This dissertation is both an analytical life history of Stó:lō Elder Archie Charles (1922-2010) as well as an academic reflection on the process of collaborating to record and write this told-to narrative. Grand Chief Archie Charles left a profound social, political and cultural legacy within the Stó:lō community. He is broadly acknowledged as one of the community’s most respected modern leaders. My examination of the way Archie strategically accepted and rejected elements of the teachings of his ancestors and the lessons learned from newcomers serves to enrich a growing body of post-colonial scholarship that challenges long-standing assumptions about what it means to be Aboriginal. The agency revealed through his life experience alerts us to the dynamic way in which Archie and certain others of his generation balanced innovation with tradition. This study of Archie’s life therefore, contributes to an emerging scholarship that challenges still lingering racist myths and faulty dualisms that position Native people as either “assimilated” or “resisting”. Through Archie’s story, I reveal the way in which he applied knowledge and skills he gained via the acculturation process (and his lifelong reflections on this process) to foster particular cultural continuities within areas of Stó:lō life. Archie successfully did this by enacting his own personal ethos of “protection through inclusion and education”. This research chronicles and interprets the genesis and evolution of his leadership strategy by tracing it back to his adaptive interpretations of his ancestral and familial teachings and highlighting key times in Archie’s life history when he worked to find a balance between innovation and tradition. Thus it foregrounds his formative experience with Xwelítem (newcomers) and Stó:lō society and cosmology, particularly his adoption, time spent attending Kamloops Indian Residential School, and involvement as a soldier and veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. It highlights how he derived meaning out of these experiences, which in turn guided his actions in the public sphere and shaped his policies as a community leader –in particular as elected Chief of his community of Seabird Island British Columbia and as a Sia:teleq (a hereditary caretaker) of his family fishcamp in the Fraser Canyon. This research draws upon my own sustained dialogue with Archie Charles and his immediate family, secondary and primary sources, and previous oral history interviews conducted with Archie and his family members. It explicates Archie’s role as a man who was known more for his actions than his words and the ways in which silence may be interpreted and made meaningful in the told-to genre. In terms that reflect the subtleties of collaborative dynamics that play out in told-to narratives, it likewise examines his role as narrator and authority of his life experience and my role as chronicler, then interpreter. As such, it provides glimpses into specific time periods and aspects of Archie’s life, but does not seek to be fully chronologic and comprehensive. As a result, I seek to contribute to collaborative historiography by sharing the way in which my collaboration with Archie shifted from a dialogue, particularly following his death in 2010, to a “polylogue”: an engagement of multiple voices of family and extended community members to support this telling of his life narrative. Moving from hearing to a more engaged form of “listening” as we did – the kind which allows for silences to exist – reinforced for me that knowledge, expressed through words, gestures, actions as well as silences are not things we can go into a community or individual’s life and “get”. Rather, they are shared as gifts, and as such come with obligations of reciprocity. This dissertation aspires to reciprocate the sharing that Archie did with me by providing his community and my scholarly community with not only an account of his life, but with an assessment of what his life reveals about pertinent issues in Aboriginal and Native-Newcomer history – and through this process to hopefully contribute to the ongoing efforts at building reconciliation between settler and Indigenous societies.

This thesis uses the uniform of the Stó:lō First Nation’s Lower Fraser Fishing Authority as a cultural, material item to inform and discuss Indigenous-Crown relationships, the history of the community the object belongs to, and the meaning that the object holds for that community. I use the uniform to argue that a single object can hold complex and contradictory meanings that can inform cultural history and relationships. This thesis adds to the historiography of the use of artifacts as an object of study, the history of the Lower Fraser Fishing Authority, and also larger discussions of Indigenous-Crown relationships in Canada. / Graduate

This dissertation seeks to illuminate key aspects of Coast Salish legal sensibility. It draws on collaborative fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2010 with Stó:lō communities from the Fraser Valley in southern British Columbia, and on the rich ethnohistorical record produced on, with, and by members of the Stó:lō polity and of the wider Coast Salish social world to which they belong. The preoccupation underlying this inquiry is to better understand how to approach an Indigenous legal tradition on its own terms, in a way respectful of its distinctiveness – especially in an ongoing colonial context, and from my position as an outsider to this tradition. As such, a main question drives the inquiry: What makes a legal tradition what it is? Two series of legal insights emerge from this work. The first are theoretical and methodological. The character of a legal tradition, I suggest, owes more to implicit norms than to explicit ones. In order to gain the kind of understanding that allows for respectful interactions with the principles and processes that inform decision-making within a given legal order, one must learn to decipher the norms that are not so much talked about as tacitly modelled by its members. Paying attention to pragmatic forms of communication – the mode of conveying meaning interactively and contextually, typically by showing rather than telling – reveals the hidden normative canvas upon which explicit norms are grafted. This deeper layer of normativity inflects peoples’ subjectivity and sense of their own agency – the distinctive fabric of their socialization. This lens on law – emerging from a reflection on the stories that Stó:lō friends shared with me, on the discussions had with them, and on the relational experience of Stó:lō / Coast Salish pedagogy, and further informed by scholarship on Indigenous and Western law, political philosophy and sociolinguistics – yields a second series of insights. Those are ethnographical, about Coast Salish legal sensibility itself. They attach to three central institutions of the Stó:lō legal order: the Transformer storycycle, longhouse governance practice and the figure of the witness, and ancestral names – corresponding to three sets of key relationships within the tradition: to the land, to the spirit, and to kin. Among those insights, a central one concerns the importance of interconnectedness as an organizing principle within Stó:lō / Coast Salish legal orders. Coast Salish people are not simply aware of the factual interdependence of people and things in the world, pay special attention to this, and happen to offer a description of the world as interconnected. There is a normative commitment at work here. Interconnectedness informs dominant interpretations of how the world should work. It is a source of explicit responsibilities and obligations – but more amorphously and pervasively yet, it structures legitimate discourse and appropriate behavior within contemporary Coast Salish societies. / Graduate / 2018-10-20

The The’wá:lí Community Digital Mapping Project is a collaborative, scholarly project for which the final product is a digital, layered map of the reserve and traditional lands of the Stó:lō (Xwélmexw) community of The’wá:lí (Soowahlie First Nation). The map, containing over 110 sites and stretching from Bellingham Bay, Washington in the west to Chilliwack Lake, B.C. in the east, is hyperlinked with audio, visual and textual media that tell stories about places of importance to this community. The map is intended to give voice to many different senses of and claims to place, and their intersections, in the The’wá:lí environment, while also exploring the histories of how these places and their meanings have changed over time. It expresses many, often conflicting, ways of understanding the land and waterways in this environment, and presents an alternative to the popular, colonial narrative of the settlement of the Fraser Valley. Thus, the map, intended ultimately for The’wá:lí’s use, is also meant to engage a local, non-Indigenous audience, challenging them to rethink their perceptions about where they live and about the peoples with whom they share their histories and land. The essay that follows is a discussion of the relationship-building, research, writing and map-building processes that have produced the The’wá:lí Community Digital Map. / Graduate / 2017-08-21 / 0740 / 0509 / 0366 / sabinatrimble@gmail.com

This thesis examines cross-cultural relationships between Indigenous and Settler women to challenge the dominant historiography that has overlooked women's lived experiences, and fill a gap in the literature concerning Indigenous – Settler relations. Conceptualizing the history of Indigenous – Settler relations as microhistories, this thesis argues that an increase of in case studies that are focused on Indigenous women’s experiences, are useful to nuance how historians think about colonialism at a macro level. Using a diaological approach I have situated myself as a participant within the research project and was able to partake in oral history interviews with Stó:lō and Settler women throughout the lower mainland in British Columbia. Throughout my discussions, it became apparent that female cross-cultural relationships occurred at certain places. Thus, this project analyzes the nature of female cross-cultural relationships that developed because of the residential school system, community interactions and religion. Were Indigenous and Settler women able to form meaningful relationships at these sites? If so, did these relationships change over the course of the twentieth century? By focusing on Indigenous women's experiences at these sites of encounter, it will be demonstrated that Settler women's colonial mindsets did not always determine the nature of cross-cultural interactions. This project makes important contributions towards an understanding of why some cross-cultural relationships were more meaningful and reciprocal than others. An analysis of colonial discourse coupled with case studies based on oral interviews offers a complex study of how colonialism and the dominant culture were experienced by Indigenous women in British Columbia from 1960 to 2009.

The reason for this story was to investigate a narrative that is important to the identity of North America’s Pacific Northwest Coast – a narrative that revolves around wild salmon, a narrative that always seemed too simple to me, a narrative that gives salmon a mythical status, and yet what does the average person know about this fish other than it floods grocery stores in fall and tastes good. How do we know this fish that supposedly defines the natural world of this place? I began my research as a science writer, inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, in which he writes that the best way to achieve reality is by combining narrative with scientific data. So I went looking for a different story from the one most people read about in popular media, a story that’s overwhelmingly about conflict: I searched for a narrative that combines the science of what we know about salmon and a story of the scientists who study the fish, either directly or indirectly. I tried to follow Steinbeck’s example and include the narrative journeys we take in understanding the world around us, the journeys that rarely make it into scientific journals. I went on about eight field trips with biology, ecology, and archaeology lab teams from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans onboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship the W.E. Ricker, and an archaeological crew from the Laich-Kwil-Tach Treaty Society in Campbell River, B.C. At the same time, I was reading a number of things, including a 1938 dissertation by anthropologist Homer Barnett from the University of Oregon titled The Nature and Function of the Potlatch, a 2011 book by economist Ronald Trosper at the University of Arizona, Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics, and works by psychologist Douglas Medin at Northwestern University and anthropologist Scott Atran at the University of Michigan, written over the past two decades, particular paying attention to their writings on taxonomy and folkbiology. My conclusions surprised me, a little. / Graduate / 0329 / 0324 / 0391

The reason for this story was to investigate a narrative that is important to the identity of North America’s Pacific Northwest Coast – a narrative that revolves around wild salmon, a narrative that always seemed too simple to me, a narrative that gives salmon a mythical status, and yet what does the average person know about this fish other than it floods grocery stores in fall and tastes good. How do we know this fish that supposedly defines the natural world of this place? I began my research as a science writer, inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, in which he writes that the best way to achieve reality is by combining narrative with scientific data. So I went looking for a different story from the one most people read about in popular media, a story that’s overwhelmingly about conflict: I searched for a narrative that combines the science of what we know about salmon and a story of the scientists who study the fish, either directly or indirectly. I tried to follow Steinbeck’s example and include the narrative journeys we take in understanding the world around us, the journeys that rarely make it into scientific journals. I went on about eight field trips with biology, ecology, and archaeology lab teams from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans onboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship the W.E. Ricker, and an archaeological crew from the Laich-Kwil-Tach Treaty Society in Campbell River, B.C. At the same time, I was reading a number of things, including a 1938 dissertation by anthropologist Homer Barnett from the University of Oregon titled The Nature and Function of the Potlatch, a 2011 book by economist Ronald Trosper at the University of Arizona, Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics, and works by psychologist Douglas Medin at Northwestern University and anthropologist Scott Atran at the University of Michigan, written over the past two decades, particular paying attention to their writings on taxonomy and folkbiology. My conclusions surprised me, a little. / Graduate / 0329 / 0324 / 0391

What must we transform in ourselves as white settlers to become open to the possibility of ethical, respectful, authentic relationships with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands? Situating this research in Stó:lō Téméxw (Stó:lō lands/world) and in relationships with Stó:lō people, this question has become an effort to understand what it means to be xwelítem and how white settlers might transform xwelítem ways of being towards more ethical ways of being. Xwelítem is a Halq’eméylem concept used by Stó:lō people which translates as the hungry, starving ones, and is often used to refer to ways of being many Stó:lō associate with white settler colonial society, past and present. Drawing on insights and wisdom of Stó:lō and settler mentors I consider three aspects of xwelítem ways of being. First, to be xwelítem is to erase Stó:lō presence, culture and nationhood, colonial history and contemporary colonial realities of Indigenous oppression and dispossession, and settler privilege. Second, being xwelítem means attempting to dominate, control, and repress those who are painted as “inferior” in dominant cultural narratives, it means plugging into racist colonial narratives and stereotypes. Third, being xwelítem is to be hungry and greedy, driven by consumption and lacking respect, reverence and reciprocity for the land. Guided by Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, critical place inquiry, narrative therapy, and autoethnography, I shape three narratives that speak to each aspect of being xwelítem, looking back towards its roots and forward towards pathways of transformation. I draw on interviews and experiences with Stó:lō and settler mentors, personal narratives, family history, and literature from critical Indigenous studies, anti-colonial theory, settler colonial studies, analytic psychology, and critical race theory. I aim to share what I have learned from rather than about Stó:lō culture, stories, teachings, and practices as these have been shared in relationships and as they have pushed me towards seeing anew myself and my family, communities, histories, and cultures. I have also walked this path as I have become a mom, and the co-alignment of these journeys has meant a focus on my role as a parent in recognizing and intervening with becoming/being xwelítem as it influences my daughter. I specifically center the space of intergenerational parent-child relationships and intimate family experiences as a deep influence on developing white settler subjectivities, and therefore also a relational space of profound transformative potential. I end with a call for settlers to offer our gifts towards the wellbeing of the land and Indigenous peoples through cycles of reciprocity as a basis for ethical relationships. Transforming white settler subjectivities is situated within the broader vision of participating in co-resistance, reparations and restitution, of bringing about justice and harmony, which inherently involves supporting the self-determination and resurgence of Indigenous peoples. / Graduate

This collaborative study investigates the events that led to the repatriation of the Stone T’xwelátse from the Burke Museum of Natural History, University of Washington Seattle, USA to the Noxwsá7aq people of Deming Washington, USA and to the Stó:lō people of Chilliwack, B.C. Canada. Stone T’xwelátse is the first ancestor of the Chilliwack people who was transformed to stone by the transformer This research grew out of the desire to learn about and share the positive lessons learned during the repatriation process and to investigate if these experiences could benefit repatriation processes in Canada, specifically the province of B.C. This work establishes the current legal setting for cultural repatriation processes in Canada, the United States, and internationally, tells the ancient and contemporary story of Stone T’xwelátse, and examines the impact of Indigenous law, differing worldviews, community capacity, and relationships on cultural repatriation processes. An analysis of the conflict is presented through the identification of the key challenges and successes. The events of the repatriation, as told by the research participants, support the argument for the implementation of John Paul Lederach’s Conflict Transformation Theory practices in future cultural repatriation processes. Using Participatory Action Research and Indigenous Research methodologies data was gathered through participant interviews to form the result of the study: How to Work Together in a Good Way: Recommendations for the Future for Museums, Communities, and Individuals from the Participants of the Stone T’xwelátse Repatriation Research Project and Museum Professionals. These recommendations were formed to share the lessons learned from the Stone T’xwelátse repatriation and also to state changes that the participants would like to see implemented in cultural repatriation processes in Canada. Stone T’xwelátse is now with the Stó:lō people fulfilling his role to teach the people “how to live together in a good way.”