Return to search

Intercultural Mediations: Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Early Twentieth-Century First Nations Literature

This thesis examines the implications of three early twentieth-century First Nations
collaborations that were produced in the context of salvage ethnography and attributed
mainly to their non-aboriginal collaborators: Henry Tate and Franz Boas’s
Tsimshian Mythology (1916), E. Pauline Johnson and Chief Joe Capilano’s Legends of Vancouver (1912), and Chief William K’HHalserten Sepass and Eloise Street’s
Sepass Poems (1911-15). By using a versioning framework to attain a “fluid” reading across variants, I can identify the intercultural mediations across versions and attempt to engage in a form of digital repatriation. Through digital archives like Kimberly Christen’s “Mukurtu” project, these cultural documents can be repatriated and accessed only by those who, following cultural protocols, should have access. Ultimately, an analysis of variants suggests that while salvage ethnography privileged the non-aboriginal collaborators, the changeability of these narratives across versions functions to perpetually unfix these texts from a static concept of aboriginal identity.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:NSHD.ca#10222/36234
Date14 August 2013
CreatorsShield, Kathryn Alix
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

Page generated in 0.002 seconds