Introduction
Handouts:
Syllabus (includes assignment handouts)
Websites and News Stories
Natives vow to press poverty issues at Olympics (Globe and Mail)
Lecture Summary:
I began the course with a short slide presentation of my recent work in northern BC. There, I was trying to learn why camping was important to a native community. Then, after a review of the course requirements and the syllabus, we began talking about the discipline of anthropology and its definition(s) of culture.
The material for this week then turned more directly to a consideration of the indigenous peoples and cultures of British Columbia. I introduced the term ‘ethnographic present’ and we decided that the ethnographic present in BC, at least as it appears in anthropological writings, was probably about the middle of the nineteenth century. That is really quite recent for North America.
We had a lengthy discussion of the labels that are used for talking about the peoples of this course. We discussed the historical reasons for using labels like Indian, aboriginal, native, and indigenous. I shared a blog post from Intercontinental Cry about the Anishinabek’s attempts to end the use of the label aboriginal because of its negative connotation that native people are somehow not the original inhabitants of North America.
The last part of the classes this week offered a slide presentation showing the cultural regions of British Columbia. This goals of this presentation included: 1) introducing you to the cultural and geographical diversity of BC; and 2) to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the cultural area concept in anthropology. The cultural area concept is a basic classifying scheme around which the material for this course (and Muckle’s book) is organized.