Reserve Memories: The Power of the Past in a Chilcotin Community (review)

In ethnohistory writing, it has become widely accepted that Indigenous oral tradition is performative, that it relays multiple, layered meanings, and that dialogue about the past contributes to identity formation. Reserve Memories is a welcome contribution to the expanding literature about Aboriginal historical consciousness and offers a concise, thoughtful portrayal of the Nemiah Valley Chilcotin residing in central British Columbia. Dinwoodie draws on his lengthy relationship with the community - as a graduate student, prospective employee, moose-hauler, and on-call 'taxi driver' (community members make great use of his presence not as a researcher or scholar, but as a driver) - to explore the everyday use of narratives about the past. Through the careful analysis of language, or the 'ethnography of speaking,' this book aims to understand how members of the Nemiah Valley Indian Band bridge the distance between past and present and argues that people utilize oral tradition as a kind of cultural reserve to orient themselves to the rapidly changing world.

The first chapter providing the cultural and economic backdrop is an uneven summary of the Chicoltin pre-contact past and offers a limited examination of twentieth-century historical shifts. Chapters 2 and 3 are much more satisfying and theoretically sophisticated. Here Dinwoodie examines how people make sense of the present by activating the traditional narrative genres of historical narrative and myth. It is significant that he pays detailed attention to the social and political context of the narratives' telling and to their structural, linguistic, and poetic constructions as genres. Historical narratives such as Johnny Richard's story about a white settler's unsuccessful attempt to graze cattle in the valley are purposeful, everyday articulations, or 'warnings,' often directed to outsiders (including Dinwoodie himself). They make meaningful links between Chilcotin and non-Chilcotin individuals and between past and present. Myths, which have a more identifiable poetic structuring and aesthetic patterning, bridge the gap between the known and unknown - 'between the world-present-to-the-senses and the world-evident-in-dreams-and-journeys' (81). Dinwoodie reveals how language constructs meaning and contributes to Chilcotin identity, always keeping in mind that community is a transformative and situational entity.

The most innovative chapter deals with the band's 1989 bilingual declaration, drafted as a political and legal strategy for asserting territorial rights in the face of escalating logging in the territory. Dinwoodie suggests that subtle differences between the English and Chilcotin portions of the declaration convey multiple readings for diverse audiences. The dominant Euro-Canadian public engages with the document as a type of new nationalist discourse. Linguistic analysis of the Chicoltin passage reveals, however, that community members can read things quite differently. For them, the declaration makes linguistic reference to the Tsilhqut'in myth of ethnogenesis, the story of the transformer Lhin Desch'osh. The declaration is not a simple appropriation of western political discourse, but is grounded in the narrative genres of the Chilcotin ancestors.

Intertwining anthropological and linguistic theory, translated Chilcotin passages, and engaging discussions of actual experience in the field, Reserve Memories offers much insight into the relationship between academic outsider and community insider. Dinwoodie describes with great humour and sensitivity his own awkward position as an anthropologist - revisiting elders, re-recording stories (when he forgets to turn on the tape recorder), rethinking what is relevant. He shows how Chilcotin individuals carefully direct his attention. His perseverance pays off. He is most successful at showing how specific narrative genres operate as ongoing, dynamic traditions within the community. This book leaves me with the question of how community members would receive his theoretical explanations. Do the Chilcotin also distinguish these narrative genres?

The book could be greatly improved with a reproduction of the declaration and photographs of community members. A number of factual errors distract (colonial treaties were signed in the vicinity of Victoria, not in Vancouver as stated). His summary of the political context abruptly ends in the early 1990s with...