Historicizing Canadian Anthropology

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 Edited by Julia Harrison
and Regna Darnell

Historicizing Canadian Anthropology

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 © UBC Press 2006
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Historicizing Canadian anthropology / edited by Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 10: 0-7748-1272-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-7748-1272-6
1. Anthropology – Canada. I. Harrison, Julia D. (Julia Diane), 1953- II. Darnell,
Regna, 1943-
GN17.3.C3H48 2006   301.0971   C2006-903739-6

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
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British Columbia Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly
Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
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 I am a teller of stories among lovers of stories, and I tell
stories as I know of no other way of making my point.
Catherine Willson, graduate student in anthropology

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 Contents

1 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology / 3

Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

Part 1: Situating Ourselves Historically and Theoretically

2 Disciplinary Tribes and Territories: Alliances and Skirmishes between

Anthropology and History / 19
A.B. McKillop

3 Toward a Historiography of Canadian Anthropology / 30

Robert L.A. Hancock

Part 2: The Pre-professional History of Canadian Anthropology

4 The Erasure of Horatio Hale’s Contributions to Boasian Anthropology / 44

David Nock

5 Marius Barbeau and the Methodology of Salvage Ethnography in

Canada, 1911-51 / 52
Andrew Nurse

6 Iroquoian Archaeology, the Public, and Native Communities in

Victorian Ontario / 65
Michelle A. Hamilton

Part 3: Locating Our Subjects

7 Canadian Anthropology and the Ethnography of

“Indian Administration” / 78
Noel Dyck

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 viii Contents

8 Canadian Anthropology and Ideas of Aboriginal Emendation / 93

Colin Buchanan

9 A Comparative History of “Cultural Rights” in South Africa

and Canada / 107
Evie Plaice

10 Canadian Anthropologists in China Studies / 122

Josephine Smart and Alan Smart

Part 4: Documenting Institutional Relations

11 Departmental Networks in Canadian Anthropology / 137

Regna Darnell

12 Canadian Anthropology as a Situated Conversation / 147

Richard K. Pope

13 Anthropology and Sociology at the University of British Columbia from

1947 to the 1980s / 157
Elvi Whittaker and Michael M. Ames

14 Anthropology at Université Laval: The Early Years, 1958-70 / 173

Marc-Adélard Tremblay

15 Expatriates in the Ivory Tower: Anthropologists in Non-Anthropology

University Departments / 183
James B. Waldram and Pamela J. Downe

Part 5: Comparisons and Connections

16 Constituting Canadian Anthropology / 200

David Howes

17 The Historical Praxis of Museum Anthropology: A Canada-US

Comparison / 212
Cory Willmott

18 Commodifying North American Aboriginal Culture: A Canada-US

Comparison / 226
Kathy M’Closkey and Kevin Manuel

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 Contents ix

19 Canadian Anthropology and the Cold War / 242

Nelson H.H. Graburn

20 Texts and Contexts in Canadian Anthropology / 253

Penny Van Esterik

21 Just a Little Off-Centre or Not Peripheral Enough? Paradoxes for the

Reproduction of Canadian Anthropology / 266
Vered Amit

Postscript / 275

Notes and Acknowledgments / 278

References / 288
Contributors / 321
Index / 324

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 Historicizing Canadian Anthropology

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 1
Historicizing Traditions in
Canadian Anthropology
Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

What is Canadian anthropology? Who is a Canadian anthropologist? These

questions, whether they are asked in formal sessions or in academic corridors,
raise the additional question of whether Canada has a distinctive national
tradition of anthropology. Although Regna Darnell (1975, 403) thirty years
ago reassuringly identified a Canadian tradition of anthropology “from her
position as an anthropologist, ethnographer, and insider-outsider” (Cole
2000, 124), there remains a certain essentialism to the definition. Musings
over anthropological identity long predate globalization and continental
free-trade agreements, issues at the core of whether there is such a thing as
Canadian culture, never mind Canadian anthropology.
An essentialist concept of national tradition, moreover, has served as a
resilient organizing device for the history of anthropology (Stocking 1968,
2001; Darnell 2001). Yet, the major national traditions – the British, the
French, the German, and the American – have not remained wholly discrete.
Individual scholarly careers have intersected, with colleagues meeting in their
ethnographic field sites and through common research interests. Nevertheless,
an intellectual genealogical distinctiveness persists. The character of Canadian
anthropology is further complicated when these national traditions are
borrowed and integrated in various combinations outside Canada.
Canada mediates national traditions, drawing upon three of the four
major international intellectual paradigms, i.e., those of its two founding
European nations and its southern neighbour. It is the amalgam that is
uniquely Canadian: the Aboriginal collective presence as “third” founding
nation, geographic isolation both internal and external, a shifting position of
observer and observed-by-outsiders, and a national political commitment to
maintaining a multicultural society within official bilingualism. This volume
engages the idea of national tradition as an heuristic device rather than as an
essentializing mechanism for the discipline in Canada.
Douglas Cole (1973, 44), describing the amateur, hobbyist, enthusiast,
and dilettante character of late-nineteenth-century anthropological writing,

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  Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

identifies a “Canadian school” of anthropology “concerned with North

American problems as British anthropology could not be and yet insulated
from some of the dominating influences upon American anthropology”
(see also Inglis 1982; Hancock, Hamilton, this volume). Such confidence in
Canadian distinctiveness has not always been echoed in later discussions.
Rather, discourse on the history of Canadian anthropology, both published
and in oral tradition, has emphasized marginality and absence, characterized
by contrastive negative ethnography. Anthropological work done in Canada
has always transcended national boundaries, for example, Franz Boas’ work on
the Northwest Coast (Darnell 1998, 2000c). Canada’s First Nations have long
been “subjects” for international anthropological investigation, with limited
attention paid to Canadian anthropologists as the “doers” of anthropology.
Moreover, Canadian anthropologists have been defined by absences.
Edward Sapir left the National Museum in Ottawa in 1925, returning to the
United States to escape his perceived isolation from the centre of the emerg-
ing field of Americanist anthropology (Preston 1976; Cole 1999; Darnell
1976, 1990, 1998). Horatio Hale arrived in Canada late in his career and
failed to obtain an academic position (Nock, this volume). The career of
Boas’ first PhD student, Canadian A.F. Chamberlain at Clark University, left
no significant mark on the profession (Darnell 1998).
Absences or truncations also characterize the work of other early figures.
Oxford-trained anthropologists Diamond Jenness and Marius Barbeau were
prominent in the discipline that emerged at the National Museum of Man
in Ottawa. Jenness focused on the ethnographic study of the Canadian
Inuit, while Barbeau compiled massive collections of text, songs, myths, and
material culture from groups as geographically and culturally dispersed as
the Tsimshian, the Huron, and Québécois “folk cultures.” Because neither
established links to a university, they lacked students who could perpetuate
and develop their intellectual and methodological legacies.
Mentoring opportunities developed slowly in Canada. In 1925 (the same
year that Jenness took over as head of the National Museum of Man),
Thomas McIlwraith became the first lecturer hired in anthropology at the
University of Toronto, an event that eventually led to the founding of the
first department of anthropology in 1936. Anthropologists were hired to
teach at McGill University and the University of British Columbia in the late
1940s, but real institutional commitments to anthropology came much later
(Darnell 1998).
To posit a more positive and distinctive Canadian anthropology presup-
poses our ability to define a national tradition, despite the well-established
permeability of Canadian anthropology. Regna Darnell, however, has posited
that national traditions coalesce around a centre that establishes intellectual
paradigms, institutional frameworks, and social networks of scholars for
a particular time. To label such a tradition is to capture the essence of its

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 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology 

key preoccupations. As scholars work around this core, its boundaries may
become increasingly blurred, although works at the periphery can be related
to each other by tracing them back to the centre. Several such centres have
produced Canadian “anthropologies” (Ames 1976a, 5). This volume estab-
lishes one framework for the history of these diverse developments, with
the identification of Canadian anthropology acknowledging interrelated yet
variant historiographic paradigms in the Canadian national tradition (see
Kuhn 1962).

Ongoing Conversations about Anthropology in Canada

Michael Ames (1976a, 2) noted nearly thirty years ago that history, disci-
plinary or otherwise, “does not exist until it is invented by the process of
description.” The description he called for has emerged within the Canadian
anthropological community in the intervening decades, producing consid-
erable scholarship on the history of the discipline.1 Much of this work, how-
ever, remains little known because it has been published in widely disparate
sources. The unavailability of textbooks has rendered the national tradition
virtually invisible within the profession and has fed the insecurity around
what one actually means by the notion of Canadian anthropology.
The invisibility of the baseline documentation results, at least partly,
from a narrow definition of history that excludes contemporary practices
and future trajectories from consideration of the past. History too often is
conceived as a static construction (see McKillop, this volume). Historicizing,
in contrast, is a process whereby the analyst frames a disciplinary tradition
as a personal genealogy and/or theoretical and methodological template.
Many of the earlier publications were primarily descriptive, documenting
particular events and careers. Building on this foundation, the chapters of
this book respond to both a material and a professional appetite for more
systematic, synthesizing treatments.
In much of what has been written about the disciplinary trajectory of
Canadian anthropology, thematic resonances recur. Each of these themes,
when revisited, retains the particular character of the moment of its discus-
sion. Both earlier writings and those included here engage with the problem
of what constitutes Canadian anthropology. This ongoing intellectual debate
remains grounded in a range of key questions, including

• What is distinctive about anthropology as practised in Canada?

• What has been the interplay among international anthropological traditions
(specifically American, French, British) in the Canadian intellectual landscape?
Do different factors shape this engagement in different parts of the country?
• Do particular intellectual and theoretical paradigms broadly define anthro-
pology in English Canada? In French Canada? Does this distinction have
any substantive reality in disciplinary practice?

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  Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

• What dynamics have shaped the professionalization of anthropology in

Canada?
• What can be said about the uniqueness of the “anthropological subject” in
Canada? What impact has its definition had on disciplinary practice?
• Which anthropologists have actively shaped the discipline in Canada?
Why have others failed to make a similar impact?
• What role, if any, do regional, historical, political, social, cultural, and
economic factors play in the engagement with particular subject areas and
theoretical paradigms?
• What has been (and is) the relationship among Canadian anthropology,
Canadian anthropologists, and the Canadian state?
• How has Canadian anthropology been institutionalized in Canadian
museums? In the Canadian academy?
• Is there a distinctive “applied” tradition of Canadian anthropology, or are
there several such traditions? If so, what impact has it had on state policy?
On the development of theory? On the lives of Canadians, Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal? To what extent have First Nations peoples contributed to
this discourse?
• What can Canadian anthropology say about being “Canadian”?
• What was and is, in Canada, the relationship of anthropology to its sister
disciplines such as history, sociology, psychology and archaeology? How
have these relations shaped Canadian anthropology at the institutional
and political levels?
• How has the political culture of Canadian anthropology changed over time?

Canadian professional associations, such as CASCA (Canadian Anthropology

Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie), formerly CESCE (Canadian
Ethnology Society/Société canadienne d’ethnologie), and CSAA (Canadian
Sociology and Anthropology Association/Société canadienne de sociologie et
d’anthropologie) have provided a structural context for debate and reflection
on these questions. The National Museum of Man (NMM), now the Canadian
Museum of Civilization (CMC), supported the creation of an institutional
framework for the self-identity of early Canadian anthropologists such as
Marius Barbeau and Diamond Jenness (see Hancock, Nurse, Buchanan,
this volume). This museum linkage was rekindled many years later when a
group of sociocultural anthropologists wished to separate themselves from
the dominant presence of sociologists in the CSAA. In 1973 they proposed
a federation of anthropological science intended originally to include
archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists.2 This new group, the
Canadian Ethnology Society, restricted itself to the museum-based framework
of “ethnology,” and included as a regular feature in its journal Culture (now
Anthropologica) reviews of museum exhibitions, an idea borrowed by other
international anthropological journals more than a decade later. “Ethnology”

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 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology 

seemed to capture the shared identity of the charter members and to be fit-
ting, because the NMM hosted and published the papers from the society’s
early meetings (Freedman 1976, 1977; Manning 1983). The new professional
association did not reclaim the broader label of “anthropology” until 1990,
when it changed its name to the Canadian Anthropology Society.
Symposia on the history of Canadian anthropology took place at CSAA
meetings in 1971 and 1974 (Ames and Preston 1975), and at CESCE meet-
ings in 1975 and 1976. The 1975 theme was “The History of Canadian
Anthropology” (Freedman 1976), although not all of the papers were
“historical” in the narrow sense, nor was there only one idea of Canadian
anthropology. In 1976, the focus was more narrowly stated as “Applied
Anthropology in Canada” (Freedman 1977), implying that applied anthro-
pology held particular salience in the Canadian context. The plausibility of
such a premise is reiterated by Dyck; Waldram and Downe; Pope; Whittaker
and Ames; Tremblay; Hancock; and Graburn (all in this volume). These
applied anthropologists aimed to increase the relevance of the discipline to
the wider Canadian population by demonstrating its potential contribution
to mainstream Canadian society. The discipline seemed well poised to offer
insights that would improve the lives of Canadians, particularly those on the
margins of society. Marginalized sectors would continue to include the tradi-
tional Aboriginal subjects of Canadian anthropology, but would be expanded
to incorporate other minorities in the wider Canadian multicultural milieu.
Ames (1976a) lamented the narrowing of an earlier, more interdisciplinary
field, attributing the increasing specialization to the Boasian four-field para-
digm, initially introduced in Canada by Boas’ student Edward Sapir, director
of the NMM from 1910 to 1925. Sapir imported the Americanist hallmark:
the study of Aboriginal populations as the core subject matter of the dis-
cipline (Darnell 1998b). The NMM concentrated on Aboriginal research,
and Sapir turned a blind eye to Barbeau’s persistent documentation of rural
Québécois culture. The Boasian or Americanist influence spread with the
hiring of American anthropologists, and later American-trained Canadians,
during the expansionary period of the Canadian academy in the 1960s and
1970s, when the baby boom generation arrived at the university. This trend
prompted some anthropologists (along with other social science colleagues)
to call for the Canadianization of the academy (Symons 1975; Inglis 1982;
see also Darnell, Graburn, this volume).
But not all anthropology in Canada was Americanist at the end of the
1970s. Gordon Inglis (1978, 375; see also Maranda 1983, Graburn, this vol-
ume), responding to a charge of blandness in Canadian anthropology (and
in Canada more generally) published in the American Anthropologist in 1978,
adamantly countered that since 1950, “a lot of things have happened. Major
contributions in applied anthropology have been made from the University
of British Columbia, McGill and other places. Université Laval is probably

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  Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

the main center of French structuralism outside of Paris … and Memorial

University has earned an international reputation in community studies.
The National Museum of Man and Northern Science Research Group of the
Department of Indian and Northern Affairs have sponsored an impressive
body of work.”
Nevertheless, until university curricula began to expand in the 1960s and
1970s as Canadian anthropologists ventured beyond their national borders,
anthropology followed the Americanist tradition of almost exclusive study
of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Although every academic department
had Indian and/or Inuit specialists, many students dismissed contemporary
First Nations peoples as “spoiled” by assimilation (Darnell 1998b), foster-
ing the perception that it was less chic to study them than, for example,
the Ju/’Hoansi of the Kalahari desert studied by University of Toronto
anthropologist Richard Lee. His research, which began in 1963, gained him
an international reputation that few anthropologists working in Canada at
the time could boast. Lee’s extended empirical research with the Ju/’Hoansi
challenged long-held assumptions about hunter-gatherers, thereby con-
fronting many assumptions implicit in the work of anthropology (Solway
2003). Other Canadian anthropologists also expanded their fields of study
beyond Canadian borders. African studies was especially strong, especially in
Quebec institutions from the early 1970s on (Lumsden 1983; Tremblay, this
volume).
Anthropological research in Mexico, Latin America more broadly, and the
Pacific (particularly in Quebec) showed similar trajectories. China and Asia
emerged later as sites of study for Canadian anthropologists (Konrad 1995;
see Smart and Smart; Tremblay, this volume).
The largest applied research project in the history of Canadian anthropol-
ogy – the government-commissioned Hawthorn-Tremblay Report (Hawthorn
1966, 1967; Weaver 1976; see also Tremblay, this volume) – began at the same
time Lee was heading for the Kalahari. University of British Columbia profes-
sor Harry Hawthorn’s two early projects – The Doukhobors of British Columbia
(1955) and (with Belshaw and Jamieson) The “Indians” of British Columbia
(1958) – had proved useful in provincial government policy development for
both of these populations. In 1963 Laval professor Marc-Adélard Tremblay’s
team-based applied approach, founded on his earlier work in Nova Scotia and
with francophone populations on Quebec’s North Shore, provided valuable
background expertise for policy changes under consideration by the Indian
Affairs Branch of the federal government (Tremblay, this volume). As Sally
Weaver (1976, 55) noted, “The Hawthorn-Tremblay Report stands out as a
marked departure from the traditional kind of anthropological reporting.”
Its purpose was to serve the needs of policy developers (see Graburn, this
volume, for a discussion of other early work commissioned by the federal
government). Along with Hawthorn and Tremblay, a total of thirty-five

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 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology 

researchers, including faculty and graduate students, worked on the project.

They attempted to gather broad information through interview and survey
techniques, and made recommendations on the political, educational, and
economic needs of Aboriginal populations in Canada. All of these recom-
mendations were ignored, however, by the controversial 1969 White Paper
on Indian Policy (see Weaver 1976).
By 1982, it was time for “both a state-of-the-art assessment of Canadian
ethnology and, somewhat more ambitiously, an attempt to examine the
ethnological exercise in relation to Canadian society” (Manning 1983, vii).
CESCE and the NMM co-sponsored a symposium titled “Consciousness
and Inquiry, Ethnology and Canadian Realities” (Manning 1983). In the
same year, an Ethnos special issue on national anthropologies replicated the
taken-for-granted two solitudes of the national discipline with Inglis (1982)
representing the anglophone tradition and Gold and Tremblay (1982, 1983)
the francophone tradition (see also Maranda 1983; Dunk 2000, 2002). The
central question in this formulation was the parallel dualism of Canadian
anthropology and of Canada itself. Ironically Inglis and Gold and Tremblay
identified these dualistic traditions as substantively engaging with parallel
issues and subjects, even though each remained situated within particular
political and social contexts.
Writings on the state of the field in the late 1970s and early 1980s empha-
sized the silencing or retreat of anthropology from social commentary, the
need to seek validation beyond our own borders by taking our research
elsewhere, and the framing of the emergent social and political context of
contemporary Canadian Native people as it unfolded through such events
as the Berger pipeline inquiry. Kallen (1983; see also Weaver 1976; Dyck, this
volume) returns to this latter question of how anthropology could contribute
both to the workings and the ideologies of the Canadian state, with particular
relevance to Canada’s Native population. The limited impact of accumulated
anthropological knowledge on the often grim lives of Canadian Native
people, and on policy development, has been a recurrent source of reflection
for anthropologists, suggesting at the very least, disquiet at the inability of
the discipline to play a clear and constructive role in these arenas.
Our pedagogies and the scope of the field defined for students in the
Canadian academy, along with the often inadequate institutional support
available to Canadian anthropology professors, came under scrutiny in the
1980s (Lee and Filtreau 1983; see also Van Esterik, this volume). The need
for the discipline to serve as an engaged, sophisticated, yet comprehensible
commentator in the public fora of the print media, film and television, and
museums was resurrected, revitalizing familiar debates and challenges (Paine
1983; Dunk 2000, 2002).
All of these discussions were embedded in an examination of the political
culture of the field in Canada. Had we yet started to Canadianize the field, or

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 10 Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

had Inglis’ arguments (1982, 93) that the field “knows no national boundar-
ies and quality should be the only standard” dispensed with this concern?
Burridge (1983, 319) reflected that the multiple, even pluralistic, influences
that ran through anthropology in Canada should be celebrated and acknowl-
edged, rather than depicted as under threat. He welcomed the potential to
“reconceptualize, forge new tools” for the discipline.
Much of the assessment that took place during the 1980s was in practice
historicizing, although without the label. The core question about the rela-
tion of anthropology to “Canadian realities” was prescient, but the proposed
answers remained fragmentary. The discipline in Canada “lacked a clear
identity,” with the proviso that this “may be less of a disadvantage than
has been generally thought” (Manning 1983, 2). This sentiment has been
reaffirmed twenty years later by Amit (this volume).
Widespread interest in studying Canadian Aboriginal peoples again reas-
serted itself in the late 1970s and 1980s, albeit in a more overtly politicized
context than earlier Americanist work on Native peoples. This later work
focused increasingly on realities of Aboriginal life in the sociopolitical context
of the Canadian state (see, for example, Weaver 1981; Preston 1976; Salisbury
1986; Asch 1984; Gold and Tremblay 1983; Dyck 1981, 1983; Waldram 1988;
Feit 1985, 1989; Tanner 1979). Foreshadowed by the Hawthorn-Tremblay
Report (Hawthorn 1966, 1967), much of this research was done under the
rubric of applied anthropology. Some of it shifted somewhat to a more activ-
ist posture in response to conflicts concerning Aboriginal rights and resource
development in Canada.
Following a tradition of “community studies” in Quebec anthropology
that had seen Tremblay working on Quebec’s North Shore and among
Acadians in Nova Scotia, Norman Chance at McGill started work with
the James Bay Cree, “providing an analysis of traditional Cree culture”
with a particular interest in the “sedentarization of … trappers and the
introduction of wage labour in the forestry industry” (Gold and Tremblay
1982, 107, 110). This work eventually developed into the McGill James Bay
Development Project under the direction of Richard Salisbury. Under this
umbrella, faculty and graduate students conducted research in the context
of the 1970 James Bay hydro-electric project and the 1975 signing of first
modern-day treaty with the James Bay Cree (Silverman 2004). These events
led to the relocation of Aboriginal communities and to an increasingly
sedentary lifestyle among the Cree. Aboriginal lives were changed forever.
These and later generations of anthropologists sought to document what
that meant socially, culturally, and economically (see, for example, Feit
1985, 1989; Tanner 1979; Scott 1989).
Community studies of non-Aboriginal communities were at the heart of
the research program at the Institute of Social Research (ISER) at Memorial
University, founded in 1961 “to foster and undertake research into the many

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 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology 11

social and economic questions arising from Newfoundland’s particular

historic, geographic, and economic circumstances. ISER … specialized in
empirically-based social scientific research in Newfoundland and Labrador,
Atlantic Canada, the Eastern Arctic, and the North Atlantic Rim. It [became]
a centre of expertise in community and cultural studies, social and economic
development, social impact assessment and policy evaluation.”3
Practical engagement by marginalized groups with the political and social
realities of the wider society characterized this work; some claimed it to be “a
style of anthropology which is distinctively Canadian” (Leyton 1977, 168;
Kennedy 1997; Graburn, this volume). Others, worried about the need to
appear neutral and objective, queried whether the discipline should be head-
ing in this direction.
What has been the impact of this applied work? Harry Hawthorn (1976,
183) commented on his own massive work of “useful anthropology,” the
Hawthorn-Tremblay Report, that its physical unwieldiness, cumbersome
language, and poor binding ensured that its most practical use was “to prop
up the shortest table leg in any [Band] Council office” across the country. (It
was largely ignored by Ottawa policy makers and politicians.) Nonetheless, a
contemporary reading situates this report as a seminal step in the emergence
of a Canadian Aboriginal policy more attuned to the needs and aspirations
of the First Nations peoples, a step rarely credited to date (Dyck, this volume;
Weaver 1976). However, it failed to stimulate theoretical developments in the
wider discipline (Dunk 2002, 29; see also Asch 1983). The results of anthropo-
logical work were and are too often used as tools for territorial and nationalist
claims (see Graburn, this volume). They also evoke the counter-productive
responses of fostering exoticism or awakening state and corporate conscious-
ness about potential resource exploitation in indigenous homelands.
Nonetheless, anthropology and anthropologists have played constructive
roles mediating and interpreting events in recent Canadian political history.
Individually and collectively, anthropologists have acted as expert witnesses,
researchers, advocates, commentators, and consultants in major legal cases,
boycotts, agreements, and referenda, such as the following:

1969 The White Paper was a federal policy document that essentially recom-
mended the full assimilation of Aboriginals into mainstream Canada.
1973 The Calder case was a Supreme Court split decision that affirmed the
existence of Aboriginal title in Canadian law.
1976 The James Bay Agreement, called the “first modern treaty,” gave Inuit
and Cree people in northern Quebec large cash payments and hunting
and fishing rights to surrendered lands, in exchange for allowing the
provincial government to build hydro-electric dams.
1977 The Mackenzie Valley pipeline debate resulted in Justice Thomas Berger
declaring a ten-year moratorium on oil and gas development in the

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 12 Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

Canadian North, pending a framework for socially and environmen-

tally sound development.
1987 The Lubicon Lake Cree boycotted the Olympic exhibition The Spirit
Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples.4
1991 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, taken to the Supreme Court by the
Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en, determined that Aboriginal title incorporates
rights to land, and that oral testimony is a valid form of evidence.
1996 The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples framed its deliberations
under the rubric of the foundations of a fair and honourable relation-
ship between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people of Canada.
2002 The referendum on Aboriginal treaties in British Columbia was held
(see Dyck, this volume).

As a result of this work, a vigorous and widespread intellectual and social

activism positioned some anthropologists in Canada well outside of the all
too frequent discourse that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and posited
colonialist and neo-colonialist motivations as the sole rationale for the work
of anthropology (Deloria 1969; Inglis 1977). Proponents of these negative
broad-brush positions tended to generalize to anthropology as a whole,
without acknowledging variability in individual, institutional, and national
practices. The legacy of this discourse still exists within the profession and
among some communities and peoples with whom anthropologists work.
Graburn, Dyck, Plaice, and Darnell (this volume; see also Darnell 1998b)
argue for the centrality of the study of Canadian Native people to contempo-
rary anthropological work. Buchanan (this volume) explores suggestions of
resistance to broader discourses of emendation concerning Aboriginal people
in the early years of the discipline’s history, presaging the later tradition in
which anthropology more consistently argued for positions contrary to
established government policies. Noel Dyck (this volume), however, argues
that Canadian anthropologists have somewhat ignobly retreated from work
with First Nations peoples, abandoning their imperative to engage with the
political economy of anthropological knowledge production (see also Asch
1983, 2001, 2004). He queries the absence of any place for anthropology in
critical reflections on Aboriginal-state relations, such as the SSHRC Dialogue
on Research and Aboriginal People (2002-3).
The CSAA, in 1990, organized four sessions “to provide an occasion for
critical reflection … [on] sociology and anthropology in Canada,” which
resulted in the publication of Fragile Truths: Twenty-five Years of Sociology and
Anthropology in Canada (Carroll et al. 1992). Albeit heavily sociological, this
special issue received a much wider distribution than earlier such materials.
Of particular interest is Howes’ (1992) discussion of a Canadian anthropologi-
cal “fragile truth.” He argues that Canadian ethnography (and ethnographic
fictional literature) reflect a structural bicentrism (as opposed to American

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 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology 13

concentrism). Drawing heavily on French theory, Howes built on his earlier

discussions of Canadian popular song (1990) and art (1991a). The persistence,
if not acceptance, of this ability of the part to stand for the whole, according
to Howes, is in fact a strength of the Canadian reality (1992, 163-4). Further
grounding this argument in the Canadian Constitution, Howes (this volume)
responds to critiques of his bicentric thesis, particularly those of Tom Dunk
(2000, 2002; see below).
Peter Harries-Jones edited a special issue of the Canadian Review of Sociology
and Anthropology titled “Canadian Anthropology in an International Context”
in 1997. It argued that anthropology had a vested interest in a comparative
global and ethnographic perspective on Canada. The persistent focus on First
Nations and on their political, social, and ethical relation with the academy
and the state (Darnell 1997; Dyck 1997); on the impacts of globalization
on the subject, methodology, and theoretical frameworks of the field (Amit
1997; Kennedy 1997); and on the commentary that anthropology can offer
to previously unimagined territories, such as those of biomedicine and the
environment (Stephenson 1997), all echo themes of earlier moments of
self-reflexivity. In a special issue of Anthropologica in 2000 titled Reflections
on Anthropology in Canada, many authors approached contemporary issues
historiographically, although the volume as a whole defined itself in terms
of the state of the art in contemporary practice. The table of contents speaks
to historical consistencies (albeit some with contemporary twists) in what
constitutes the field of study of anthropology in both French and English
Canada. Dunk engages the discussion of how this Canadian anthropological
tradition is best described. He challenges Howes’ principle of bicentrism,
arguing that it reflects a Central Canadian, upper- and middle-class view of
the nation-state. If there is a “Canadian school” that frames anglophone
Canadian anthropology, Dunk (2000, 2002) situates it in Harold Innis’ politi-
cal economy, a theory grounded in a discussion of staple development and
how it shaped Canadian local, regional, state, and international structures
and relationships. To Dunk, this Canadian school additionally reflects the
influence of Canada’s historical relationships to the imperial powers of the
United Kingdom, the United States, and France (Dunk 2000, 141). Dunk
(2002) later refined this analysis, arguing that a defining feature of Canadian
anthropology is that the academy continues to hire preferentially those
trained elsewhere rather than its own graduates, a theme that evoked discus-
sions during the 1970s about the need to nationalize the field.
Four papers published in 2000 discussed the study of Canada’s indigenous
populations: Briggs on the Inuit, and Darnell, Scheffel, and Gélinas more
generally on First Nations peoples. Darnell argues that the Americanist
study of First Nations still predominates in Canadian anthropology, while
Scheffel “asks for honest debate within the discipline about the future of the
anthropology of First Nations” (Cole 2000, 125) and about the relationship

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 14 Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

between politics and anthropological practice at the beginning of the twenty-

first century. Gélinas concludes that the focus on First Nations in Quebec
anthropology is diminishing, based on his analysis of the independent journal
Recherches amérindiennes au Québec. Highlighting this publication, he returns
to an earlier understanding of anthropology in Canada, and concludes that
the discipline outside the academy has made an important contribution.
Concern about the renewal of the discipline and worries for the future of
upcoming generations of students (Labreque 2000) and for invisible figures
in the social landscape (such as women) – whether they are in the developing
world or in rural Quebec (Phillips and Ilcan 2000; Saillant and Gagnon 2000)
– are familiar themes in the discussion of who and what will comprise the
subject and the practitioner in years to come. Such wide-ranging resonances
remind us that national traditions coalesce around characteristic centres and
paradigms (Darnell 1998b).
Despite these periodic bursts of interest, however, the self-reflexive posture
has not maintained its momentum. We believe that this will change. The
emerging historiographic paradigm adopted by the authors in this volume is
supported by the work of scholars at all stages of their careers. The mapping
of the disciplinary field over time invites students in particular to articulate
their own work within the context of an ongoing genealogy of Canadian
anthropology. The publication of this book by a respected university press
transcends the ephemeral character of previous reflections.
The chapters of this book build on these precedents and call for a further
sustained self-examination of Canadian anthropology and anthropologists.
The proximity of Canada and the United States makes it harder to document
the relationship among the First Nations, Canada’s anthropologists, and
the Canadian nation-state. This task requires both empirical research and
interpretive elaboration of the underlying narrative thread(s) of the national
discipline. These collective discussions revolve around the moral and ethical
positioning of anthropological observers relative to their own communities
as well as to those studied. This self-examination anticipates many of the
insights of poststructural critical theory, especially the questions of episte-
mology and the empowerment of alternative voices.

Telling Our Stories

Contributors to this volume encompass much of the diversity of Canadian
anthropology and represent most Canadian provinces and regions. Their
institutional affiliations and academic training are both Canadian and inter-
national, predominantly American and British. Interestingly most individual
contributors identify with several locations, which reflects their educational
and professional mobility, fieldwork sites and present institutional affilia-
tion. Waldram and Downe remind us of the perspective gained from those
who work as anthropologists in interdisciplinary and other contexts. Pope,

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 Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology 15

Whittaker and Ames, and Tremblay explicate the localized contexts that
fostered particular developments in Canada (see also Salisbury 1976; Trigger
1997; Preston 2001). All of these multiple affiliations feed into the core
definition of a Canadian national tradition. Contributors range in profes-
sional generation from elders reflecting back on their careers, to those who
are mid-career as practising anthropologists, to graduate students situating
themselves in relation to their profession. Twelve contributors are women;
fourteen are men. With the exception of those by the editors, all of the
co-authored chapters are by a female and a male. Theoretical approaches range
from political economy to interpretive ethnography, and intersect with other
disciplines, particularly history, sociology, and political science. Some authors
identify themselves within the tradition of applied anthropology in Canada.
Despite the editors’ efforts to be comprehensive, there remains within
this volume and within the discipline a need for more inclusive treatment.
Canadian anthropology fails to reflect the full racial and ethnic diversity
of the national population (francophone scholarship is seriously under-
represented in this volume). Canadian anthropologists are found outside
of the academy in museums, in government, in the corporate world, and
as private consultants. Several chapters discuss museum-related research
(Hamilton, Willmott, and M’Closkey and Manuel), yet all the contributors
were at the time of writing employed or studying in the academy. Further, an
adequate history of Canadian anthropology must include the voices of those
who have been the traditional subjects of our study.
The turn of a new millennium induced intensified self-reflection among
Canadian anthropologists. This milestone, albeit arbitrary, lent a certain
urgency to our debates, especially given that it also marked a generational
turnover, with significant numbers of academic retirements occurring across
the country. Over one-third of Canada’s professoriate is expected to retire by
2010. Colleagues who hold the institutional memory of their departments
are leaving. The chapters of this book contribute to documenting the histo-
ries of the founders and key participants of Canadian anthropology. Such
histories need to be framed within a critical analysis of the historiography,
theoretical relevance, and political economy of the discipline.
The collective engagement of this volume’s contributors with the project
of “historicizing” disciplinary traditions combines rich ethnographic detail
with critical theoretical analysis. How our stories are told, how they are con-
structed, and how they engage larger analytical abstractions are all central to
historicizing diverse traditions in Canadian anthropology.
The editors have spearheaded a long-term strategy for empirical research
and shared reflection on the history of Canadian anthropology. The selection
of contributors drew on a series of gatherings and conversations at profes-
sional meetings over several years; on a roundtable discussion titled “Talking
across Generations” at the 2002 CASCA annual meetings; and on a 2002

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 16 Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell

session on “Canadian National Traditions” at the centennial meeting of the

American Anthropological Association. Subjects discussed at the AAA session
covered a spectrum comparable to the one contained in this volume. They
included how the definition of the first Canadian “ethnographers” could
be extended to include early fur-trade factors; issues surrounding languages
shared by Native groups whose traditional lands cross the political boundar-
ies of Canada and the United States; and the marginal position of Canadian
anthropology relative to other disciplines and national traditions. Oddly,
however, most AAA presenters began with a disclaimer of the session’s prem-
ise that their papers dealt with traditions of Canadian anthropology (from
the presenters at this session, only Vered Amit contributed to the present vol-
ume). The editors of Historicizing Canadian Anthropology resolved to address
this myopia of Canadian anthropologists about their own disciplinary lin-
eages. Invitations to contribute to this volume focused around historicizing
Canadian anthropology with the intention of initiating an examination of
the history of Canadian anthropology as both a record of the past and a
guide to contemporary practice.
Before they prepared the essays that constitute Historicizing Canadian
Anthropology, the authors debated the potential definitive features of
Canadian anthropology and Canadian anthropologists. The questions they
raised formed the framework for the volume and include the following: Does
Canadian anthropology include work done by anthropologists who were
socialized, formally educated, and teach in Canada but may trace their roots
to First Nations research and an Americanist tradition? Does it include work
by “outsider” anthropologists who study Canadians and may or may not
teach in Canada? Does it include research done by native-born Canadians
who have studied and done research elsewhere, and may live and teach
outside of the country? Given the magnitude of the task, the editors resolved
to concentrate on sociocultural anthropology, raising issues in archaeology
and in physical and linguistic anthropology only as they speak to the core
focus. Contributors arrived at an informal consensus of inclusivity rather
than a rigid prescriptive definition of a monolithic Canadian anthropological
tradition. Several observed that this consensus itself seemed fundamentally
Canadian; the merit of the project would be to clarify the coherence of its
subject matter rather than to circumscribe it in advance.
Because this volume breaks new ground in assembling diverse thematic,
topical, and methodological strands of existing research under the rubric
of “historicizing Canadian anthropology,” the particular contributions
are presented as the basis for future scholarship rather than as exhaustive
treatments of the history of Canadian anthropology.

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 Part 1:
Situating Ourselves Historically
and Theoretically

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 18 Situating Ourselves Historically and Theoretically

Chapters 2 and 3, by Brian McKillop and Robert Hancock respectively, situ-

ate the analytical frameworks – theoretical, historical, and historiographic
– for this volume. These frameworks, which have been employed by the
other contributors, constitute a new paradigm for studying the history of
Canadian anthropology. The framework dissolves the arbitrary boundary
between past, present, and future by applying continuities within the dis-
cipline to its contemporary practice. Key to this paradigm shift is one of
process, of historicizing rather than reifying history and then locking it in
the past. Reflexivity is key to the increasing significance placed by Canadian
anthropologists on exploring our history and broadening the scope of what
might constitute that history. Recently there has been a burgeoning of
literature, but as of yet no theoretical framing of the potential of reflexive
historiography for professional socialization and contemporary practice.
Brian McKillop, a distinguished historian of Canadian intellectual tradi-
tions, muses over what he calls the “alliances and skirmishes” between the
disciplinary “tribes” of anthropology and history. He concludes that the two
disciplines have more often than not been allies. Indeed, one might extend
his argument to suggest that anthropologists writing their own history
consider themselves to be operating as anthropologists doing ethnography.
Anthropologists are, perhaps, more likely than historians to supplement their
archival documents with evidence from oral history when it is available.
McKillop identifies a “Canadian sensibility.” At the core of this Canadian
uniqueness, whether in anthropology or in the nation-state, is the Canadian
propensity to acknowledge that one’s perspective will vary depending on
one’s standpoint (Darnell 2000). Almost by definition, such an identifica-
tion or sensibility is difficult to pin down. It emerges more from the stories
anthropologists tell themselves about their tradition(s), than from the docu-
mentation of particular events and circumstances.
Robert Hancock emphasizes the historiographic methods that define the
scope and substance of our history. As a young scholar, he seeks to establish a
baseline for what is already known and what remains to be explored. At the
same time he emphasizes the need to respect the methods of the historian.
Hancock insists on the intimate relationship between historiographic docu-
mentation and contemporary activism. Acknowledging the dialectic between
its political realities and its history is important for the future of Canadian
anthropology.

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