Living on the Edge: Nuu-Chah-Nulth History from an Ahousaht Chief's Perspective (review)

Traditional education and formalized schooling. Harvesting seasonal resources and wage labour. Hereditary rights and treaty negotiations. These pairings are not oppositions as much as they are interwoven elements of twentieth-century indigenous lives. In this slim volume, Chief Earl Maquinna George recounts a personal history with measured elegance. That this history takes the form of a book at all is the result of his decision to return to university after retirement and earn a master's degree. Chief George aims to set an example for Aboriginal youth and to communicate an understanding of First Nations to non-Aboriginal audiences.

George draws on more than seventy years of listening to and learning from indigenous teachers around him. Born in 1926 in Ahousaht, a Nuu-chah-nulth village on the west coast of Vancouver Island, George grew up in a family of ha'wiih, or hereditary chiefs, owners of the land, water, and resources in Ahousaht territory. He provides the genealogy of this ownership in the second chapter, where he recounts the eighteenth-century history of warfare, rivalry, and alliance between Nuu-chah-nulth families. War not only produced territorial boundaries, it also assigned resource rights such as whaling and sealing to specific families. George attaches post-contact involvement in commercial sealing to this pre-existing indigenous right, situating the former as a continuation of the latter.

In chapters 3 and 4, George emphasizes the natural bounty available to his parents' generation. Streams were filled with salmon, and forests with game and plants. One of George's most important points here is that this bounty resulted from careful indigenous management. Salmon runs were plentiful because people tended the streams, manufacturing the ideal habitat for salmon spawn to hatch. Specific seasonal and geographical knowledge was likewise required to harvest berries and plants that served as food and medicine. These were skills that children learned from their parents and grandparents, an education put on hold by residential schools.

This indigenous learning linked the Ahousaht to their land through stories, knowledge, and spirituality. George divides chapter 5 between a discussion of spiritual values, especially as they relate to the environment, and involvement in the fishing and logging industries. If placing these two topics side by side appears incongruous to some readers, George would ask them to reflect on the reason. He wants readers to 'realize that some things that are taken for granted by white people are quite different from how a First Nations person might think' (86). A case in point is his discussion of the role that Tiskin, the thunderbird, plays not only in the ancient origins of the Ahousaht, but in George's own life. Tiskin re-invokes the theme of environmental stewardship, setting the context for George's discussion of the resource economy. George recounts labour in canneries, on seiners, at lumber mills, and in logging camps that took him from British Columbia to Washington State and back again. He stresses that the environmental damage caused by the logging and fishing industries is incommensurate with Ahousaht notions of stewardship.

In order to resolve this problem, George is clear that the Ahousaht must regain enough of their traditional territory to be able to sustain themselves once again. In chapter 6 George speaks to his descendants about the treaty negotiations and his role as treaty negotiator. He details many difficulties, not least of which is the inability or unwillingness of the governments of Canada and British Columbia to extend the good faith required to truly understand indigenous perspectives.

This, ultimately, seems the motivation behind George's writing. He hopes that this book will speak to indigenous and non-indigenous readers alike, and that it will serve as a bridge of understanding between the two. He has created a book that will work well in classroom settings and for general audiences. By weaving together topics that other works treat as distinct, he challenges binary...