Sat May 8 detailed schedule

This session looks at three generations and three partnerships between First Nations people and newcomer anthropologists each one of which made a major contribution to the anthropological interpretation and re-interpretation of First Nations cultures in British Columbia. We begin at the beginning of anthropology on the Northwest Coast with George Hunt and Franz Boas, move to Mungo Martin and Wilson Duff in the 1950s and end with the generation of collaboration in the 1970s and 1980s. Each of these stories is about close partnerships between colleagues from two cultures striving to inform each other and others. And in each generation, as with every generation, the end is a beginning.

In 1921 the Prince George Citizen ran an article titled “Central B.C. Is Not a New Country….” in which the author argues that the decision of the Canadian Pacific Railway to use the Kicking Horse Pass to the south hindered non-Indigenous economic development in the region and perpetuated the myth it was a new frontier. Like many newspapers in Western Canada during this period, one of the Citizen’s objectives was the promotion of European agricultural settlement, mining, and transportation infrastructure. Rather than achieve their goal in Central B.C., however, by 1952 the Citizen had conceptually transformed it into Northern B.C. and reported that the European population had been on the decline since the 1860s, with former farms, ranches, traplines, and mining claims reverting to nature. This panel will examine the Tsek’ehne concepts of wilderness and the history of homesteading in the Finlay-Parsnip watershed and Front Ranges of the Rockies.