem (non-Native) world.

It is in that spirit that I can say just how amazing it is to see this collection completed, and even more amazing to think that people are going to be able to read the words of our St:l elders, past and present, directly within the text of the various chapters. When the Ethnohistory Field School started in 1998 I was very pleased to see that the students were as interested in reading the old archival documents and listening to the tapes of oral histories recorded in the past as they were in conducting their own interviews with living elders. Ethnohistory Field School students have now added dozens and dozens of new original oral history interviews to the St:l Nation archives, helping to create a repository of traditional knowledge that will be consulted by St:l and non-St:l people alike well into the future. That, in itself, is a great achievement and contribution.

But these young ethnohistorians have done much more than simply record and document St:l history. By working on research projects that have been identified by St:l community members they have helped to find answers to historical questions that are priorities for St:l people and families. And by bringing their academic training to these subjects they have provided us with interpretations that link St:l history to broader Indigenous histories. As I understand it, they bring insights to their study of the St:l past from their readings of scholarship pertaining to other Indigenous communities, and in turn, their research into St:l history can be used to help others who are seeking answers to similar question about other Indigenous communities histories. That is a great thing because it respects the distinctness of St:l culture and history while revealing things about that past that are common to Indigenous people everywhere.

One thing that the authors of these essays have done that really shows the way scholarship has been changing since I first started doing heritage research with non-Natives in the mid-1980s is build long-term relationships with elders and community members. There was a time when many students and professors would show up in our communities with their own research objectives and projects, do their summer fieldwork and then disappear. I remember elders telling me how much they resented the researchers who came to interview them and then were never heard from again. After these students from Victoria and Saskatoon have completed their research projects it would be easy for them to simply walk away. But they don't. The Ethnohistory Field School emphasizes long-term relationships. It is built upon older existing partnerships with the professors Keith Carlson and John Lutz. They have been working with us since the early 1990s and the elders know them and trust them. The way it works with the Ethonohistory Field School is that we identify the projects we want done, then we open the doors for the faculty and their students, and we know we can rely on them to keep coming back in a respectful way. The former students who have contributed to this collection of essays have come back multiple times, presenting their findings at our bi-annual People of the River Conference, for example, where they get feedback from community members and from our staff at our St:l Research and Resource Management Centre. Many of the students have been inspired to dig even deeper and in the end expanded their original field school papers into full graduate theses and publications.