Towards a New Ethnohistory: Community-Engaged Scholarship among the People of the River ed. by Keith Thor Carlson et al. (review)

Towards a New Ethnohistory is the culmination of two decades of community-engaged scholarship between the Stó:lō Nation of the lower Fraser River watershed in southwest British Columbia and university faculty and graduate students. The research legacy of academic scholars going into Indigenous communities and extracting knowledge for their own benefit–the product of which the people themselves rarely saw–underwent a significant change in the 1970s. The Stó:lō led the production of their own ethnohistory and began to partner with others to work on community-based projects where they would benefit from the research findings. In the 1990s, the Stó:lō implemented the Ethnohistory Field School where students lived in the community and worked with Indigenous cultural interpreters and elders. Co-designed research projects involved the interview process. For two decades, the Stó:lō community hosted and led this successful field school that dissolved barriers between the researcher and the researched.

The book begins with a prologue by Naxaxalhts'i (Albert "Sonny" McHalsie), one of the four book editors: "There are certain kinds of work we can (and should) do ourselves, and then there are the sorts of work where we have to humble ourselves and reach out and ask other respected people to do the work for us" (ix). He emphasized the importance of the Stó:lō Nation archives, including interviews that capture the voices of the elders. The introduction by the other three editors, all of whom, along with McHalsie, have been involved in the community-engaged research since the beginning of the field school, present a "new ethnohistory" where community-engaged scholarship is built upon long-term relationships based on mutual trust and respect. It recognizes the importance of "co-designed and co-executed" research topics that involve conversations over years (26). The scholarship should not only be meaningful to the researched community but also easily accessible to everyone. Practitioners appreciate that "historiographies are culturally bound" and understand that culturally appropriate methodologies and use of multiple disciplines can reveal more complexities in the human experience (27).

The authors of the ten chapters received training by the Stó:lō Nation's Ethnohistory Field School and often attribute new findings from the community interviews. Prominent themes of the first four chapters include legends, kinship, place, and identity. Adar Charlton examines stories from the Fraser Canyon. Although her original goal had been to explore the lessons learned from these stories, her training in literature enabled her to examine the legends' connections between transformative places with kinship and the natural world. Amanda Fehr's focus on different lived experiences with an Indigenous memorial at I:yam and Katya C. MacDonald's work on access routes to Stó:lō fishing sites emphasize the importance of changes in identity, memory, and retaining family access to the river in the context of colonialism and contrasting Indigenous positions. Anastasia Tataryn's piece shows how the revitalization of ancestral names cannot only broaden the sphere of community ties and instill status but can also give rights to certain places in their homeland, retain family connections, and encourage appropriate behaviour.

The second half of the book consists of specific case studies from Kathryn McKay's piece on "Caring for the Dead," which can impact heritage policy development, to Lesley Wiebe's chapter on Stó:lō foods, which attempts to move beyond the Indigenous–Western dichotomy. Two other chapters address the importance of community institutions. Ella Bedard explores the importance of the Skulkayn/Stalo Heritage Project, an early educational and cultural project that centred on Indigenous language and intergenerational communication, and Noah E. Miller examines the Coqualeetza Indian Hospital, revealing the wide range of personal experiences people had in the hospital. The last two chapters look at the sport of boxing and Stó:lō loggers. Christopher Marsh...