Stories from the Margins: Toward a More Inclusive British Columbia Historiography

Drawing on the oral narratives of Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson (1900–1990), this article challenges historians, folklorists, and others to consider how the early Boasian ethnographic archive has shaped our understanding of Aboriginal historical consciousness. At every turn, Robinson challenges the archive's fixation on a static Golden Age Past. Robinson's Coyote, for example, is important not for what he represents in the deep past, but for his fluid relationships with non-Aboriginal peoples from the beginning of time to the present. Taking its lead from scholars such as Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, the article argues for the need to refocus attention on Aboriginal interpretations of the recent past, paying close attention to what ethnographic discourse has excluded and why. It concludes that what we have inherited from the Boasian archive may reveal more about dominant discourses of imperial accommodation and material power than about the living Aboriginal discourses of its times.