Collaborative Service Learning and Anthropology with Gitxaała Nation

Early ethnographic field schools used the "field" of indigenous communities as a laboratory. Today's schools, like our program at the University of British Columbia (UBC), are more likely to involve collaboration with an indigenous community or organization and to be based upon principles of service learning (S. Beck 2006; Iris 2004; Lamphere 2004). As Huber notes, "The dual emphasis in service learning in anthropology is on ethnography as process rather than a product embodied in a book, journal, or video; and on ethnography in service to the subjects and not just to the students (or to anthropology as a body of knowledge, to which the students' work contributes)" (quoted in Colligan 2001: 14). Thus students learn and make meaningful contributions to the community with whom field schools collaborate.

Service learning is not, of course, unproblematic, but it does provide a real opportunity for students to participate in what Lamphere calls "a sea change in the discipline" of anthropology that "shifts the balance of power toward partnership" with community members (2004: 440, 432). At the core of the collaborative service learning model is a philosophy that "emphasizes the obligations of students to local communities through volunteerism, contributions to community life, and collaborative research endeavors that directly benefit the host community" (Iris 2004: 57). Ultimately, a service learning approach has the potential to facilitate the scholarly growth of more engaged and considerate students.

Our objective at UBC's school has been to establish and maintain ties with indigenous communities or organizations wishing to conduct research that records, enhances, and preserves their own cultural systems and social relations. This has entailed a detailed protocol of engagement that lays the ground rules for creating opportunities for respectful community-focused student research (Menzies 2004a). The reflections included in this special section of Collaborative Anthropologies emerge out of the Gitxaała-UBC collaborative venture in service learning student research.

This introductory section has two goals: first, to outline the history and explain the context of the Gitxaała-UBC collaborative venture, and second, to discuss the critical research issues that are illuminated by the field school structure and experience. Specifically, we are interested in (1) exploring the ways in which the field school experience as a mediated fieldwork encounter is both inherently rewarding and disappointing for students, and how that dynamic can result in a very positive training experience, and (2) outlining two specific difficulties of collaborative service learning research projects: the cost for communities and the problematic potential for cultural tourism on the part of students.

The Gitxaała-UBC Service Learning Project

The Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia has run a number of collaborative field schools over the course of its history. The most recent series of graduate student ethnographic field schools began in the early 1990s under the direction of Bruce Granville Miller (Menzies was co-instructor for the last three of these schools). Five of these field schools were in the territory of the Sto:lo Nation, who live along the Fraser River some thirty miles inland from Vancouver. The Sto:lo have more than five thousand members living in twenty-four communities. UBC students were delegated projects by the researchers in the Sto:lo Nation Treaty Office. In 2006 and 2007 the UBC field school was hosted by the Gitxaała Nation on the north coast of British Columbia under the direction of Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler. Since 2007 an additional half dozen students have had the opportunity to conduct guided independent studies under field school-like conditions working with Menzies in Gitxaała territory.

Menzies is an indigenous scholar whose family is part of Gitxaała Nation. Butler is a resident of Prince Rupert, where she and her partner are raising their family. Both of us have over a decade each of research experience on British Columbia's north coast. Menzies, born and raised in Prince Rupert, began his research in the mid-1980s. Butler's first north coast research was as one of three students working with Menzies in...