History
History
Abstract
Canadian Anthropology came of age in the 1960s and 70s. Between 1960 and 1975 alone, UBC’s Department of Anthropology added thirty-eight new faculty members to its ranks. Because many of the new hires were left-leaning transplants from the USA, they introduced a radicalism to many Canadian campuses. An endless flow of baby boomers kept Anthropology’s classrooms filled. The country’s Indigenous peoples provided the discipline with much of its core curriculum and research grants.
The tendency today is to view the Indigenous participants in this phase of Anthropology as pawns – “informants” or even “traitors” -- in a largely exploitative academic exercise. Such a position overlooks agency on the Indigenous side. While the anthropologists (often graduate students) set up and paid for the 1970s/80s projects, their Indigenous hosts often took the lead. As the first generation of English speakers, many saw the newly-minted ethnographers -- tape recorders and notepads in hand –as vehicles to voice directly (rather than second-hand or through translation) their own perspectives on their history, language loss, settler colonialism, land claims, residential schooling, and much more. This paper argues that many Indigenous participants in the 1970s/80s anthropological projects deserve credit for their activist roles in shifting Anthropology away from the generic, large-group surveys that had defined the discipline in the 1940s/50s/60s to the more intimate, one-on-one ethical listening model that emerged in the 1980s/90s.
Wendy Wickwire, Emeritus Professor and Adjunct, University of Victoria