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Part II LOOKING BACK IN TIME On the day I arrived at Rae in 1971, I encountered two Slavey friends from Jean Marie River (‘‘Lynx Point’’) of twenty years before. Their very presence at Rae brought home to me the extent of the changes in communications and perspectives in the two decades since I first came to the Northwest Territories. Louis Norwegian and Jimmy Sanguez were in Rae as representatives from the Fort Simpson Band (with Chief Cazon) to the meeting of the newly formed (1969) Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories (IB-NWT). Within the first two days at Rae, I was so taken with the changes in everyday life that I sat down to record immediate impressions and observations. Preceded by a reflective essay by Nancy Lurie, my notes made on these two days make up chapter 6, which initiates this section. By 1970 I knew I was to be the editor of the Subarctic volume of the Handbook of North American Indians that was being planned as a twenty-volume publication of the Smithsonian Institution. (Subarctic, volume 6 of the Handbook , was published in 1981.) That prospect and the Athapaskan Conference in Ottawa in 1971 (Clark 1975) led to a graduate seminar at the University of Iowa in which several students joined with me to work on a survey of the contact history of the subarctic Athapaskans (chapter 7). That broad historical overview buttressed comprehensions I had developed in the field and library over twenty years. I was thus preadapted to respond to the request of the IB-NWT to serve as an expert witness in the efforts of the Brotherhood to establish a caveat on land development in the Territories. In August 1973 I testified before the Territorial Supreme Court regarding the nature of Dene land use throughout the historical era to the present day, as well as my understanding of the natives’ comprehension—or, rather, lack of comprehension —of the implications for land alienation in the treaties signed in 1900 and 1921. As I was being the ‘‘expert’’ in the witness’s dock in Justice William Morrow ’s court, Joe Tobie, multilingual Dogrib, leaned over to Beryl Gillespie (also an ‘‘expert witness’’) sitting with him in the audience and observed, ‘‘We could have told him that!’’ Of course Joe Tobie and other Dene could have testified to the same points I was making. It brought home to me how strange are the criteria of the whites’ courts: for summarizing what the people know, the courts accept me as an ‘‘expert’’ because I have a Ph.D. Within a year, Beryl Gillespie and I were working for the Brotherhood in land claims research. I developed a field project in which young members of the Brotherhood , as they interviewed Dene of the Northwest Territories, plotted on maps the routes and resources (e.g., good furbearer locations) that men and their families used across the land. The project’s aim was to establish the facts of native land use and deployment as part of the Brotherhood’s effort to maximize Indian control over land use and development through negotiation and/or judicial process. (See Nahanni [1977] and Asch, Andrews, and Smith [1986] in which, curiously, no acknowledgment of Helm as the project designer is made.) In 1975 I was called on to provide an ethnohistorical overview at another government hearing, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. As oral testimony recorded by the court stenographer, it had redundancy and a few confusions. I have worked over the transcript to present it as chapter 9 in this book. 92 Part II The first three chapters of this part, arising from encounters and events in the first five years of the 1970s, provide a staging position from which to move back through the first fifty years of the twentieth century, thence into the 1800s, and then into the furthest reaches of documentary and oral history of the Dene of the Mackenzie region (chapters 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13). Chapter 14, the last chapter of this part, returns to events of the ‘‘Berger hearings’’ of 1975: the views presented by the IB-NWT and the views by ‘‘ordinary’’ Dene citizens in the community hearings held by Mr. Justice Thomas Berger in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. The tremendous changes in years since 1975 I do not address. Now the Dene people have generated their own scholars of and active participants in the events of the last twenty-five years...

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