Butterflies, Anthropologies, and Ethnographic Field Schools: A Reply to Wallace and Hyatt

The butterflies—people from outside—are now part of our world. The first contact between butterflies and First Nations actually happened in our area. Our old people saw those big ships coming. At first they thought it was a monster actually coming over. But then they saw these are new people from far away. Some of the names that we carry today in Gitxaała come from those adawx, from those stories. Our stories date way back, even beyond that moment of contact, to the great floods of ancient times. The inclusion of the butterfly (really the inclusion of the rest of the world) into the process of collaboration is critical to us. It is part of our history. It is also part of our future.

—Nees Ma'Outa (Clifford White)

Collaboration is critical to us. It is part of our history. It is part of our future.

I stand with Nees Ma'Outa in this statement of fact—as an indigenous scholar and member of Gitxaała Nation and as a Western-trained social anthropologist. Ethnography, the research method and practice of sociocultural anthropology, is nothing if it is not collaborative. There are, certainly, different ways of being collaborative and different approaches to conducting oneself in a collaborative manner.

One might suggest that ethnographic research, at its core, is a collaborative venture. Kevin Dwyer, in Moroccan Dialogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), nicely makes this point in his discussion of the dialogic manner by which his research with Faqir Muhammad progressed. Dwyer had assumed that he would be the interviewer and Faqir Muhammad the informant. What ensued was a process of interaction and engagement—collaboration, in other words—in which the conversation between the two men found its own path: hence the notion of the dialogic. What is innovative about Dwyer's approach is not the discovery of a new method but the recognition in writing that older models of the expert interviewer masked an inherent act of collaboration between self and other; an act of collaboration that lies at the core of the anthropological enterprise.

Late twentieth-century approaches have made collaboration more explicitly part of the ethnographic process. This very journal reflects our contemporary attention to the process of collaboration and what that might mean in theory and application. We are learning to be forthright in our recognition of what anthropological practice entails. We are converging on ideas that have long been explicit in our indigenous world.

Nees Ma'Outa clearly articulates that the Gitxaała approach is one that is firmly collaborative: "Our hereditary process is a collaborative process. . . . Our hereditary ways are a process of collaborating with our own people." For Gitxaała, as with many other indigenous nations, collaboration is a necessity and a virtue. Unlike the competitive individualism of free market capitalism, in which one ego is pitched in battle against another, our indigenous world places the emphasis upon overcoming conflictual individualism.

This is not a perfect model—Nees Ma'Outa himself points to problems in process and moments in which we forget the collaborative path. There are moments when we have forgotten ourselves, mistreated our nonhuman relatives, and lost the ability to collaborate. Our history speaks to these moments by reminding us that our approach necessarily involves collaboration. Collaboration has its roots in a common human experience, and it is from this place that we reach out to the butterflies, be they merchant explorers in the 1700s or early twenty-first-century anthropologists.

Anthropologists pride themselves on being able to see, to hear, to feel, to enact strange and foreign cultures. While we are always cautious to set ourselves apart from mere tourists, our passion and excitement does share a common foundation in the European wanderlust that set off that remarkable explosion of human productivity we now know as the birth of capitalism and the age of invention and exploration. Thus, rooted as we are in the same history that gave us the enlightenment on the one hand and the slave trade on the other, we stand on a...