“The Shadows of the Images”

“How have indigenous perspectives (not?) been integrated into the scholarly literature? What effects has this integration, partial integration, or lack of integration had on the historiography of indigenous people?”

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” considers a hypothetical group of prisoners, held since birth inside a cave. For the first parts of their lives, the shadows against the wall of this cave are their only visual input about the outside world. After their release, the prisoners are permitted to see the outside world, illuminated by sunlight. This, however, is distressing; the objects they see are unfamiliar when seen through light rather than as shadows, and the glare is painful to their eyes. This allegory encapsulates many of the challenges for historians with the increasing inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in scholarship. It forces Euro-Canadians to face elements of the past in ways that are unfamiliar, and potentially distressing. Without this inclusion, however, the field risks being shadowed, filtered only through the perspectives of the privileged. While the integration of Indigenous perspectives is by no means universal in recent scholarly literature about Indigenous peoples, ethnohistorical methodology has shown that these perspectives are essential, enriching the literature by complicating myths and discourses about Indigenous people. By considering the work of non-Aboriginal scholars whose research centres Indigenous peoples and their land, it is apparent that the integration of Indigenous perspectives is a work in progress.

This field is replete with work that examines Indigenous issues and bodies exclusively or primarily from a settler perspective, with little consideration of Indigenous voices from the past or present. To illustrate the integration of Indigenous perspectives, this analysis will consider the work of several researchers of non-Indigenous ancestry who have indicated that they aim to work in a way that is sensitive to Indigenous communities, and have taken significant steps to do so. Their work is still filtered through a settler perspective, and published as part of a non-Indigenous academic tradition. However, through a consideration of the centrality of places and the stories that people attach to them, several of these historians have created what appears to be sensitive research that engages with, rather than merely footnoting, Indigenous paradigms and voices. This work stands in contrast to studies that undertake important research, but do so almost exclusively from a Euro-centric perspective. I write this with two caveats: as a white student educated by a colonial/neocolonial system, I can evaluate the historiography only as a non-Indigenous person; as well, my own research, to date, has fallen far short of the engagement that I now view as essential.

Peter Kulchyski and Frank Tester’s Kiumajut is one example of well-intentioned, theoretically-informed scholarship that, I would argue, uses Indigenous perspectives in an insufficient way. Kulchyski and Tester’s study of game management argues against a totalizing perspective, yet they also perpetuate it. Their work maintains a Western epistemology in which Indigenous perspectives are secondary. Linguistically, these authors have opted to use Inuit place-names and to label themselves as Qallunaat—non-Inuit—researchers.[1] This shows that they are deeply conscious of their own perspective; however, Inuit perspectives in their work are limited to brief, vague anecdotes. For example, they quote David Serkoak, who noted that the Inuit “were willing to adapt in their own way, their own style.”[2] It is unclear, however, just what that “style” was. While Kulchyski and Tester outline Inuit hunting techniques, arguing that Inuit and Qallunaat practices and views of hunting diverged significantly, only Qallunaat concerns are visible in this analysis.[3] They indicate that scientists needed to engage with traditional knowledge, without discussing what this knowledge was, or its impacts. For example, it is evident that animals were very significant to the Inuit, but not how.[4] Kulchyski and Tester focus largely on Qallunaat understandings of the Inuit, rather than the inverse. This shows the necessity of dialogue in the field, rather than merely a well-informed monologue, and the difference between including Indigenous perspectives and engaging Indigenous epistemologies.

Hans Carlson’s Home is the Hunter illustrates the epistemological conflict that is ongoing in this historiography, showing the limits of Western theories and paradigms. While Carlson, like Kulchyski and Tester, relies primarily on written archival sources, he focuses on Cree understandings of the world to a far greater degree than Kulchyski and Tester do with the Inuit. In Carlson’s analysis, land and language are in the foreground.[5] Arguing that words are the “connecting tissue that binds individuals to the land that sustains them,” Carlson is particularly conscious of which ones he uses in the theories and narratives that he presents. In Carlson’s work, a Foucauldian interpretation is therefore secondary to the Cree narrative of the hunt.[6] Carlson emphasizes the insufficiency of European theories by refuting Frank Speck’s portrayal of hunting as a “holy occupation,” arguing that this is not entirely reflective of Cree hunters’ worlds.[7]

Carlson carefully notes the divergence of Cree epistemology with his own, noting that he takes the Cree epistemology seriously even when it appears incompatible with Western paradigms. He clearly articulates three major motivations for a Euro-Canadian scholar to engage with Indigenous perspectives in such a way: a “narrative of reciprocity with the animal world” is meaningful for the hunters; it shows the relationship of people and land that is integral to the region’s history; and the potential and hope that the Cree see in the world, even if unexplainable in a Western paradigm, is important for researchers to understand and represent as best as possible. As Carlson argues, “the challenge…is to talk about this aspect of Cree culture and history in a way that allows us to see its shape and the way it shaped history without simply burying it under a heap of our own ideas.”[8]

The 1975 negotiation of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) mirrors the pitfalls in historical work about Indigenous people. This court case saw the land as an abstraction, rather than an integral element in hunters’ lives. Drawing from research that clearly illustrated the extent of Cree land use, but kept the meaning of this use in shadows.[9] Authority to interpret Cree land use in this case was the purview of “expert witnesses” rather than the Cree themselves.[10] These witnesses amassed knowledge about the Cree, but this knowledge was not necessarily relevant to the Cree or representative of their lives and needs, as it interpreted the land as a commodity without probing its broader meanings.[11] A similar process that extracted and abstracted particular meanings is apparent in Kulchyski and Tester’s work on the Inuit and game management. Carlson argues that the James Bay hydroelectric projects situated the Cree at the “nexus between two systems of environmental logic.”[12] Scholarship about and by Indigenous people is similarly at the nexus of two systems of epistemological logic.

A number of historians have engaged in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, drawing from Indigenous concepts of the land. Several of these researchers also undertook their research while living in the Indigenous communities they studied, to further grasp the significance of and engage with the places that inform their research. This is not merely good academic and ethical practice; it has the potential to shape dialogues and processes of decolonization by emphasizing the importance of geography, an element of Indigenous lives that colonial and ongoing neo-colonial policies and discourses has fragmented. Keith Carlson notes that Euro-Canadians saw Aboriginal identity as resulting from “an unanchored relationship with geography” due to their mobility, rather than recognizing links of geography, spirituality, and kinship.[13] This misperception of Aboriginal identity and land use has contributed to a colonial process of dispossession that denies Aboriginal sovereignty over their traditional territories. According to Carlson, the river system in Coast Salish territories formed a social geography that was the “geographical nexus” for Stó:lõ identity.[14] Rather than perpetuating dispossession through geographically disconnected research about Indigenous people, scholars such as Julie Cruikshank and Keith Basso emphasize the links between people and places by foregrounding the stories about land that shape Indigenous knowledge and relationships.

Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places uses a methodology in which he physically moved through the places that anchored Western Apache histories, guided by elders who shared stories and emphasized the significance of these stories to the Cibecue community. Among the Cibecue, place-names serve as shorthand for important stories that speak to their history and social values, as truths and values are mapped onto the landscape.[15] “Speaking with names” in conversations enables the Cibecue to express these values succinctly, referring to a place-name to make a broader point.[16] Basso notes that for the Cibecue, “place-making is a way of constructing history itself.”[17] In this culture, the land serves as a historical text, for which features such as paths and footprints have deep significance.[18] Geography, therefore, is not merely a resource, or even a home; it is an identity.

Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? illustrates the sentience of the land in Indigenous traditions and languages. The Tlingit language, for instance, makes little distinction between animate and inanimate, enabling landscape features such as mountains and glaciers to have animate characteristics.[19] Considering nature as a category of social analysis that is entangled with class, race, and gender, Cruikshank draws from oral history with three Tlingit and Tutchone elders to show the role of glaciers in social imagination.[20] As Cruikshank argues, “Tlingit and Athapaskan oral traditions explore the connections between nature and culture as carefully as early exploration projects tried to disentangle them."[21] Where place-names are an integral element in Cibecue knowledge, stories about glaciers underpin Indigenous knowledge and identities in the Yukon, Alaska, and northern British Columbia. "Glacier stories,” Cruikshank notes, “may not always be “about” glaciers in any transparent way but may instead provide imaginative material for thinking about broad historical issues," including responding to colonial narratives.[22] It is apparent that, when Indigenous perspectives are central, land is no longer an inanimate backdrop, but an active participant. Language and stories are key to conveying this.

Indigenous knowledge is not a singular, cohesive perspective. Cruikshank and Lina Sunseri highlight the mutability and multiplicity of Indigenous perspectives by presenting similar stories multiple times in their work. All three of Cruikshank’s oral history informants recount an important glacier story, Falling through a Glacier. Cruikshank respects the individual perspectives of these three women by presenting all three versions in succession, showing how they emphasize the transformative potential of fire and ice, the importance of kinship and trade relationships, and the need for skill in approaching glaciers.[23] Lina Sunseri repeats the Oneida creation story Sky Woman Falling from the Sky twice in her work. She justifies this repetition, explaining, “retelling a story is in line with Oneida traditions, as it highlights the importance of the living character of a story. Each time a teller narrates a story, it is used in a different context so that the listener can learn new lessons from it.”[24] Indeed, while the wording of the story is identical in both instances, Sky Woman Falling from the Sky takes on new meaning after reading Sunseri’s chapter contrasting modernist and Indigenous perspectives of nations and nationalisms, or after hearing the perspectives of Oneida women on decolonization.

On a practical level, Sunseri’s work can be illustrative of methodologies that draw from Indigenous knowledge in a productive way that works towards eventual decolonization. Sunseri sees attacks on Indigenous knowledge as interwoven with attacks on Indigenous land.[25] As an Oneida woman, Sunseri works from the intersection of her gendered and racialized identities, showing that from this particular nexus, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and Euro-centric theories of nation and nationalism are insufficient without also drawing from Indigenous stories and concepts of the land.[26] She undertakes her study of Oneida women and decolonization by deconstructing the theories that scholars often use to frame women’s experiences in colonialism, then reconstructing a narrative in collaboration with several Oneida women whom she interviews. While undertaking work such as Sunseri’s would present additional ethical challenges for non-Indigenous researchers, her study shows the potential that new frameworks have for anti-colonial research.

The divergences in this field can be seen in how various historians conceptualize food, scarcity, and hunger in their work. Readers of Kulchyski and Tester’s work can see Qallunaat views of scarcity, but not how the Inuit conceptualized it. While it is clear that Qallunaat scientists emphasized waste in their concerns about Inuit hunting, the Inuit view is a shadowed, ambiguous other, known only through its difference from the Qallunaat perspective.[27] Indigenous perspectives on food, however, must be conceptualized as broader than their difference from European conceptions. Keith Carlson notes that the need to access food resources functionally underpinned the growth of Stó:lõ collective identity and regional political authority, as part of the link between place and identity.[28]

Hans Carlson considers how concepts of hunting and hunger are fundamental elements of Cree spirituality. Cree hunters held a personal relationship with hunted animals, a gift that was transformed into human food. “This understanding of a personal relationship with the hunted,” Carlson argues, “leads to an understanding of the environment as a personal event and not simply as a geography of resource options.”[29] Carlson evocatively explains how the Cree relationship of humans and non-humans revolves around the concept of speyum, or hope, which the Cree conceive as an active emotion.[30] In this context, Cree anxieties about the environment do not specifically concern hunger, but instead loss of hope and humanity, manifested in insanity and cannibalism.[31] Cannibalism, for the Cree, is an ontological crisis, a metaphor rather than behaviour; it is a framework for Cree people to interpret their personal struggles, linking sanity to their relationship with food and the environment.[32]

It is conceivable that ontological crises could frame literal acts of cannibalism in other contexts. The Fore people in Papua New Guinea developed an unusual neurological disease called kuru, which Warwick Anderson discusses in The Collectors of Lost Souls. This work focuses on the efforts of scientists, notably a man named Carlton Gajdusek, to deduce the aetiology of kuru. Anderson’s analysis of the disease, which scientists attributed to Fore ceremonial cannibalism, mirrors that of the scientists, who ignored the cultural and social significance of bodies, and the act of consuming bodies, for the Fore.[33] While the scientists took specimens of Fore bodies for their research, an act which Anderson terms as “medical cannibalism,”[34] his own work is similarly ethically problematic, focusing on the perspectives of researchers at the expense of those of the Fore. Fore bodies, but not voices or ontological perspectives, are at the forefront of Anderson’s work.

A focus on Indigenous bodies, without incorporating Indigenous perspectives about their bodies, and how their bodies relate to their minds and wider lives, can be framed as epistemologically cannibalistic. This can be a broad metaphor as well, whereby research that depends on Indigenous knowledge yet fails to acknowledge it is similarly consuming, digesting, and reformulating the knowledge of other humans in a problematic way. Several researchers have gone beyond this consumption of knowledge, by foregrounding Indigenous perspectives and their role in decolonization. Historiography about Indigenous peoples is therefore not a body of work without hope. Hans Carlson notes that for the Cree, losing hope is an act of hubris, as it implies omniscience.[35] I would suggest that historians, despite the challenges of engaging with Indigenous perspectives, maintain hope in scholarship, acknowledging imperfections and continuing to work towards scholarship that has decolonizing potential, rather than resorting to or justifying epistemological cannibalism, or engaging in research that is merely an act of manipulating the shadows of colonialism.

Works Cited

Anderson, Warwick. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Carlson, Hans M. Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008.

Carlson, Keith Thor. The Power of Place; The Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination. Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press, 2005.

Kulchyski, Peter Keith, and Frank J. Tester. Kiumajut (Talking Back): Game Management and Inuit Rights, 1900-70. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.

Sunseri, Lina. Being Again of One Mind: Oneida Women and the Struggle for Decolonization. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

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[1] Peter Keith Kulchyski and Frank J. Tester, Kiumajut (Talking Back): Game Management and Inuit Rights, 1900-70 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 20.

[2] Kulchyski and Tester, 67.

[3] Kulchyski and Tester, 78.

[4] Kulchyski and Tester, 157, 161.

[5] Hans M. Carlson, Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 13.

[6] Hans Carlson, 21-22.

[7] Hans Carlson, 49.

[8] Hans Carlson, 50.

[9] Hans Carlson, 216.

[10] Hans Carlson, 221.

[11] Hans Carlson, 217.

[12] Kulchyski and Tester, 199.

[13] Keith Thor Carlson, The Power of Place; The Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 169-177.

[14] Keith Carlson, 53-54.

[15] Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 57.

[16] Basso, 80.

[17] Basso, 6.

[18] Basso, 31.

[19] Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination (Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press, 2005), 142.

[20] Cruikshank, 4.

[21] Cruikshank, 11.

[22] Cruikshank, 72, 210.

[23] Cruikshank, 94.

[24] Lina Sunseri, Being Again of One Mind: Oneida Women and the Struggle for Decolonization (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 48.

[25] Sunseri, 84.

[26] Sunseri, 46, 81.

[27] Kulchyski and Tester, 60, 78.

[28] Keith Carlson, 50.

[29] Hans Carlson, 52

[30] Hans Carlson, 54-55.

[31] Hans Carlson, 57.

[32] Hans Carlson, 58.

[33] Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 135, 170).

[34] Anderson, 4.

[35] Hans Carlson, 55.