This thesis examines the implications of three early twentieth-century First Nations collaborations that were produced in the context of salvage ethnography and attributed mainly to their non-aboriginal collaborators: Henry Tate and Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology (1916), E. Pauline Johnson and Chief Joe Capilano’s Legends of Vancouver (1912), and Chief William K’HHalserten Sepass and Eloise Street’s Sepass Poems (1911-15). By using a versioning framework to attain a “fluid” reading across variants, I can identify the intercultural mediations across versions and attempt to engage in a form of digital repatriation. Through digital archives like Kimberly Christen’s “Mukurtu” project, these cultural documents can be repatriated and accessed only by those who, following cultural protocols, should have access. Ultimately, an analysis of variants suggests that while salvage ethnography privileged the non-aboriginal collaborators, the changeability of these narratives across versions functions to perpetually unfix these texts from a static concept of aboriginal identity.

Following the Enlightenment, Western adherence to positivist theory influenced practices of Western research and documentation. Prior to the introduction of positivism into Western scholarship, innovations in printing technology, literary advancements, and the development of capitalism encouraged the passing of copyright statutes by nation-states in fifteenth century Europe. The evolution of copyright and positivism in Europe influenced United States copyright and its protection of the author, as well as the practice of archiving and its role in interpreting history. Because Native American cultures practiced orality, they suffered the loss of their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions not protected by copyright. By incorporating postmodern perspectives on archiving and poststructuralist views on the formation of knowledge, this thesis argues that Native American tribes now use Western forms of digital technology to create archives, record their histories, and reclaim control of their traditional cultural expressions.