The People of Denendeh: Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada's Northwest Territories (review)

June Helm began her anthropological investigations among the Dene people of Canada's Northwest Territories in 1951. Though she has not been engaged in active fieldwork for more than twenty-five years, she remains, with good cause, one of the most respected anthropologists of the region. It is fitting, then, that McGill-Queen's University Press issued this lightly edited and updated compilation of Helm's earlier publications into a single volume. Helm's own principal interest in compiling the collection was to give back to the Dene community some of the information that was so generously shared with her by members of an earlier generation.

One of the most striking features of People of Denendeh is its innovative organization. Helm's introduction situates her publications within the scholarly literature to show the extent to which research among the Dene in the decades following the Second World War contributed to the revising of classical models of human social evolution first advanced by Franz Boas and, later, by such anthropological luminaries as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Julian Steward. The rest of the book aims both to historicize and to humanize the writing of Aboriginal history. In Part One, Helm describes Dene society as she encountered it in 1951. Thereafter, the chapters in the volume's two remaining parts move both backward and forward through time, creating a series of interconnected ethnohistorical narratives that effectively challenge established Western chronologies and anthropological orthodoxy.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate this work's unconventional structure is as a reflection of Helm's own academic history and what might be considered the historiographical developments within her writings. Taken collectively, Helm's writings illustrate that, contrary to once popular belief, by the mid-twentieth century the Dene had not undergone such dramatic cultural change that their true traditions had been lost forever. When she arrived in the Canadian North in 1951, she expected to find a fragment of Dene culture, a pale shadow of what had existed before European disruptions. Instead she encountered a society that, though undergoing profound changes, was adapting to change on terms that allowed people to remain Dene. Her writings reflect the way anthropology slowly came to terms with the resilience of indigenous cultures.

Although arguing for cultural continuity and adaptation in the face of profound challenges is the central scholarly thesis of People of Denendeh, it is not the principal reason for the book's publication, or at least not Helm's personal reason. Indeed, her earlier articles have already made this argument convincing, so repetition would not justify republication in a single volume. Where People of Denendeh really shines, and what makes this compilation tremendously valuable, is that it deftly presents indigenous cultural history within both a historiographical context and a Dene epistemological context. Helm strives, and I think succeeds, in creating an integrated and comprehensive volume that demonstrates how European preconceptions, political agendas, and deductive reasoning created models of Dene society that were not only unanchored in historical reality but unintelligible to Dene people. In their place, Helm's largely inductive research contributed to the resituating of Dene people within the academic literature. Through the compilation of her earlier writings (coupled with the new inclusion of some raw fieldnote observations and more current correspondence and ruminations) into this single accessible volume, Helm is now helping to resituate the academic literature within Dene society.

There is much to engage readers here. People of Denendeh will make a fine teaching tool as well as a solid scholarly reference source. Where it falls short is in its almost complete disengagement from recent academic debates and developments. Helm's fieldwork ended in 1975, and her scholarly writing about the Dene concluded roughly five years later.

Taken as a whole, People of...