Be of Good thoughts are marketed as revealing “how Coast Salish resides and identities have already been reshaped by two colonizing countries and by systems of kinfolk, spiritual techniques, and ways of understanding landscape” (back address). It purports become a “seamlessly edited” interdisciplinary assemblage that “teases aside the gotten wisdom of earlier researches and brings the grant in the Coast Salish current.” The amount further statements become the mandatory followup to Wayne Suttles’ seminal work with the Coast Salish. I would personally have liked to own heartily suggested an innovative new work of these breadth, but We are not able to.
Into the interests of complete disclosure i ought to initially declare a bias in reviewing this collection of ten essays, which arises from that my very own work specifically about the book has-been dismissed. My master’s thesis, awarded the Lieutenant-Governor’s medal, tested Wayne Suttles’ important type of personal relations. We examined and quantified the evidentiary basis when it comes to presumptions in regards to the level and incidence of village exogamy within central coast Salish culture that purportedly underpin most of Suttles’ work. My doctoral thesis, awarded because of the University of Oxford, resolved the situational nature of identity within Coast Salish community as well as the relationship between identity and put, like the milieu of contemporary First countries’ land statements. Instead of referencing these locally readily available works, Be of great notice (71) references just my 1983 guide Sliammon Life, Sliammon Lands (co-authored with Randy Bouchard), where this volume oddly seems, along with Pamela Amoss’ 1978 Coast Salish Spirit Dancing, underneath the subheading “Litigation, ” like these books had been done for court functions, therefore attributing in their mind, in a reductive manner, a cloudy governmental genesis. While the author mistakenly presumes that “not a lot continued in Coast Salish study when you look at the 1970s and 1980s” (71), an exact bookkeeping of these decades must await an even more considerable analysis.
I ought to not be surprised because of the omission of my own work, for much else from grant apart from that for the contributors and their educators (which unfailingly cite both) is either ignored or disparaged. Despite having classics like Wilson Duff’s 1952 Upper Stalo, an endeavor is built to show it as insufficient, causing records “somewhat jumbled and puzzled” (142), although to do therefore the deconstructor must distort the facts. As an example, Duff doesn’t “erroneously” (142) assign the positioning of this landslide that started the migration regarding the Chilliwack to xéyles lower down the lake. Duff has it right at No. 22 inside the published record, in which he reports directly from their area notes without having the complained-of discrepancy. Indeed, the discrepancy is within the footnote citation in the present amount (175 n. 6) which means p. 50 of Duff’s industry records, as opposed to p. 63. Nor can any so-called dilemma of interpretation geared towards Duff be corroborated by Oliver Wells’s interview with Albert Louie dedicated to the migration (175 n. 8). Mr. Louie just cannot state understanding paid to him by this chapter’s author (together with conversation involved appears on p. 162 of Oliver Wells, 1987, and not p. 160).
The couple of exclusions into the axe-grinding essays collected right here consist of that of archaeologist Colin Grier, whoever strategy includes all the modesty in regards to previous resources any particular one would anticipate from a devoted clinical investigator. Important thinking and a well-structured debate provide an engaging discussion of restrictions when you look at the application of ethnographic narratives to questions posed during archaeological query. Grier acknowledges that his views is dismissed as scholastic or irrelevant to modern Coast Salish political problems (302), but he contends that pursuit of a more carefully constructed prehistory will attain, in the long run, much more useful comprehension at all times (303).