Historically, the Nuu-chah-nulth People of Vancouver Island passed down knowledge and skills utilizing methods analogous with traditional Indigenous pedagogies around the world. These traditional teaching and assessment methods of the Nuu-chah-nulth have ensured the successful transfer of important physical, mental, cultural and spiritual knowledge over thousands of years. Within these pedagogies, assessment and evaluation is integral and inclusive, achieved through authentic and holistic means. Conversely, contemporary assessment in the post-secondary realm, despite endeavours to integrate formative assessment more frequently, tends toward a summative end result. The historical traditional assessment methods of the Nuu-chah-nulth exemplify holistic values and are illustrated through the concept of heshook-ish-tsawalk, or ‘everything is connected’. This dissertation argues that there are insights to be gleaned from identifying these assessment and evaluation methods, and in bringing them forward into contemporary pedagogy. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the researcher examined the learning and teaching understandings and experiences of several Nuu-chah-nulth Elders and cultural experts. Interviews took place within the homes of the Elders, and care was taken to ensure representation across a wide range of Nuu-chah-nulth territory. Augmenting these interviews, the researcher examined translated recordings of past Nuu-chah-nulth Elders while reflecting on her personal experiences as a Nuu-chah-nulth person. These personal experiences were analyzed through a self-study style examination of her own journey through education, and her recollections of traditional and contemporary assessment practice. Significant themes emerged from the collected data, including the overarching importance of time, relationships, echoing, and demonstration in historical Nuu-chah-nulth assessment. These themes fit naturally within a circular medicine wheel framework, which effectively illuminates the holistic and connected nature of an Indigenous pedagogy. This study concludes that these themes hold significant importance for contemporary assessment practice. / Graduate

This thesis examines the comparative abundance of shellfish from archaeological assemblages on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu-chah-nulth territories. Eighteen sites spanning the Nuu-chah-nulth region emphasize the diversity in invertebrate foods that have been consumed 5000-150 years ago: Yaksis Cave, Loon Cave, and Hesquiat Village at Hesquiat Harbour; Chesterman Beach; Spring Cove; Ts’ishaa, Ch’ituukwachisht (North and South), Tl’ihuuw’a, Shiwitis, Huumuuwaa, Maktl7ii, Huts’atswilh, Kakmakimilh, Kiix7iin, and Huu7ii. Invertebrate zooarchaeology is an understudied field that has the potential to impact ecological restoration and conservation efforts. Ubiquity, or frequency of occurrence, provides a measure of abundance for a target taxa or species through a percent presence/absence approach. Regionally conventional methods of invertebrate analysis, including weight-based quantification, primarily favour heavy and robust bivalves, such as clams and mussels, and diminish the presence of other frequently occurring invertebrates. Ubiquity-based quantification shows how frequently ‘other’ shellfish have been utilized over time and across archaeological deposits. Gooseneck barnacles (Pollicipes polymerus) are often considered rare, an unimportant intertidal resource, but ubiquity-based analyses show that they are far more abundant than previously appreciated. A methodological combination of these two approaches shows vastly different perspectives on shellfish abundance, and this has implications for how the dietary role of shellfish is understood and discussed in archaeological discourse. / Graduate / 2020-09-09

The primary objective of this study is to explore the social functions of drumming and singing based on the perspectives of three Northwest First Nations teachers named James (ʔUu-Kwa-Qum) [pronounced: OO-Kwa-Koom] Swan of the Ahousaht Nuu-chah-nulth Nation, Ax7wil [ACKh-wheel] of the Secwepemc [She-KWE-pem] and St̓át̓imc [Stat-lee-um-c] Nations, and Spuska7 [SPU-skah] of the St̓át̓imc Nations. It further aims to determine whether the author’s etic, or outsider, perspective on function can contribute new and useful insights into how drumming and singing function in diverse First Nations cultural contexts. Community involvement prior to the initiation of this study constituted a fundamental methodological step. Such involvement resulted in the acquaintances of James (ʔUu-Kwa-Qum) Swan, Ax7wil, and Spuska7, and facilitated participation in certain drumming and singing practices. Following processes of request for teachings and ethical and informed consent, interviews were conducted with James, Ax7wil, and Spuska7, which were transcribed and used as primary resources for this largely biographical study. The method of collaborative ethnography was applied, with each chapter being provided to the respective teacher for editing three weeks prior to a follow-up editing meeting. The combination of interview data and participatory research through community involvement resulted in a unique merging of observation, experience, and interpretation from three distinct perspectives: an intercultural perspective, between Nuu-chah-nulth, Secwepemc, and St̓át̓imc First Nations; an interpersonal perspective, between James, Ax7wil, and Spuska7; and an etic perspective, from the author’s analysis of data observed, experienced, and collected. Two main conclusions were drawn from this multivalent approach: firstly, while purpose and function, as defined from emic, or insider, perspectives were often analogous, the author’s etic analysis frequently defined functions distinct from purposes emically described. This difference was tentatively attributed to the fact that function, that is, what drumming and singing effectively do for those involved, may not be fully experienced by those lacking cultural background and understanding, and thus analysed and defined according to broader criteria. Secondly, it was suggested that from the author’s etic perspective, though the purpose of diverse drumming and singing practices according to the teachings of James (ʔUu-Kwa-Qum) Swan, Ax7wil, and Spuska7 were multifarious, a general overriding function was found to be the strengthening and affirmation of specific social relationships. / Graduate

This dissertation examines multiple exponence (ME) phenomena in the non-inflectional morphology of three languages: Nuu-chah-nulth (Wakashan), Central Yup'ik (Eskimo), and Korean (language isolate or Altaic). These languages exhibit a common property: ME comprised of a non-inflectional suffix and one or more base modifications. The base modifications involve a vowel length change and reduplication in Nuu-chah-nulth, various types of deletion in Central Yup’ik, and vowel shortening in Korean. This dissertation pursues four research questions: (1) what criteria diagnose morphophonological alternations as ME and do the criteria apply to all cases of ME to the same degree? (2) Does derivational ME differ from inflectional ME? (3) Does one exponent play a more significant role in expressing semantic/syntactic information than another? (4) How is derivational ME formally accounted for? In pursuit of these research questions, this study proposes, based on Matthews’s (1972) study, four criteria to distinguish ME from other phonological alternations. Only the two criteria, Non-phonological condition and Consistent co-occurrence are obligatory; two others, Phonological Consistency and No exceptions on base selection, may be violated, suggesting that ME parameters occur along a continuum. This dissertation also proposes derivational classes according to patterns of base modification. Derivational classes play an important role in formulating Word Formation Rules (WFRs), in that they provide the morphological conditions for the structural description of base modification rules. Significantly, semantic/syntactic information is encoded in suffixation, capturing the fact that the large number of meanings that suffixes carry (approximately 500) cannot be mapped onto a limited number of base modifications (ranging from two to fourteen). The evidence that suffixes convey meaning supports the claim that ME requires two different types of WFR, a suffixation rule that conveys semantic/syntactic information, and base modification rules that do not. Also, this study suggests that suffixes are the main exponent of ME because they make the main contribution to the meanings conveyed through ME. This study contributes to a theory of morphology not only in that seemingly distinct processes receive a unified analysis as ME, but also in that the distinct processes are formally accounted for, expanding the WP approach to derivational morphology. / Graduate / 0290 / sung17hwa@gmail.com

From 1988 to 1994, the Carmanah and Walbran valleys on southern Vancouver Island emerged from obscurity to inspire international newspaper headlines, ecotage, and election platforms, and figure in British Columbia’s Commission on Resources and the Environment (CORE), the genesis of the current provincial land-use status quo. With Canada’s tallest tree, first marbled murrelet nest, and proximity to Victoria, the area’s old-growth forests became the site of a touchstone conflict in BC’s War in the Woods (ca. 1980-1995), one which resulted in Carmanah and the Upper Walbran and Lower Walbran becoming designated as Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park in 1995. The Central Walbran remains open to logging, which as recently as 2016 has incited backwoods blockades not dissimilar to those from July and August 1991, the climax of my narrative. This thesis explores how and why the Walbran land-use resolution disappointed Victoria-based environmentalists, Cowichan Lake forest workers, the Nuu-chah-nulth, and the nation-state of Qwa-Ba-Diwa, and why the fate of the watershed remains subject to debate. Analyzing the roots of BC’s wood “exploitation axis” helps contextualize why Carmanah Walbran campaigns in Cowichan Lake and Victoria failed to produce satisfactory outcomes despite significant compromises from provincial governments after much deliberation. In short, dissidence failed to engender land-use consensus because forest capitalism and its co-constitutive partner, colonialism, have since the nineteenth century crafted policy based on a conception of the world rooted in forestry-based development, a durable ontological construct against which other imaginaries of nature have had to compete. The Tree Farm Licence system brought the International Woodworkers of America into a Gomperist bargain with companies and the state after World War II, and contributed to decades of overharvesting, overoptimistic regrowth projections, and corporatization which culminated in falldown and forest community crisis before environmentalists began to shape the public discourse regarding nature in the late 1980s. A fundamental inability to produce a satisfactory vision of sustainable forestry and a narrow state narrow response—wilderness parks—to broad, diverse environmentalist demands allowed nature to remain envisioned as a store of raw material for industrial forestry. This thesis additionally seeks to problematize environmentalists’ “wilderness” narratives to elaborate how green knowledge production can act as discursive violence. Our “natures” are more than workplaces, sites for recreation, or pristine ecosystems. They are environments within which to find and make meaning. Or perhaps more accurately, nature is a symbol with which to construct narratives; narratives which, in Carmanah Walbran, often left little room for work in the woods. Environmentalists’ depictions of unpeopled nature advanced their wilderness-preservation cause at the expense of marginalizing Nuu-chah-nulth land claims, loggers’ paycheques, and ecocentric worldviews based on holistic conceptions of interconnectedness and/or radical dissent against the forest industrial complex. In short, the Carmanah Walbran War in the Woods added 16,365 hectares of new parkland, contributed (along with log exports) to the 2001 closure of the Youbou mill, the last at Cowichan Lake, and ensured that an isolated gravel road still ends at a bridge to nowhere. / Graduate / 2020-09-12

The Hiikwis site complex, located in Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, consists of two traditional Nuu-chah-nulth village sites: Uukwatis (DfSh-15) and Hiikwis proper (DfSh-16). Uukwatis, the older of the two sites, was occupied from at least 2870 cal BP. It is believed that at some point the main village was moved west up the beach approximately 650 m to Hiikwis proper, which has been dated to at least 1290 cal BP. Both sites appear to have been occupied into the early twentieth century. This thesis represents the first detailed faunal analysis of an inner Barkley Sound site older than 600 years. The faunal assemblage is unique among contemporaneous sites in the region, due in part to a large bird assemblage and the presence of salmon remains throughout all levels of the site complex. Hiikwis does not follow the pattern typically described for Barkley Sound sites, in which salmon was not a significant resource until around 800 cal BP. However, after 900 cal BP, the relative abundance of salmon within the Hiikwis fish assemblage does increase. These results support an established hypothesis that this time period in Barkley Sound was characterized by group amalgamations, increasing populations, shifting territorial boundaries, changes in subsistence practices, and increased defensive strategies and structures. This faunal analysis shows that the Hiikwis site complex was occupied year-round for the majority of its occupation, with a shift to seasonal (winter/spring) occupation represented within the most recent levels of cultural deposits at Hiikwis proper. / Graduate / 0324 / nicole.westre@hotmail.com

The Hiikwis site complex, located in Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, consists of two traditional Nuu-chah-nulth village sites: Uukwatis (DfSh-15) and Hiikwis proper (DfSh-16). Uukwatis, the older of the two sites, was occupied from at least 2870 cal BP. It is believed that at some point the main village was moved west up the beach approximately 650 m to Hiikwis proper, which has been dated to at least 1290 cal BP. Both sites appear to have been occupied into the early twentieth century. This thesis represents the first detailed faunal analysis of an inner Barkley Sound site older than 600 years. The faunal assemblage is unique among contemporaneous sites in the region, due in part to a large bird assemblage and the presence of salmon remains throughout all levels of the site complex. Hiikwis does not follow the pattern typically described for Barkley Sound sites, in which salmon was not a significant resource until around 800 cal BP. However, after 900 cal BP, the relative abundance of salmon within the Hiikwis fish assemblage does increase. These results support an established hypothesis that this time period in Barkley Sound was characterized by group amalgamations, increasing populations, shifting territorial boundaries, changes in subsistence practices, and increased defensive strategies and structures. This faunal analysis shows that the Hiikwis site complex was occupied year-round for the majority of its occupation, with a shift to seasonal (winter/spring) occupation represented within the most recent levels of cultural deposits at Hiikwis proper. / Graduate / 0324 / nicole.westre@hotmail.com

This research project explores ways in which place-based Indigenous perspectives can inform national park ‘visitor experience’ planning, management, and information delivery. Engaged in collaborative processes with Tseshaht First Nation, this project explores knowledge of Tseshaht-identified places of cultural significance in Tseshaht traditional territory, discussed in the context of creating a web-based digital map. In attempting to explore Nuu-chah-nulth-informed ways in which to more widely share cultural history and knowledge in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, I learned of the many dynamics that are revealed when the depth of Nuu-chah-nulth connections to place are made visible. This research project examines knowledge, power, and place in the context of Indigenous self-representation. Informed by Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous principles of knowledge-sharing, this thesis is an ethnography of knowledge-sharing in modern contexts fraught with issues of state power, commodification, and colonialism. / Graduate

Written from a nuučaan̓uł perspective this dissertation documents the reclamation of knowledge, teachings, culture, language, responsibilities, and identity through my personal (re)connection to my family’s ḥaḥuułi and hereditary home, čaačaac̓iiʕas. In specific and intentional ways my research, fieldwork, and dissertation are part of a story of reconciliation between myself and čaačaac̓iiʕas, the ḥaḥuułi that my family was dispossessed from because of the impacts of colonization. Despite the near severing of our relationship with čaačaac̓iiʕas and the near destruction of our ḥaḥuułi, čaačaac̓iiʕas is thriving and now is the time to pick up my responsibilities and begin to re-establish a relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds found there. In my research the lands, waters, skies, and natural world are not a place and/or object of inquiry, they are non-human knowledge holders and teachers. The dissertation draws upon on a diverse set of ethnographic, anthropological, and Indigenous literatures. Emphasis is placed upon the use of nuučaan̓uł scholarship, theory, and methodologies including muułmuumps (being rooted to the land), ceremony, language, song, and interviews. The research builds on four kinds of knowledge that are expressed as: 1) known knowledge; 2) incomplete knowledge; 3) unaccounted for and/or unknown knowledge; and, 4) ethnographic/anthropological knowledge. Through this theoretical platform I explore tangible and intangible cultural and hereditary forms of knowledge production. Importantly, I highlight the role of song and sound as critical vehicles through which contemporary Indigenous peoples can connect to historical places and times. I place equal emphasis on the production of sound through song as I do through the reception of song and sound through a methodology of deep listening. Song and sound play a crucial role in my research and form the basis of knowledge transfer between myself, čaačaac̓iiʕas, and my yakʷiimit kʷiyiis nananiqsu (ancestors). Furthermore, the songs shared within this dissertation are the analysis of my data and how I am choosing to disseminate that data. I argue that these connections provide ways for future agendas and aspirations for cultural resurgence and governance to emerge. / Graduate

The Nuu-chah-nulth and other First Nations of coastal British Columbia used to maintain gardens of indigenous plants with edible roots on their estuarine tidal flats. Tasty and nutritious, these roots were carefully tended and nurtured to enhance their productivity and quality. Within the last century, the Nuu-chah-nulth diet has changed significantly, and these indigenous root vegetables are not as well known. This community-based action research project (The λ’aayaʕas Project) was suggested by members of the Nuu-chah-nulth communities of Clayoquot Sound, as a way of maintaining and strengthening traditional knowledge, cultural identity and ultimately, community health and well-being through renewal of awareness of these and other traditional foods. The λ’aayaʕas project engaged students and community members of all ages in a diverse range of activities aimed at revitalizing the knowledge, skills and cultural practices involved in caring for traditional root gardens. These activities have included: hosting community steam-pit cooking events; learning from knowledgeable community members; re-creating a root garden in the community of Ahousaht; and implementing and observing the results of traditional management techniques on a root garden plot at the Atleo River estuary. This thesis documents the development of this community action research project and examines the role of ecocultural restoration projects in providing opportunities to strengthen and facilitate the connection of youth to their land and culture through experiential learning. Discussions incorporate a summary of feedback and reflections on the project, and of the revitalization of traditional iv knowledge and practices locally, globally and in the future. In closing, I draw together thoughts and ideas from local community members and others who recognize and hope to revitalize the inextricable relationships between cultural and ecological health and diversity.