In this thesis I discuss the semantic basis of the morphological form of predicates in N+e?képmx, a Northern Interior Salish language. Intransitive and transitive use of roots in Nle7képmx is morphologically marked; intransitives use a set of primary affixes and transitives use a set of transitivizers. I document the behavior of these morpho syntactic affixes with a subset of the predicates of Me?képmx to determine what is optional, what is obligatory and what is blocked. I link this to an analysis of argument structure of predicates and subsequently create a classification of predicate types. I present an overview of the intransitive and transitive morphology of Meképmx in Chapter One. In Chapter Two I discuss current literature regarding the syntactic and semantic diagnostics of unaccusative and unergative verbs. I create a semantic classification of the set of roots, and discuss the behavior of roots with morpho-syntactic affixes to determine the diagnostic potential of the affixes. In Chapter Three I discuss the potential of an intransitive-transitive classification of roots. The data show that there is an unergative and unaccusative distinction in the language, specific aspectual morpho-syntactic diagnostics distinguish unaccusatives and causative and desiderative distinguish unergatives. The traditional analyses of Salish languages as having a majority of unaccusative roots and no underlying transitives is confirmed.

In this thesis I discuss the semantic basis of the morphological form of predicates in N+e?képmx, a Northern Interior Salish language. Intransitive and transitive use of roots in Nle7képmx is morphologically marked; intransitives use a set of primary affixes and transitives use a set of transitivizers. I document the behavior of these morpho syntactic affixes with a subset of the predicates of Me?képmx to determine what is optional, what is obligatory and what is blocked. I link this to an analysis of argument structure of predicates and subsequently create a classification of predicate types. I present an overview of the intransitive and transitive morphology of Meképmx in Chapter One. In Chapter Two I discuss current literature regarding the syntactic and semantic diagnostics of unaccusative and unergative verbs. I create a semantic classification of the set of roots, and discuss the behavior of roots with morpho-syntactic affixes to determine the diagnostic potential of the affixes. In Chapter Three I discuss the potential of an intransitive-transitive classification of roots. The data show that there is an unergative and unaccusative distinction in the language, specific aspectual morpho-syntactic diagnostics distinguish unaccusatives and causative and desiderative distinguish unergatives. The traditional analyses of Salish languages as having a majority of unaccusative roots and no underlying transitives is confirmed. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

This thesis examines the impacts of indigenous dispossession from lands and resources by utilizing a concept in ecology, that of ecological keystone species, and extending it to species that play a key, characterizing role in a particular culture or society. A storytelling methodology is used to determine the presence of cultural keystones in stories and place names of Tla'amin peoples, a Northern Coast Salish group whose traditional territory is located along the coast 130 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia. I extend the storytelling methodology to encompass film and video projects that exhibit characteristics of Fourth World Cinema and discuss how such films can be used to empower indigenous communities and reclaim cultural and political rights.

Coast Salish coiled basketry has been a much-neglected area of research. Previous investigations into this topic have been primarily concerned with geo-cultural distributions, and discussions pertaining to stylistic attributes. In recent years several scholars have turned their attention to the topic of Salish weavings, but they have focused their efforts quite narrowly on textiles made from wool and other similar fibres to the exclusion of weaving techniques such as basketry which utilise local roots and barks. This thesis will focus exclusively on one type of Salish basketry - coiled basketry. In this thesis I explore different ways of identifying, or "knowing", Coast Salish coiled cedar root basketry. I specifically focus on Sto:lo basketry and identify three ways in which Sto:lo basket makers "know" these objects. First I discuss the Halkomelem terminology and what insights it provides to indigenous classification systems. Secondly, I situate coiled basketry in a broader Coast Salish weaving complex in order to discuss how basketry is influenced by other textile arts. This also enables me to explore how Sto:lo weavers identify a well-made object. In the final section I discuss ownership of designs by individuals and their families. This research draws primarily from interviews conducted with Sto:lo basket makers between May and September 2000 in their communities and at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. It is supplemented by interviews with basket makers from other Salish communities and by the ethnographic literature on this topic.

This thesis focuses on the production and display of weavings made by a small number of Musqueam women, who in the 1980s began weaving in the tradition of their ancestors. It addresses the way in which these weavings, positioned throughout Vancouver and worn in public settings, build a visual presence to counter the exclusion of Coast Salish cultural representations from the public construction of history in Vancouver and the discourse of Northwest Coast art. The Vancouver International Airport and the Museum of Anthropology at the University o f British Columbia both share with Musqueam a history of place. A distinct relationship fostered between Museum staff and members of the Musqueam community has yielded several exhibits since the first, Hands of Our Ancestors: The Revival of Weaving at Musqueam, opened in 1986. The presence of Musqueam material at the Museum is part of an extensive history of interaction and negotiation between Canadian museums and the cultural communities whose histories, traditions and material culture are represented - a history which encompasses issues of representation, authorship and authority. The Vancouver International Airport is also situated on Musqueam traditional territory. Designed by representatives from the Musqueam Cultural Committee and the Airport project team, the international arrivals area features works of contemporary Musqueam artists which are intended to create a sense of place with an emphasis on the distinctiveness of its location. Travelers cross several thresholds in the terminal - the sequence o f these crossings carefully choreographed so that deplaning passengers pass from the non-space of international transience to a culturally specific space marked by Musqueam's cultural representations, and then past Customs into Canada. Certain incidents at these sites indicate that visibility and self-representation do not in themselves answer the problems of power and history. When the Museum of Anthropology hosted a meeting for leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Community in 1997, a newly implemented protocol agreement between Musqueam and the Museum was broken; and in a number of instances, achievements at the Airport have also been impaired. Despite these limits, weavings are not examples of token native inclusion as some critics argue. Rather, they are cultural representations strategically deployed by the Musqueam community. Enlarged from traditional blankets to monumental hangings, these weavings participate with other more recognized monumental Northwest Coast forms. They are visual, public signifiers of Musqueam identity which, without violating boundaries between public and private knowledge, carry messages from the community to a broader audience - messages intended to mark Musqueam's precedence in Vancouver's past as well as to claim visibility in the present.

This dissertation has three main goals: 1. To provide an analysis of the syntax and semantics of Salish determiners and quantifiers. 2. To provide an account of differences in the determiner and quantification systems of Salish and English which reduces cross-linguistic variation to a minimum, in line with a restrictive theory of Universal Grammar. 3. To assess the theoretical consequences of the analysis of Salish, including implications for the range of possible cross-linguistic variation in determiner and quantification systems, and the nature of the relationship between syntactic structure and interpretation. I give evidence that one common method of expressing quantificational notions in English is absent in Salish. While English readily allows quantifiers to occupy the syntactic position of the determiner (as in every woman, most women), Salish languages do not allow such constructions (see also Jelinek 1995). I propose that Salish and English exemplify opposite settings of a Common Ground Parameter, which states that Salish determiners may not access the common ground of the discourse. This parameter accounts not only for the absence of quantificational determiners in Salish (since quantifiers presuppose existence, and therefore access the common ground), it also derives several other differences between Salish and English determiners, such as the absence of a definiteness distinction in Salish. I further demonstrate that Salish possesses a robust system of DP-internal quantification, and that quantificational DPs in Salish function as generalized quantifiers at logical form. This means that the strong hypothesis that languages do not differ with respect to the presence or absence of generalized quantifiers is upheld (cf. Barwise and Cooper 1981). Simple DPs in Salish, unlike in English, do not function as generalized quantifiers. This result follows from the Common Ground Parameter. I give further evidence from St'at'imcets (Lillooet Salish) on the strong/weak quantifier distinction; I argue that the interpretation of weak quantifiers is derivable directly from the overt syntactic position of the quantifier.

This study addresses the question of the nature of indigenous people's connection to the land, and the implications of this for articulating these connections in legal arenas where questions of Aboriginal title and land claims are at issue. The idea of 'place' is developed, based in a phenomenology of dwelling which takes profound attachments to home places as shaping and being shaped by ontological orientation and social organization. In this theory of the 'senses of place', the author emphasizes the relationships between meaning and power experienced and embodied in place, and the social systems of property and territory that forms indigenous land tenure systems. To explore this theoretical notion of senses of place, the study develops a detailed ethnography of a Coast Salish Aboriginal community on southeast Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Through this ethnography of dwelling, the ways in which places become richly imbued with meanings and how they shape social organization and generate social action are examined. Narratives with Coast Salish community members, set in a broad context of discussing land claims, provide context for understanding senses of place imbued with ancestors, myth, spirit, power, language, history, property, territory and boundaries. The author concludes in arguing that by attending to a theorized understanding of highly local senses of place, nuanced conceptions of indigenous relationships to land which appreciate indigenous relations to land in their own terms can be articulated.

Thesis (Ph. D)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-325).

This thesis focuses on the production and display of weavings made by a small number of Musqueam women, who in the 1980s began weaving in the tradition of their ancestors. It addresses the way in which these weavings, positioned throughout Vancouver and worn in public settings, build a visual presence to counter the exclusion of Coast Salish cultural representations from the public construction of history in Vancouver and the discourse of Northwest Coast art. The Vancouver International Airport and the Museum of Anthropology at the University o f British Columbia both share with Musqueam a history of place. A distinct relationship fostered between Museum staff and members of the Musqueam community has yielded several exhibits since the first, Hands of Our Ancestors: The Revival of Weaving at Musqueam, opened in 1986. The presence of Musqueam material at the Museum is part of an extensive history of interaction and negotiation between Canadian museums and the cultural communities whose histories, traditions and material culture are represented - a history which encompasses issues of representation, authorship and authority. The Vancouver International Airport is also situated on Musqueam traditional territory. Designed by representatives from the Musqueam Cultural Committee and the Airport project team, the international arrivals area features works of contemporary Musqueam artists which are intended to create a sense of place with an emphasis on the distinctiveness of its location. Travelers cross several thresholds in the terminal - the sequence o f these crossings carefully choreographed so that deplaning passengers pass from the non-space of international transience to a culturally specific space marked by Musqueam's cultural representations, and then past Customs into Canada. Certain incidents at these sites indicate that visibility and self-representation do not in themselves answer the problems of power and history. When the Museum of Anthropology hosted a meeting for leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Community in 1997, a newly implemented protocol agreement between Musqueam and the Museum was broken; and in a number of instances, achievements at the Airport have also been impaired. Despite these limits, weavings are not examples of token native inclusion as some critics argue. Rather, they are cultural representations strategically deployed by the Musqueam community. Enlarged from traditional blankets to monumental hangings, these weavings participate with other more recognized monumental Northwest Coast forms. They are visual, public signifiers of Musqueam identity which, without violating boundaries between public and private knowledge, carry messages from the community to a broader audience - messages intended to mark Musqueam's precedence in Vancouver's past as well as to claim visibility in the present. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation has three main goals: 1. To provide an analysis of the syntax and semantics of Salish determiners and quantifiers. 2. To provide an account of differences in the determiner and quantification systems of Salish and English which reduces cross-linguistic variation to a minimum, in line with a restrictive theory of Universal Grammar. 3. To assess the theoretical consequences of the analysis of Salish, including implications for the range of possible cross-linguistic variation in determiner and quantification systems, and the nature of the relationship between syntactic structure and interpretation. I give evidence that one common method of expressing quantificational notions in English is absent in Salish. While English readily allows quantifiers to occupy the syntactic position of the determiner (as in every woman, most women), Salish languages do not allow such constructions (see also Jelinek 1995). I propose that Salish and English exemplify opposite settings of a Common Ground Parameter, which states that Salish determiners may not access the common ground of the discourse. This parameter accounts not only for the absence of quantificational determiners in Salish (since quantifiers presuppose existence, and therefore access the common ground), it also derives several other differences between Salish and English determiners, such as the absence of a definiteness distinction in Salish. I further demonstrate that Salish possesses a robust system of DP-internal quantification, and that quantificational DPs in Salish function as generalized quantifiers at logical form. This means that the strong hypothesis that languages do not differ with respect to the presence or absence of generalized quantifiers is upheld (cf. Barwise and Cooper 1981). Simple DPs in Salish, unlike in English, do not function as generalized quantifiers. This result follows from the Common Ground Parameter. I give further evidence from St'at'imcets (Lillooet Salish) on the strong/weak quantifier distinction; I argue that the interpretation of weak quantifiers is derivable directly from the overt syntactic position of the quantifier. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate