Building out of recent scholarship that examines the way colonialism has altered Aboriginal peoples relationships with the land, this thesis employs the theories of historical anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, historical philosopher R.G. Collingwood, and historical consciousness with ethnohistorical methods to explore the ways Native people have worked to protect and regain their connections with certain places. In particular, it examines change and continuity in the ways that the Stó:lõ Coast Salish in South Western British Columbia have understood and continue to understand a place called I:yem, located four kilometres north of Yale in the Fraser Canyon. Following a historiographical chapter, two case studies are used to access past and present Stó:lõ understandings of I:yem. The first case study examines the 1938 erection of a memorial there (which incorporated and blended aspects of Roman Catholicism with an articulation of a distinct Stó:lõ identity and assertion of rights) to see how I:yem was understood at the time. The creation of the I:yem Memorial illuminates those aspects of Stó:lõ relationships with I:yem that were considered non-negotiable in the face of rapid change and conflict, namely the continued importance of fishing and ancestors. The second case study, based on oral interviews that I conducted during the joint University of Victoria/University of Saskatchewan Stó:lõ Ethnohistory Fieldschool in June 2007, focuses on the current significance of I:yem and its memorial. Today the Stó:lõ place a greater emphasis on the importance of re-establishing personal connections with the Fraser Canyon in general, rather than in identifying those specific aspects of the relationships that are collectively and communally non-negotiable and in need of being preserved. Over the past seventy years the Aboriginal people of the Fraser Canyon and Valley have employed innovative means to regain and preserve attachments to their places. This thesis explores these processes, fundamentally demonstrating the importance Stó:lõ people attribute to maintaining relationships with place in the face of change.

This thesis explores notions of community and Aboriginality within the histories of two Aboriginal communities: the primarily Métis town of Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan and the Stó:lõ reserve of Seabird Island, British Columbia. By reading community members oral histories in terms of these two concepts, it historicises the accounts, giving temporal context to academics writings and local histories that at times act as snapshots of a small span of time.<p/> Considering Île-à-la-Crosse and Seabird Island in terms of their communal and Aboriginal components also complicates definitions of community and Aboriginality or indigeneity as they relate to these two places, thereby reinforcing the links between histories and the places and people from which they originated. Thus, the first part of this thesis situates Seabird Island and Île-à-la-Crosse historically and physically, and demonstrates how local oral histories introduce broader historical themes. The second part focuses on the community aspect of these places: the Aboriginal component to both Seabird Islands and Île-à-la-Crosses existence is what has tended to attract outside academic research and attention, yet an Aboriginal community exists as such because of influences that make and sustain a community as well as its Aboriginal components.<p/> While each category draws on understandings of the other in order to create a cohesive definition of the whole, a community does not become a community simply by being Aboriginal, nor is it Aboriginal simply as a result of Aboriginal people living together. Therefore, diverse definitions and histories of Aboriginality are also significant in maintaining historical links among inhabitants of Île-à-la-Crosse and Seabird Island.<p/> There exists a historiography in these communities that, while sometimes unintentional or implicit, links community members accounts of their community and its Aboriginal features with outside observations. This connection places these interpretations of historical events into a historiographical context of ways these Aboriginal communities have been both, and alternately, communities and Aboriginal places.

This thesis explores the utility of the conflated term “colonial medicine” by drawing on events during an historical outbreak of amebic dysentery that occurred on several Indian Reservations near Loon Lake, Saskatchewan, during the 1960s and ‘70s, including a series of government-sponsored drug trials conducted to stem the outbreak. Largely devoid of the racialized notions characterizing primary documents used by previous scholars of ‘colonial medicine’, the medical journal articles, government memorandums, and letters written by physicians in connection with the outbreak and trials reveal their immersion in ‘la clinique’, or an anatomo-clinical discourse similar to what theorist Michel Foucault described in Birth of the Clinic. Conversely, conversations with Loon Lake area community members on the subjects of the outbreak and trials reveal their multiplex and nuanced reactions to medical and colonial discourses. Arguably, then, when writing about past events, historians should weigh ‘medicine’ and colonial discourse separately. Essential methodological consideration was given to the Foucauldian concept of ‘disinterring’ popular knowledge. Drawing on Foucault’s edited works Power/Knowledge and I, Pierre Riviére, the subjugated knowledges of Aboriginal community members, physicians, sanitation workers, and government employees gleaned through interviews and text are contrasted as per his example in these works with the false functionalism of ‘scientificity’. Moreover, when considered in tandem, these subjugated knowledges illustrate a ‘structural violence’, following anthropologist Paul Farmer’s methodology for describing such phenomena in Pathologies of Power. Overarchingly, they obscure the paradigmatic dichotomies (‘doctor’/‘patient’, ‘patient’/the healthy person, ‘colonizer’/‘colonized’, ‘oppressor’/‘oppressed’) espoused in medical, colonial, and even post-colonial discourses. This understanding forces the reflexive recognition that–if we accept rhetorician Christopher Bracken’s assertion in Magical Criticism there is a recourse to savage philosophy within academia–what we say as historians has consequence beyond discourse, possibly creating new ‘subjects’ in a Foucauldian, disciplined society.