Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology) / Simon Fraser University.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology) / Simon Fraser University.

This thesis attempts to demonstrate that the symbolic significance of food gathering among the Lillooet, Thompson, and Shuswap generates two major paradoxes, cannibalism and infertility, which arise from a sexual imbalance revealed by certain myths related to food gathering, and that the shaman is a potential mediator of these paradoxes. Initially, I suggest that an analysis of the symbol system of a culture affords an excellent access to native perspective if the analyst is able to avoid the influences of his ethnocentrism with respect to his methodology and selection of data. Thus, analytical methods must possess universal applicability, and the data (native categories of thought) might be selected from native solutions to problems occurring to all humans--e.g., cultural solutions and conceptions of those solutions to food gathering. The second chapter considers some definitions of symbols proposed by Geertz, Langer, and others and suggests a "working definition" of a symbol as a locus of logical operations. It is then possible to apply structural methods of analysis (metaphor, binary opposition, transformation, et al) to a symbol system as structuralism professes to consider the universal structure of cognition. In the third chapter, I provide some ethnographic notes concerning the manifestation of one underlying Plateau cultural principle, equality, to the general social structure of the Lillooet, Thompson, and Shuswap with respect to political organization, food gathering, and the sexual division of labor. Although men and women are considered to be generally equal, a strict distinction is maintained between sexual roles. Hence, I suggest that this balance plus necessary distinction might be termed a "sexual balance." Also, the chapter briefly considers the unusual capacities of shamans and suggests that, as shamans are not subject to restrictions imposed upon the normative group, they may be able to manipulate the rigid sexual distinction if the sexual balance is upset. The fourth and fifth chapters discuss the symbolic significance of food gathering. In the fourth chapter, I suggest that women maintain a metaphorical sexual relationship with the roots they gather. As this relationship is strictly metaphorical, however, serious problems accrue when the relationship becomes literal and when men gather roots. Another myth succinctly states the ultimate results of a violation of a woman's metaphorical relationship with food. This violation generates an excessive cultural union or marriage between two men (necessarily infertile) and an excessive natural union (between woman and tree) whose issue, blood transformed into blackberries, poses the problem of cannibalism to the people. The fifth chapter suggests that women who hunt also pose a threat to the cognitive system as men appear to have a metaphorical sexual relationship with deer and other game animals. Two myths suggest a former intimate relationship between women and deer. Menstrual blood appears to function as a differentiator of women from deer. The chapter focuses on the logical implications of the hunting ventures of a cannibal woman. This woman not only opposes the role of women by hunting, but also possesses a snake-like vagina which offers death as opposed to life (as in childbirth). The sixth chapter examines shamans (with respect to myths and ritual actions) as mediators of the two paradoxes, cannibalism and infertility. First, I discuss two myths relating the drilling and sucking practices of mosquitoes to those of thunder. These practices echo shamanic curative techniques. Also, the symbolic significance of the earth people's spiral ascent to the sky world parallels the significance of the spiral in other contexts. Finally, some rituals and myths concerning shamanic performance consider certain problems (including improper sexual distinction, excessive sibling intimacy, and lack of potential spouses) which generate infertility. The concluding chapter reviews the strategy for analysis and the logical implications of the symbolism of food gathering as well as the potential of the shaman to mediate paradoxes emerging from the logical implications. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 1993. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-89). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Faculty of Education) / Simon Fraser University.

Twenty years ago the Shuswap Indian community of Alkali Lake was like many other reserve communities in the northern Interior of British Columbia, with life characterized by high levels of drinking, violence, suicide, accidental death, and child abuse and neglect. In 1973 this pattern of life was challenged by the newly-elected Band chief and his wife. Working as a team, and by drawing upon the powers of the Band Office and applying confrontational tactics, the two initiated an anti-alcohol campaign in the community. For three years the chief and his wife persisted, despite extreme hostility and occasional threats against their lives. In 1976 their efforts began to achieve success. By 1981 most adults on the reserve had become committed to a sober lifestyle, and by 1985 the reserve was essentially "dry". This thesis traces the development of the recent events at Alkali Lake. To refer to these events the term "Sobriety movement" has been used. The movement is analyzed largely from a political processual point of view, with attention paid not to the underlying sources of "deprivation" or "stress" that may have generated the movement, but to the strategies and tactics utilized by the movement leaders to promote their cause. In this manner the resource mobilization approach to the study of social movements provides an analytical framework for this study. Several factors are identified as key ingredients in the success of the Sobriety movement. First, the Band chief and his wife were able to use effectively the powers of the Band Office to impose economic sanctions on drinkers. Second, as community leaders they were able to solicit the aid of powerful outside agencies, namely the R.C.M.P. and the Ministry of Human Resources, to support them in their efforts. Third, the personal resources of the two leaders - their courage, strength and determination -were crucial to the movement's survival during its early years. The success of the Sobriety movement can not be understood simply by looking at the leaders' actions. The social and cultural context within which they operated must also be considered. Three underlying and fundamentally important factors are identified: the pre-existence of a strong sense of community within the Alkali Lake village, the inherent readiness of the Alkali Lake people for new leadership and social change, and the use by the Band chief of a leadership tradition that permitted the application of strict punishment as a means of social control. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

Much of the literature on First Nations education is written by Euro- Canadians. However, in recent years, American Indian scholars have initiated research on gifted and talented First Nations children. The purpose of this paper is to present eminent Shuswap womens' perspectives of traditional ways gifted and talented girls were identified and nurtured over their lifetime. Seven eminent Shuswap Elder women from the Interior of British Columbia, whose gifts and talents were identified and nurtured form the nucleus of the study. Because Shuswap people traditionally have an oral culture very little was written of the Shuswap peoples' experiences, therefore, interviewing was deemed the most appropriate research technique. Through the Elder's own words, the experiences of the identification and nurturance of their gifts and talents in the four phases of life (childhood, adolescence, adult, Elder) are presented. The Elders were selected to represent various time periods and several different bands of the Shuswap Nation. All of them have been recognized for their service to the people locally, provincially, or nationally. The most outstanding feature which is revealed by this study is the extent to which the Elders struggled to stay on the path paved for them throughout their lives since their grandparents identified their gifts and talents. Their struggles may be viewed the same way First Nation people continue their fight for their aboriginal rights. The need to continue the work of preserving, recording, perpetuating and enhancing the Shuswap language, history and culture is shown here. Implications for further qualitative research are numerous. From specific aspects of culture such as the Shuswap concept of giftedness and the traditional ways Shuswap people identified and nurtured boys to more general comparisons of finding a national First Nations concept of giftedness or trying to determine how band-operated school are trying to identify and nurture their gifted and talented students, there are many possibilities. What has emerged is strong individuals and cultural group healing, adapting and surviving very well despite the dark ages.

Much of the literature on First Nations education is written by Euro- Canadians. However, in recent years, American Indian scholars have initiated research on gifted and talented First Nations children. The purpose of this paper is to present eminent Shuswap womens' perspectives of traditional ways gifted and talented girls were identified and nurtured over their lifetime. Seven eminent Shuswap Elder women from the Interior of British Columbia, whose gifts and talents were identified and nurtured form the nucleus of the study. Because Shuswap people traditionally have an oral culture very little was written of the Shuswap peoples' experiences, therefore, interviewing was deemed the most appropriate research technique. Through the Elder's own words, the experiences of the identification and nurturance of their gifts and talents in the four phases of life (childhood, adolescence, adult, Elder) are presented. The Elders were selected to represent various time periods and several different bands of the Shuswap Nation. All of them have been recognized for their service to the people locally, provincially, or nationally. The most outstanding feature which is revealed by this study is the extent to which the Elders struggled to stay on the path paved for them throughout their lives since their grandparents identified their gifts and talents. Their struggles may be viewed the same way First Nation people continue their fight for their aboriginal rights. The need to continue the work of preserving, recording, perpetuating and enhancing the Shuswap language, history and culture is shown here. Implications for further qualitative research are numerous. From specific aspects of culture such as the Shuswap concept of giftedness and the traditional ways Shuswap people identified and nurtured boys to more general comparisons of finding a national First Nations concept of giftedness or trying to determine how band-operated school are trying to identify and nurture their gifted and talented students, there are many possibilities. What has emerged is strong individuals and cultural group healing, adapting and surviving very well despite the dark ages. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

In the summer of 1995, eighteen protesters came into armed conflict with over 400 RCMP officers and soldiers in central British Columbia. The conflict escalated into one of the costliest police operations in Canadian history. Many accounts of Aboriginal aggression provided by the RCMP are not consistent with evidence disclosed at the trial of the protesters. Moreover, the substance of the legal arguments at the heart of the Ts' Peten Defenders' resistance received little attention or serous analysis by state officials, police or the media. The RCMP constructed the Ts' Peten Defenders as terrorists and downplayed the use of state force that included military weaponry, land explosives and police snipers, who received orders to shoot to kill. Serious questions remain about the role of the RCMP, who acted as the enforement arm of state policies designed to constrain the effort to internationalize the Aboriginal title question. / iii, 225, [44] leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

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