This study explores Coast Salish s’ulxwe:n (Elders)-in-residence and Coast Salish xwulmuxw (First Nation) Professors’ application of xwulmuxw (First Nation) pedagogy specifically from southeast Vancouver Island, Coast Salish speaking people in higher education using nutsamaat uy’skwuluwun meaning to work together as one, with a good heart and good mind to obtain a goal. This study used interviews to gather narratives of eight Elders and three professors who use Coast Salish pedagogy in higher education. Participants are members of the Snuneymuxw, Quw'utsun, Penelakut, Lyackson, Tsawout, Tsartlip, and Songhees First Nations of southeast Vancouver Island First Nations and one participant from Katzie First Nation on the lower mainland of British Columbia. The implication of this research is significant because Coast Salish pedagogy has very little research by an authentic Coast Salish researcher and is not fully documented. My analysis of the interviews offers insight on ways the participants apply Coast Salish pedagogy in higher education. I found many themes that the participants use while teaching Coast Salish pedagogy in higher education. The three main common themes were 1) respect, 2) uy’skwuluwun and 3) nutsamaat uy’skwuluwun. Respect was a term that was central to the many teachings and themes shared by the participants. Second, uy’skwuluwun was also a term woven through many of the Coast Salish teachings, meaning to have a strong heart and mind. Lastly, the term nutsamaat uy’skwuluwun was a common theme that kept arising among many of the participants, meaning to we work together as one, with a good heart to obtain a goal. It is a term, that weaves throughout all the common themes and pertains to the educator, students and non-Indigenous peoples that learn and work with Indigenous peoples in higher education. The analysis offers insight on what would the present Coast Salish Elders-in-residence and xwulmuxw professors like future Coast Salish Elders-in-residence and Coast Salish professors to continue to teach in higher education. Some of the main topics the participants would like future Elders and professors to instruct on are; protocol, spirituality, language, experiential learning, and for the university to hire more Elders-in-residence and Coast Salish professors. The analysis offers insight on why it is important to teach Coast Salish pedagogy in higher education. Participants shared that they thought it was important to teach Coast Salish pedagogy in higher education because Indigenous and non-Indigenous people need to understand Coast Salish ways of doing, understand the history and impacts of colonization, and the local languages of the area. By doing so, Coast Salish Elders and professors create space to further instruct Coast Salish pedagogy for all students, and work together as one with a good heart and good mind to obtain a goal, that is to create a better society for all mustimmuxw, in higher education regarding First Nations history, culture and language of the local area. / Graduate

One cannot begin to understand the nature of Hul’qmi’num legal tradition without first acknowledging and understanding the relationship between culture and law. The Coast Salish people have a vibrant culture, influenced heavily by the nature of their relationships with their ancestors, their kin and their lands. These relationships permeate their legal tradition. Influencing not only regulatory aspects of law, but also dispute resolution processes. Trying to understand and appreciate this tradition outside of this worldview would be detrimental to the tradition itself, as I believe it would result in a transformation of the laws and practices. In thinking about the relationship between law and culture, this research has identified two fundamental categories of law within the Hul’qumi’num legal tradition: 1) snuw’uyulh and 2) family laws. Snuw’uyulh refers to a condition generated by the application of seven teachings: 1) Sts’lhnuts’amat (“Kinship/Family”); 2) Si’emstuhw (“Respect”); 3) Nu stl’I ch (“Love”); 4) Hw’uywulh (“Sharing/Support”); 5) Sh-tiiwun (“Responsibility”); 6) Thu’it (“Trust”); and 7) Mel’qt (“Forgiveness”). Accordingly, universal teachings seek to foster harmony, peacefulness, solidarity and kinship between all living beings and nature in the world. In a sense, snuw’uyulh is a state or condition and Hul’qumi’num legal tradition encompasses all the animating norms, customs and traditions that produce or maintain that state. As a result, Hul’qumi’num law functions as the device that produces or maintains the state of snuw’uyulh. There is another fundamental category of law present within the Hul’qumi’num world – family laws. Family laws encompass the norms, customs and traditions, or customary laws, which produce or maintain the state of snuw’uyulh. Law is a practice – an activity. Arguably, much of the practice of law takes places in the form of regulation and conflict and dispute resolution. Similar to how law cannot be separate from its surrounding culture, nor can the processes developed to resolve conflicts in the law. Since time immemorial the Hul’qumi’num Mustimuhw have utilized processes and practices to resolve conflicts and disputes both within their communities and with other communities in the Coast Salish world. Although the processes and practices have varied over time, it is possible to identify several inherent standards of conflict resolution which the Hul’qumi’num people continue to utilize in resolving their disputes. / Graduate / Sarah.Morales@uottawa.ca

Discusses the contributions made by the atlas to our understanding and appreciation of Coast Salish history and culture and its intertwined relationship with newcomer history beginning in the late 18th Century. / The complete published book with images is available from ebrary to those who have access. Smith's chapter appears on pages 241-268. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/usask/docDetail.action?docID=10512806

Around 1500 years ago, the Coast Salish peoples of southwestern British Columbia began to inter their dead within funerary petroforms. These burials, consisting of patterned arrangements of stone and soil built over the dead, marked a dramatic transition from below ground burials within the village, to above ground cemeteries located around village peripheries. This upward and outward movement of the dead is exemplified at the Rocky Point Peninsula on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island. It is one of the largest mortuary landscapes on the Northwest Coast of North America, with 515 visible funerary petroforms distributed within and between two large neighbouring cemeteries. Catherine Bell’s (1992) notion of ritualization challenges us to consider what the building of funerary petroforms accomplished that previous funerary practices did not. While funerals are times of grieving, they may also be ritual actions in which the dead are transformed from corpse to ancestor and the family from mourner to inheritor. It was in the authority of tradition that funerary ritual served as a process for both enacting and contesting relationships of power within and between the two neighbouring communities at Rocky Point. Foregoing excavation, Coast Salish protocols of working with their dead challenged me to consider how the external and material attributes of funerary petroforms worked through space and time to produce a landscape inhabited by these durable, ancestral agents. Focusing on the mesoscale encompassing these two large cemeteries, this dissertation is an analysis of the depositional practices employed by the Rocky Point peoples in the burial of their dead. Tacking between an ethnographic thematic analysis of Coast Salish ritualization, a body of social theory, and the archaeological record, I used a novel suite of quantitative analyses to identify patterns in how these burials were made, in addition to how they were placed relative to one another on the landscape. Results point to a fundamental bifurcation in funerary petroform morphology and placement, in part, differentiating communities of ritual practice at Rocky Point. In particular, the results highlight the social significance of the spaces between the burials, as much as the burials themselves. This is exemplified by a perceptual paradox in which these above ground features, built according to shared dispositions of practice and placed on distinctive landscapes, are simultaneously and intentionally hidden from day-to-day movement between villages. This Rocky Point sense of monumentality speaks to the liminality of their most powerful dead, anchored at the threshold of the living. Funerary petroforms have a persistent power to entangle the living and the dead in oblique relationships of power. The resilience of this memory work, however, is not limited to the past. At Rocky Point and other cemeteries throughout the Salish Sea, these ancestral places provide living descendants with a tangible connection to family and community history. Possessing a durability that continues to enmesh people and places through time, funerary petroforms are one of the fulcrums upon which relations of power are presently balanced between Coast Salish and settler communities in British Columbia. / Graduate / dmathews@uvic.ca

The Coast Salish subsistence economy has been characterized by local fishing adaptations to regional ecological variability (Mitchell 1971a.) This dissertation explores the temporal depth of these adaptations in the traditional territory of the Coast Salish, the Gulf of Georgia. Many researchers have used this, Donald Mitchell’s (1971a), model to develop theories of regional cultural development. Many of these interpretations present social complexity or social inequality – a hallmark of Northwest Coast social complexity – as having developed more or less in lock-step with the specialized fishing adaptation described among the Central Coast Salish, around the Fraser River. The temporal depth of this adaptation and the “Diversified” fishing adaptations described among the Northern and Southern Coast Salish, as well as their developmental relationship, are not well understood. In exploring this problem, this study evaluates whether or not the ecological ethnographic model is representative of the archaeology of these cultural subareas. A gap in the regional dataset which corresponds with a large portion of Mitchell’s (1971a) “Northern Diversified” fishing subarea has largely presented a previous study of this type. Recently excavated sites in traditional shíshálh territory provide artifact and archaeofaunal data that fill in this gap. These data are analyzed along with existing data from the Northern subarea and from the Central Gulf of Georgia (River and Straits Fishing subareas). The results of this study significantly broaden our understanding of prehistoric Coast Salish socioeconomic diversity, and test the assumed salmon specialization on the Fraser River and its primacy the development of regional ethnographic characteristics, especially pronounced social inequality. The results also shed light on the prehistoric importance of herring, a decreasingly overlooked resource in Northwest Coast archaeological studies, and advocate for the use of fine mesh recovery for quantifying the relative importance of fish species.

Douglas (Doug) LaFortune is a Coast Salish Master Carver and Graphic Artist of both Quw’utsun’ (Cowichan) and Tsawout, WSÁNEĆ (Saanich) heritage, with an artistic career spanning over four decades (City of Duncan 2013:2,6,21,28; Coastal Peoples n.d.). By examining how Douglas’ life and work are intertwined in the active practice of his culture, this thesis challenges harmful Euro-settler institutional narratives of Indigenous art that privilege authenticity-as-tradition and place Indigenous cultures in a mythical pre-contact past, thus dismissing references to their lived experiences as inauthentic (Phillips 2012:113; Tupper et al. 2013:42). This project is rooted in community. Douglas and his wife Kathleen told my supervisor, Dr. Andrea Walsh, that they wished to organize their collection of Douglas’ drawings and prints (dating from the 70s until the present). Dr. Walsh recommended me (Justine Drummond) for this work, and I agreed to catalogue, photograph, and organize the collection. Through examining Douglas’ collection and work as a whole, I witnessed the relationality of his artistic practice, as it is inextricable from family, place, and culture (Wilson 2008:80, 87). This was further illuminated in interviews with Douglas, Kathleen, and their granddaughter, Seneca, which I conducted through collaborative witnessing, wherein I acted as a co-storyteller with the participants (Adams et al. 2015:4,54-56). The thesis structure is as follows: the introduction outlines my research objectives and a brief biography of Douglas; chapter 2 reviews the literature on decolonizing approaches towards Coast Salish art; chapter 3 details my methodology and data collection process; chapter 4 presents Douglas, Kathleen, and Seneca discussing their lives as lived through art; chapter 5 explores Douglas’ collection, and his entire body of artistic work; and chapter 6 is the conclusion. / Graduate

Narratives serve many functions within a given cultural group. As well as reflecting and transmitting the social values of that group, narratives provide children with a cognitive framework that is an important factor in the learning process. Although the structure of narratives has been described for mainstream children, there is some debate as to whether different cultures share the same narrative structure. A culturally-based difference in narrative structure may contribute to the fact that Native Indian children (as well as children from other minority cultures) are overrepresented among those children who have difficulty in school. The present study set out to investigate whether there was a discernable difference in the structure of narratives told by five Coast Salish children aged 5;0 -8;6 and those told by mainstream children reported in the narrative development research literature. Two types of narratives (personal experience and fictional) were collected and analyzed according to three analysis procedures: high point analysis, which emphasizes evaluation of events; episodic analysis, which emphasizes goal-based action; and poetic analysis, which emphasizes the poetic form of the narratives. The high point analysis revealed that the Coast Salish children ordered events in their stories in a different order than mainstream children do. Both the high point and the episodic analyses showed that the Coast Salish children expressed relationships between events implicitly more frequently than mainstream children. The poetic analysis was the most revealing of potential intercultural differences. This analysis revealed that falling intonation, grammatic closure, lexical markers and shifts in perspective (reference, action, focused participant, time frame, comment, etc.) defined structural units in the narratives of the Coast Salish children. This evidence of structural unit markers was consistent with predictions based on research by Scollon & Scollon (1981, 1984). The results of this investigation have implications for educators and speech-language pathologists in their interaction with Native Indian children. In addition, the results provide a useful indication of the necessary considerations and appropriate procedures for carrying out a more focused study of the narratives of a larger group of Native Indian children. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

The concern of this thesis is the position of people of alternative genders in Coast Salish culture, not only in the past, but in the present. How were individuals with such a difference treated? What forces constrained them? What factors afforded them opportunity? Were such genders even recognized? With these questions in mind, field work was conducted with the permission of the Std: Id Nation throughout the summer of 1998. This paper is based on interviews conducted then and subsequent interviews with people from other Coast Salish groups. In addition, local ethnographic materials—with reference to field notes whenever possible—and traditional stories were analyzed from the perspective of Coast Salish epistemology. Alternative genders need to be understood foremost in the cultural contexts in which they occur, only then can comparisons proceed from a secure foundation. Research revealed a paradoxical situation. Oral traditions in which the alternately gendered are despised, occur side-by-side with traditions in which such people were honoured for the special powers they possessed. Individuals and families operated in the space generated by this paradox, playing the "serious games" to which Ortner alludes (1996:12-13). The absence of a "master narrative" in Coast Salish culture accounts for some, but not all of these contradictions. Equally relevant are persistent patterns of secrecy, personal autonomy, kin solidarity, differential status, and differential gender flexibility that both restrict the social field and offer stress points that were, and are, manipulated in individual and collective strategies. Given a world view in which transformation was the norm, and in which the disadvantaged could become powerful overnight by revealing the power they had hidden, some alternatively gendered people were able to maximize their potential and become significant forces. No formal roles offered sanction, instead an ad hoc approach marked the response to alternative genders and the outcome rested on the position of the individual and her/his family, and their ability to maneuver within multiple constraints. It was this potential to transform a stigmatized status into an honoured role that made the position of the alternatively gendered paradoxical.

A negotiated, cooperative co-management arrangement between six Coast Salish First Nations and Parks Canada has created an opportunity for Hul’qumi’num peoples to “re-story” a colonized landscape in the southern Gulf Islands archipelago east of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Collaborative research undertaken with the Hul’qumi’num-Gulf Islands National Park Reserve Committee is part of a long-term and practical effort to regain authorship over Central Coast Salish cultures, languages and history. In particular, this thesis seeks to challenge popular and public narratives which do not recognize Hul’qumi’num peoples’ territories and territorialities in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve (GINPR). By tracing the processes of narrative and historical production, and with attention to how power imbues these processes (Trouillot 1995), I argue that the narrative of ephemerality whereby Hul’qumi’num peoples are thought to have “floated by” the southern Gulf Islands, but never “settling” there, emerged largely through early colonial processes and Indian land policy which reconfigured Central Coast Salish territorialities. These assumptions have been reproduced in a regional anthropological “seasonal rounds” narrative and through the language of “villages” and “seasonal camps.” Through the period of comprehensive land claims, this narrative has been reified by framing the southern Gulf Islands as the exclusive territory of First Nations’ neighbouring the Hul’qumi’num. Narratives of ephemerality and exclusivity continue to dominate the public imaginary through their reproduction in GINPR interpretive materials and in the grey literature of consulting archaeologists. These narratives are not neutral, but have implications for rights and title recognition and accommodation by the state. The perspectives of Hul’qumi’num peoples help to understand the silence in the dominant narratives by elucidating the historic and ongoing significance of specific locales in the southern Gulf Islands for Hul’qumi’num individuals, families and communities, as well as the transformative processes effecting territorial dispossession in the post-European contact period. / Graduate / 2019-08-31

The seed for this research germinated deep in the lands of our Coast Salish ancestors thousands of years ago. As a Coast Salish Two Spirit researcher, I noticed there is a striking absence of west coast Indigenous and Coast Salish specific knowledge about Two Spirit identities, experiences and vision work in academic and community circles. Therefore, this research was conducted exclusively on Coast Salish territories, with Coast Salish identified Two Spirit participants and allies. I apply my Four House Posts Coast Salish methodology in an Indigenous research framework, and through storytelling and art-based methods, this study asks - How does recognition of Coast Salish Two Spirit identity and experience contribute to community wellness and cultural resurgence? The intention of this study is to offer pathways for intergenerational healing and reconnections, cultural revitalization and transformation by weaving traditional Indigenous knowledges with contemporary narratives, in order to increase voice and visibility of Coast Salish Two Spirit People. / Graduate