Standing on the Shore with Saaban: An Anthropological Rapprochement with an Indigenous Intellectual Tradition

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the academics who study us is fraught with the memories of Western colonialism and its attendant history of disruption and appropriation. Perhaps if it was only a memory we could creatively reinvent the past and get on with it. But it is our present too. As I write this, a large multinational corporation is planning to run crude oil tankers through the culturally and ecologically important waters of my home community on Canada’s northwest coast. Another company wants to place a large ship loading facility over a place of cultural significance. Yet another company wants to plant several hundred gigantic wind turbines over the top of a culturally significant resource harvesting area and watershed. Government agencies continue to act as facilitators of these projects, and social science continues to be applied to justify the displacement of indigenous peoples from meaningful decision-making processes and ultimately to marginalize us further from our homes.¹

Social science research has become more attuned to indigenous issues in recent decades, but indigenous people still experience such research as enacted upon them more frequently than it is done by them, with them, or for them under their direct control and authority. This is not to deny the important role played by individual researchers nor the use to which older research is put by contemporary indigenous peoples. Some anthropologists, historians, and geographers have taken a personal stance to align their research against the grain of the dominant colonial society (see Menzies 2001, and Marcus and Menzies 2005, for discussion of an earlier generation of anthropologists who challenged the dominant order). Yet the dominant order still deploys social science research as a tool of governance directed against and upon indigenous peoples.

Social science research, as Tuhiwai Smith observes, is “inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” (1999: 1). Nonetheless, and as an Indigenous scholar like her, I see the need to take hold of this history and reclaim an Indigenous practice of inquiry. Failure, as Deloria laments, will leave us “cursed” ( [1969] 1988: 78).² There is a further perplexing problem, identified by Chakrabarty: “European thought is at once both indispensible and inadequate” (2000: 16). The intellectual tradition of scientific inquiry has made it possible to take a bird’s eye view of our world and to see various unique places and peoples as part of a whole. Yet this Western tradition also uses these places as the laboratories and these peoples as the data within and upon which Western theories are practiced and refined. It is time for this to change.

This essay is one contribution to an anthropological rapprochement with an Indigenous intellectual tradition.³ I seek to turn the anthropological gaze by identifying an Indigenous set of ideas or concepts that one might (with some intended irony) call an Indigenous anthropology. This is not, as one commentator suggested to me, an “argument for an ethnically based social science”—unless one considers the mainstream disciplines themselves to be ethnically based.⁴ My point is that articulating an Indigenous anthropology would respect and reframe our disciplinary discussion in ways that move beyond simply treating our communities as data sources.⁵ Clearly the notion of an indigenous anthropology is something of an oxymoron, especially if one takes my desire no further than the most immediate and literal sense. I am, however, trying to do something more. I am interested in contributing to an anthropology that is rooted within the intellectual traditions of Indigenous peoples and the longstanding traditions of the discipline qua discipline. I am ultimately seeking an anthropological rapprochement of sorts with Indigenous intellectual traditions of the northwest coast. To accomplish this I draw from my professional practice as an anthropologist and my personal history as an Indigenous British Columbian. These two histories come together in my concern with documenting Indigenous intellectual traditions.

Much of my research in British Columbia has been concerned with the ways in which members of Gitxaała and associated Tsimshian communities have engaged with the modern resource extraction industries (forestry...