This thesis is a case study using paleoethnobotanical analysis of Kilgii Gwaay, a 10,700-year-old wet site in southern Haida Gwaii to explore the use of plants by ancestral Haida. The research investigated questions of early Holocene wood artifact technologies and other plant use before the large-scale arrival of western redcedar (Thuja plicata), a cultural keystone species for Haida in more recent times. The project relied on small-scale excavations and sampling from two main areas of the site: a hearth complex and an activity area at the edge of a paleopond. The archaeobotanical assemblage from these two areas yielded 23 plant taxa representing 14 families in the form of wood, charcoal, seeds, and additional plant macrofossils. A salmonberry and elderberry processing area suggests a seasonal summer occupation. Hemlock wedges and split spruce wood and roots show evidence for wood-splitting technology. The assemblage demonstrates potential for site interpretation based on archaeobotanical remains for the Northwest Coast of North America and highlights the importance of these otherwise relatively unknown plant resources from this early time period. / Graduate / cohenjenny2@gmail.com

Culture types in Pacific Northwest archaeology are characteristic artifact assemblages distinguishing different prehistoric periods. Assemblages indicate a culture type transition during the 2,630 BP–270 BP occupation of Willows Beach (DcRt-10), southeastern Vancouver Island. Faunal remains could reveal links to subsistence patterns, following Croes’s theory that culture type change reflects subsistence intensification. Five dated DcRt-10 faunal assemblages underwent taxonomic and size classification, weighing and MNI calculation. Vertebrate weight and NISP percentages were compared between stratigraphic units associated with the later Gulf of Georgia and earlier Locarno Beach culture types. The youngest assemblage contains a smaller proportion of land mammal bone, suggesting increased sea mammal, fish, and bird procurement. Faunal remains also suggest a greater variety of taxa exploited over time. Faunal assemblages suggest that culture type change at DcRt-10 is the product of subsistence change, increasing knowledge of the culture historic sequence of this region.

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 cedar dugout canoe is iconically associated with First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, but the vital contribution it made to the economic and social development of British Columbia is historically unrecognized. This beautifully designed and crafted oceangoing vessel, besides being a prized necessity to the maritime First Nations peoples, was an essential transportation link for European colonists. In speed, maneuverability, and carrying capacity it vied with any other seagoing technology of the time. The dugout canoe became an important site of engagement between First Nations peoples and settlers. European produced textual and visual records of the colonial period are examined to analyze the dugout canoe as a site of intercultural interaction with a focus upon the European representation. This research asks: Was the First Nations' dugout canoe essential to colonial development in British Columbia and, if so, were the First Nations acknowledged for this vital contribution? Analysis of primary archival resources (letters and journals), images (photographs, sketches and paintings) and colonial publications, such as the colonial dispatches, memoirs and newspaper accounts, demonstrate that indeed the dugout canoe and First Nations canoeists were essential to the development of the colony of British Columbia. However, these contributions were differentially acknowledged as the colony shifted from a fur trade-oriented operation to a settler-centric development that emphasized the alienation of First Nations’ land for settler use. By focusing research on the dugout canoe and its use and depiction by Europeans, connections between European colonists and First Nations canoeists, navigators and manufacturers are foregrounded. This focus brings together these two key historical players demonstrating their “entangled” nature (Thomas 1991:139) and breaking down “silences” and “trivializations” in history (Trouillot 1995:96), working to build an inclusive and connected history of colonial British Columbia. / Graduate

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of unprompted (spontaneous) speech in pidgin Chinook Jargon [synonyms Chinúk Wawa, Chinook]. The data come from a dialect I term ‘Kamloops Chinúk Wawa’, used in southern interior British Columbia circa 1900. I also present the first historical study and structural analysis of the shorthand-based ‘Chinuk pipa’ alphabet in which Kamloops Chinúk Wawa was written, primarily by Salish people. This study is made possible by the discovery of several hundred such texts, which I have transliterated and analyzed. The Basic Linguistic Theory-inspired (cf. Dixon 2010a,b) framework used here interprets Kamloops Chinúk Wawa as surprisingly ramified in morphological and syntactic structure, a finding in line with recent studies reexamining the status of pidgins by Bakker (e.g. 2003a,b, forthcoming) among others. Among the major findings: an unusually successful pidgin literacy including a widely circulated newspaper Kamloops Wawa, and language planning by the missionary J.M.R. Le Jeune, O.M.I. He planned both for the use of Kamloops Chinúk Wawa and this alphabet, and for their replacement by English. Additional sociolinguistic factors determining how Chinuk pipa was written included Salish preferences for learning to write by whole-word units (rather than letter by letter), and toward informal intra-community teaching of this first group literacy. In addition to compounding and conversion of lexical roots, Kamloops Chinúk Wawa morphology exploited three types of preposed grammatical morphemes—affixes, clitics, and particles. Virtually all are homonymous with and grammaticalized from demonstrably lexical morphs. Newly identified categories include ‘out-of-control’ transitivity marking and discourse markers including ‘admirative’ and ‘inferred’. Contrary to previous claims about Chinook Jargon (cf. Vrzic 1999), no overt passive voice exists in Kamloops Chinúk Wawa (nor probably in pan-Chinook Jargon), but a previously unknown ‘passivization strategy’ of implied agent demotion is brought to light. A realis-irrealis modality distinction is reflected at several scopal levels: phrase, clause and sentence. Functional differences are observed between irrealis clauses before and after main clauses. Polar questions are restricted to subordinate clauses, while alternative questions are formed by simple juxtaposition of irrealis clauses. Main-clause interrogatives are limited to content-question forms, optionally with irrealis marking. Positive imperatives are normally signaled by a mood particle on a realis clause, negative ones by a negative particle. Aspect is marked in a three-part ingressive-imperfective-completive system, with a marginal fourth ‘conative’. One negative operator has characteristically clausal, and another phrasal, scope. One copula is newly attested. Degree marking is largely confined to ‘predicative’ adjectives (copula complements). Several novel features of pronoun usage possibly reflect Salish L1 grammatical habits: a consistent animacy distinction occurs in third-person pronouns, where pan-Chinook Jargon 'iaka' (animate singular) and 'klaska' (animate plural) contrast with a null inanimate object/patient; this null and 'iaka' are non-specified for number; in intransitives, double exponence (repetition) of pronominal subjects is common; and pan-Chinook Jargon 'klaksta' (originally ‘who?’) and 'klaska' (originally ‘they’) vary freely with each other. Certain etymologically content-question forms are used also as determiners. Kamloops Chinúk Wawa’s numeral system is unusually regular and small for a pidgin; numerals are also used ordinally in a distinctly Chinook Jargon type of personal name. There is a null allomorph of the preposition 'kopa'. This preposition has additionally a realis complementizer function (with nominalized predicates) distinct from irrealis 'pus' (with verbal ones). Conjunction 'pi' also has a function in a syntactic focus-increasing and -reducing system. / Graduate

Between 1960 and 1992, American artist George Tsutakawa (1910 – 1997) created more than sixty fountain sculptures for publicly accessible sites in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The vast majority were made by shaping sheet bronze into geometric and organically inspired abstract forms, often arranged around a vertical axis. Though postwar modernist artistic production and the issues it raises have been widely interrogated since the 1970s, and public art has been a major area of study since about 1980, Tsutakawa's fountains present a major intervention in North America's urban fabric that is not well-documented and remains almost completely untheorized. In addition to playing a key role in Seattle's development as an internationally recognized leader in public art, my dissertation argues that these works provide early evidence of a linked concern with nature and spirituality that has come to be understood as characteristic of the Pacific Northwest. Tsutakawa was born in Seattle, but raised and educated primarily in Japan prior to training as an artist at the University of Washington, then teaching in UW's Schools of Art and Architecture. His complicated personal history, which in World War II included being drafted into the U.S. army, while family members were interned and their property confiscated, led art historian Gervais Reed to declare that Tsutakawa was aligned with neither Japan nor America – that he and his art existed somewhere in-between. There is much truth in Reed's statement; however, artistically, such dualistic assessments deny the rich interplay of cultural allusions in Tsutakawa's fountains. Major inspirations included the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko, Himalayan stone cairns, Japanese heraldic emblems, First Nations carvings, and Bauhaus theory. Focusing on the early commissions, completed during the 1960s, my study examines the artist's debts to intercultural networks of artistic exchange – between North America, Asia, and Europe – operative in the early and mid-twentieth century, and in some cases before. I argue that, with his fountain sculptures, this Japanese American artist sought to integrate and balance such binaries as nature/culture, intuition/reason, and spiritual/material, which have long served to support the construction of East and West as opposed conceptual categories. / Graduate