A Death Feast In Dimlahamid

Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en history and culture; background to the aboriginal title action Delgamuukw versus the Queen; decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in December 1997; no Australian Aboriginal content.

Skookum, cultus, hyack, saltchuck, klahowya, tillicum: It is in words like these that the last vestiges of a lost British Columbian language remain. It was known as Chinook. Its use today is mainly confined to colloquialisms, and place names like Boston Bar, Canim Lake, Illahee Mountain, Snass Creek, and Skookumchuck. It began as a trading jargon, but it soon evolved into a distinct West Coast tongue. Down through the years, as many as a quarter of a million people relied on it. Chinook was an everyday necessity.A Voice Great Within Us consists of an introductory essay by Glavin exploring the development and spread of Chinook throughout the West Coast, and the place it continues to have in our history; the Chinook poem, Rain Language; Lillard's own essay on the part that Chinook played in his own life and exploration of British Columbia. In addition, A Voice Great Within Us includes a lexicon containing hundreds of Chinook words and expressions and a map and gazetteer of British Columbia, showing eighty Chinook place names in this province.A Voice Great Within Us is Number 7 in the Transmontanus series of books edited by Terry Glavin.

In this groundbreaking portrait of the uneasy state of the province, Terry Glavin's lyrical narratives reveal the fibre of a British Columbia rarely glimpsed. With journalistic acumen, he surveys a landscape of inexorable suburban sprawl, dismantled railway lines, scapegoating of Native fisheries, and strange goings-on at Gustafsen Lake. A new breed of travelogue, "This Ragged Place" will leave the taste of oolichan grease on your lips and the seeds of a transcendent new British Columbian mythology in your mind. "This Ragged Place" earned Glavin a Governor General's Award finalist distinction in 1997.

In this sweeping re-investigation of Canadian legal history, Harring shows that Canada has historically dispossessed Aboriginal peoples of even the most basic civil rights.

WINNER of the EDNA STAEBLER AWARD for CREATIVE NON–FICTION From its opening image of the varied workforce at a Vancouver postal station, Stardust is a series of literary essays defining Bruce Serafin's world. The teenage Serafin is a captivating figure, freshly arrived from the United States and eager to immerse himself in the particular delights of a still largely frontier–era Vancouver. As a young man enrolled at SFU, he refuses the perm pressed upon him in a Chinatown barber shop and eavesdrops on his rowdy neighbours in a Powell Street apartment house. Working in the post office, Serafin discovers Michel Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant and realizes for the first time that writing about working–class people is not only possible, but desirable. Later, Serafin embarks upon an intimate criticism of touchstones of Western culture. Roland Barthes and Daniel Defoe are counterparts, he suggests, and shows why. Leonard Cohen was read so avidly by the young proto–hippies of the era not because of his writing, but because he physically modelled a way to be cool. The ceremonial objects collected by anthropologists, according to Serafin, are not actually art but something else again. Serafin critiques literary magazines and western novels. He discusses the work of Don DeLillo, Terry Glavin, Steve McCaffery, Northrop Frye, and William Henry Drummond. There's an engagement to these essays that lightly sketches the workings of a mind forever learning.

The Tsimshian people of coastal British Columbia use a system of hereditary name-titles in which names are treated as objects of inheritable wealth. Human agency and social status reside in names rather than in the individuals who hold these names, and the politics of succession associated with names and name-taking rituals have been, and continue to be, at the center of Tsimshian life. Becoming Tsimshian examines the way in which names link members of a lineage to a past and to the places where that past unfolded. At traditional potlatch feasts, for example, collective social and symbolic behavior �gives the person to the name.� Oral histories recounted at a potlatch describe the origins of the name, of the house lineage, and of the lineage's rights to territories, resources, and heraldic privileges. This ownership is renewed and recognized by successive generations, and the historical relationship to the land is remembered and recounted in the lineage's chronicles, or adawx. In investigating the different dimensions of the Tsimshian naming system, Christopher F. Roth draws extensively on recent literature, archival reference, and elders in Tsimshian communities. Becoming Tsimshian, which covers important themes in linguistic and cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, will be of great value to scholars in Native American studies and Northwest Coast anthropology, as well as in linguistics.

This book is a one-stop reference resource for the vast variety of musical expressions of the First Peoples' cultures of North America, both past and present. Encyclopedia of Native American Music of North America documents the surprisingly varied musical practices among North America's First Peoples, both historically and in the modern context. It supplies a detailed yet accessible and approachable overview of the substantial contributions and influence of First Peoples that can be appreciated by both native and nonnative audiences, regardless of their familiarity with musical theory. The entries address how ethnomusicologists with Native American heritage are revolutionizing approaches to the discipline, and showcase how musicians with First Peoples' heritage are influencing modern musical forms including native flute, orchestral string playing, gospel, and hip hop. The work represents a much-needed academic study of First Peoples' musical cultures—a subject that is of growing interest to Native Americans as well as nonnative students and readers.

This book examines ways of conserving, managing, and interacting with plant and animal resources by Native American cultural groups of the Pacific Coast of North America, from Alaska to California. These practices helped them maintain and restore ecological balance for thousands of years. Building upon the authors’ and others’ previous works, the book brings in perspectives from ethnography and marine evolutionary ecology. The core of the book consists of Native American testimony: myths, tales, speeches, and other texts, which are treated from an ecological viewpoint. The focus on animals and in-depth research on stories, especially early recordings of texts, set this book apart. The book is divided into two parts, covering the Northwest Coast, and California. It then follows the division in lifestyle between groups dependent largely on fish and largely on seed crops. It discusses how the survival of these cultures functions in the contemporary world, as First Nations demand recognition and restoration of their ancestral rights and resource management practices.