Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs (review)

Our Box Was Full is an exemplary model of scholarly acuity, a rigorous documentation of indigenous ways of life, an admirably honest critical reflection on the complex challenges of professional and personal responsibility, and a labour of love. It promises to become a classic in late twentieth-century anthropology.

Daly, an anthropologist, testified as an expert witness in the landmark Aboriginal title case, Delgamuukw v. R. This four-year (1988–92) trial marked a turning point in Aboriginal law, and in the participation of both Aboriginal elders and academics – particularly anthropologists and historians – as expert witnesses. The trial judge, then chief justice of British Columbia, Allen McEachern, found against the claims of the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en plaintiffs, relying on Hobbes to rule that they their lives were 'nasty, brutish and short,' and relatively ungoverned by institutions or laws, before European contact. Judge McEachern dismissed the elders' and Daly's testimonies to the contrary as little more than subjective impressions. Our Box Was Full, demonstrating as it does the methodological rigour that produced Daly's report to the court, stands as a much needed and long awaited refutation of Allen McEachern's lamentable Reasons for Judgment.

The core of this book – chapters 3 to 7 – consists in a re-presentation of Daly's testimony about Gitksan and Witsuwit'en kinship-based economic and political relations. Drawing from oral histories, archival collections, archeological and ethnographic records, interviews, and participant observation of contemporary practices, Daly offers a detailed description and elegant analysis demonstrating a complex of interconnections between land and life in production, distribution and consumption organized through a dense interrelated network of reciprocal gift-giving, continually and complexly reproduced over generations. Chapter 2 locates Daly's research within the context of the Delgamuukw v. R. case through an account of a contemporary pole-raising feast.

Forewords by Michael Jackson and Peter Grant, law professor and lawyer, respectively, who represented the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en, instruct readers on legal issues. Daly's epilogue reflects on the years following the court decisions and raises important questions about their diverse affects 'on the ground,' in the social relations and political imaginations of the diverse and divided communities involved. An afterword by Gitksan leader Don Ryan, Masgaak, appropriately closes the book with a pragmatic assessment of possible futures.

The preface and fifty-six-page introduction are remarkable for their breadth and depth. Daly forthrightly grapples with the contradictions and challenges that increasingly face anthropologists seeking to contribute to the well-being of the people we work with. Drawing largely on feminist theory, Daly offers a careful reflexive analysis of the standpoint from which he conducted his research, and explicates the necessarily contingent resolutions he arrived at, in practice, while simultaneously struggling to be accountable to indigenous employers, professional standards, evidentiary requirements of a legal forum, and personal commitments. Following a critical analysis of the history of anthropological writing about 'complex hunter gatherers' and their encounters with European colonialisms over time, Daly provides an intriguing analysis that articulates contemporary debates between indigenous and European social theories. In particular, he proposes linkages with feminist and Bourdieuian analyses, and offers a provocative critique of contemporary conceptualizations of human rights from a position rooted in collectivities and gift economies.

Interspersed throughout the book are evocative passages such as 'Stifled Competence' (6–8) in which Daly describes a moment in an elder's testimony through a beautifully crafted, imaginative vignette. Daly's text combines documentation, analysis, critique, reflection, and poetry without succumbing to false objectivity, unnecessarily abstract theorizing, self-indulgence, or romanticism. Readers are left with respectful and complicated understandings of Gitksan and Witsuwit'en peoples as historical and contemporary agents that defy simplistic and demonized or idealized portraits. The limitations and possibilities of law as a strategy for social justice are critically explored, as is the potential for politically engaged anthropology.

Daly describes Our Box Was Full as his gift to the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en peoples from...