I started learning about Canada’s history in grade 8, with the first arrival of European settlers, and the beginnings of colonization. Most of the Canadian history I’ve covered in 3 years of high-school is, in a way, the aftermath of this.

In this waypoint¹ we got to go beyond that, and look at the history of pre-contact indigenous societies of (what is now) British Columbia, to create a collective class book. 

My chapter focused on the Gitxsan, a nation in northwest BC, around the Skeena River. In this post, I’ll be talking about the learning, and thinking that went into it, so I’d strongly recommend reading it so you can get an idea of the work I’ll be referencing.

First thoughts assumptions

I’ve lived in Vancouver for most of my life, so I grew on the lands of (mostly) the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Watuth people. This meant that a large portion of my experience and knowledge of first nations  came from these three, and was more modern than historical.

Because of this, I had the general assumption that most first nations operated as a collective whole, like many do today. In the specific case of my nation, I actually thought that the historical governance systems would be the same as the modern ones. 

While there are similarities, I found that modern governance was largely impacted by the Indian Act’s chief and council structure, while merging in more historical elements.

Second, Observations and corrections

This example of some assumptions I had right off the bat shows two important things about First Nations.

First is that they aren’t static. The way Gitxsan operate today isn’t the same as it was 3000 years ago(shocker I know), because just like any other society, they changed as the world did. 

To me, this is a clear example of how no one moment or state of a cultures existence is any less authentic than another, which is an idea I want to make sure I bring into future projects.  

Secondly, this is an example of just how diverse all of BCs First Nations actually are. Given their depth of culture, and the sheer number of them, it would be impossible to fully understand all of their histories. 

The work on anthropological thinking we did in the beginning of this project was very useful for identifying these assumptions and biases, and leaving them behind in my research. ²

Relevant, accurate, and respectful

This project required a fair amount of research. I wanted my chapter to provide good, relevant information on the Gitxsan in specific without repeating too much general information.  

As I started my research, I thought there wouldn’t be very many good sources, because of the time period I was studying and the nature of the information I needed. It turned out that there was actually a decent number of sources I could pull from.³

Since I wanted to make sure my work was both accurate and respectful, I found that I had to be very mindful about which my sources. As I started to compare multiple sources with the same information, sources that initially seemed good turned out to have some significant differences to what a lot of the other info said. 

Because of this, I had to make sure my information was generally corroborated by multiple sources. I can’t be 100% sure that everything is totally accurate, but I do feel confident in the fact that I did my due diligence to try and ensure it would be.

Let’s talk language and layout

Language was also something I had a responsibility to ensure was correct and respectful, while also being accessible to the reader. For me, this meant using Gitxsan words and phrases with proper context in  my book and communications⁴, and that if needed, translations also preserved context as well as possible, in hopes of not accidentally doing something like a Chai tea. 

I think in pursuit of accuracy and depth of information my book did fall short on creating a story for the reader. Besides the content itself, I think layout was partly to blame as the amount of information I wanted to show did make the pages harder to easily to parse.

Going forwards, I think this is a good reminder for me to think more intentionally about the experience of the average reader/viewer/user of any works I make. This is I saw done well by a lot of people in our first humanities project, and admittedly my video there also could have had a stronger story.

I did try to make my visuals were as valuable and relevant to the text as possible. There was a lot of textual information on my nation, but good photos were somewhat rare. Fortunately, this is where my creation skills saved me, so I was able to make some nice graphics and maps (also finding watershed data is way harder than it needs to be).

Back to the launchpad

To wrap this post up, I want to talk about my goals I set in my learning intentions post for this project. 

Since I didn’t have any super high-confidence guesses as to what skills our work would require,I focused on logistical and organizational goals. 

This was to help me stay on top of my work so I could receive feedback on time, which I fell short of in our first humanities project and I very much wanted to avoid doing it again. 

I am somewhat disappointed that I didn’t develop my Zettelkasten with this research, but I found that with the number of sources I had to cross-reference, a hybrid system was a lot better. I think this means my Zettelkasten systems need some updating, because this should have been a good situation for it.

On the brighter side, sticking to task scheduling especially front-loading work helped a lot in getting through all the research for my project.

Making little notes as I was skimming sources, writing down ideas of things I could say, and keeping track of sources as I went were all things that made putting together the final book much more streamlined and organized. 

I started to slip up on my goals in the middle of the project, as my source collection started to get out of hand, but I was able to pull things back together and ultimately create something I’m fairly happy with.

Thanks for reading. 

1. Our BCFP work this year all actually falls into one very large project, building towards a final piece of “Reconcili-action”. This means each of what would normally be considered a project, is actually a benchmark. ↩︎
2. Because lets be honest, a modern worldview isn’t super useful when trying to piece together the history of people who have lived in BC longer than our calendar goes back. ↩︎
3. This actually reminds me of the research I did for In the Name of Nationalism all the way back in grade 9, the main similarity being the slow reveal of information as I started to dig, the type of info I was looking for being very historical(in this project even more so), and the presence of what I’d like to call red herring sources ↩︎
4. I wrote an email to some members of the Gitxsan Huwlip to see if I could get any information, although I never got a response ↩︎

Bias is inherent to existence. Every aspect of our worldview distorts and warps our interpretation of information, like facets in a sheet of glass. In anthropology — the study of humanity through culture, society, and human behaviour — minimizing bias is important. When analyzing a culture other than our own, it’s important not to jump to conclusions that may seem clear within our worldview; those conclusions often fall apart with more context.

Out for Launch

Our launch activity made the importance of reducing bias very clear. It showed how we could use only the context of a single image to deduce something about the society that made it. For example, my group was given this image to analyze¹:

My immediate first impression was that this was a knife evidenced, as our teachers pointed out, by the shape of the handle and the presence of serrations. The manufacturing of the knife itself also posed a clue, as it showed that whatever “society” it was from could work with metal and wood in a fairly precise manner. The last clue we picked apart was the large circular cutouts, which showed that it was likely meant for some sort of heavy duty cutting, where the holes could catch offshoots. What this whole activity showed is that taking something at face value usually isn’t enough ( other groups got much harder objects than us ), but that even while thinking about an object in complete isolation you can glean a lot of useful information from it.

The future

In this project, we’ll be learning about how we can adopt an anthropological perspective in our thinking, specifically within the context of learning about the indigenous peoples of Canada. My goal as an anthropological thinker is to be able to analyze and understand new information in ways that minimize the impact of my own biases. In the last project my intentions were largely set around learning about the role of western systems in the oppression of indigenous peoples, which I feel was reflected in the rest of the project, and in most of history of indigenous peoples we’ve studied since grade 8. So much of our knowledge has been affected by the white settler worldview of those who recorded it. Even in this, the learning was largely through a western lens, so the next step is to start to more deeply understand indigenous culture with the aforementioned anthropological perspective. Maybe we’ll be examining our own culture, and the harms we’ve caused to indigenous peoples. Maybe we’ll be trying to clear biases, and make some sort of action towards reconciliation.² To be honest, I haven’t heard much about what the rest of this project will look like, and I feel like my guesses are pretty far off, but I’m exited to learn more!

Since we’re going very day-by day with this, my time blocking, scheduling, and informational front loading goals from my VMV will be very useful to help me stay on top of whatever comes next, and as always, my zettelkasten will be the primary way I digest info.

That’s been my intentions, thanks for reading!

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1. I didn’t save the photo from the activity, but I managed to track down it’s original source to this reddit post ↩︎
2. Fair disclaimer, these are nothing more than educated shots in the dark. ↩︎