Early Northern and Interior Ethnology
Handouts:
Lecture 4 Outline
Websites Visited
BBC’s Olympic Promo Video
Four Host First Nation Olympic Promo Video
Lecture Summary:
This week, we took the same approach to looking at the early anthropology of the subarctic and the plateau as we did with the Northwest Coast. We looked at a brief overview of the anthropology of the areas before discussing the roles of explorers like Samuel Black and missionaries like Father AG Morice in the earliest documentation of the lives of the people living in the north and interior. We read briefly from Black’s Rocky Mountain journal, for example, and saw that he was interested in the political organization of the Sekani people. This may have been because he wanted to know who he could trade furs with. We also looked at the career of James Teit and, like Boas, spoke about Teit’s applied anthropology. Remember, Teit advocated for land rights on behalf of native groups in both the southern interior and the far north.
When looking at the cultures of the north and interior, early anthropologists noted the difficulty of identifying groups in the sense of politically bounded entities. Instead, they found groups with flexible memberships and porous territorial boundaries. This led June Helm to propose the concepts of regional and local bands as well as task groups as a way of thinking about how group membership was defined and activities like hunting were organized. When we looked at Sekani and Beaver cultures – through the writings of Diamond Jenness and Robin Ridington – we learned more about the processes of hunting. Jenness’ dramatic accounts of spirit questing pair nicely with Ridington’s argument for knowledge as a kind of technology.