The Power of Place, the Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism (review)

Many scholars have explored the Eurocentric foundations of legal norms. For those of us disturbed by the primacy of such norms, our challenge involves grappling with colonialism and thus problematizing normative historical consciousness. But what is the historical consciousness that forms, complicates, and transgresses the law and society addressed in our legal research? Keith Thor Carlson’s book The Power of Place, the Problem of Time, offers insight into this question. The book explores the identity of a First Nations group in interaction with European newcomers and is supported by Carlson’s years of working with the Stó:lō Nation in British Columbia. Carlson relies on diverse sources, from archived government documents to ethnographic collections and the work of ethno-historians. The plurality of understandings that results from his analysis of these diverse sources sheds light on the anti-normative possibilities of interdisciplinary thought and critique. For this reason, the potential audience for this book goes well beyond those researching Native–Newcomer relations.

From the opening sentences, Carlson grasps the reader’s attention as he begins his exploration of identity, history, time, and space:

Special tunnels link various sites on the Indigenous landscape of south-western British Colombia’s lower Fraser River watershed. Although they cannot be found on government-produced maps, and are not readily visible to casual travellers, for those who know the history and know where to look, the tunnels are real.

(p. 7)

This passage foreshadows the way in which Carlson complicates the distinctions between reality and myth, insider and outsider, imposition and adaptation. He does not privilege one voice over another. Carlson’s disturbance of traditional historical interpretations arises out of his recognition of multiple historical narratives and overlapping, sometimes conflicting, narratives, which in the present day represent claims to territory, rights, and recognition. For example, in chapter 9, “Collective Governance and the Lynching of Louie Sam,” Carlson describes the “emergence of Modern Stó:lō Collective Identity” and the different ways in which collective identity and community were challenged, constructed, consolidated, and expressed. In Carlson’s discussion of Queen Victoria’s birthday celebrations (1864–1876) and the lynching of Louie Sam, we see this weaving of a legal political system, heavily laden with colonialism and hegemonic law, “operating within Indigenous culture and history, and not just upon it” (Cp. 261).

A great strength of the book is Carlson’s attention to both “forgotten” and remembered stories. The author demonstrates the power of stories—what they reveal about how people understood (and continue to understand) time, place, change, resources, migration, and relationships with other groups, including but not limited to European newcomers. Legal scholars exploring alternative voices to express law’s paradoxes or plurality can gain insight from learning how historians such as Carlson grapple with such diverse narratives and truths. The federal anti-potlatch law, for example, “significantly altered the manner in which Indigenous people . . . transmitted and publicly professed notions of collective self, an aspect of the prohibition’s impact that has not been previously considered” (p. 181).

Another strength of the book is Carlson’s refusal to fall into apologetic or idealistic portrayals of pre- or post-contact Aboriginal peoples:

[W]hile foregrounding spirituality risks reinforcing the image of Indigenous people as exclusively “otherworldly,” allowing metaphysics to lie as an icing upon a cake of geography, biology, and economics risks creating scholarship that is not only disconnected from Aboriginal realities but within which Aboriginal people cannot recognise themselves. This book refuses to fall on one or the other side of this debate.

(p. 58)

Carlson’s standpoint is significant, given the long history of ethnographers and researchers who have studied Aboriginal groups as specimens representative of another world. Both positive and negative representations have hyperbolized the reality of persons living in Aboriginal communities and have failed to recognize the real struggles and successes of diverse groups and...