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In many western countries, judicial decisions are based on “black letter law” – text-based, well-established law. Within this tradition, testimony based on what witnesses have heard from others, known as hearsay, cannot be considered as legitimate evidence. This interdiction, however, presents significant difficulties for Aboriginal plaintiffs who rely on oral rather than written accounts for knowledge transmission. This important book breaks new ground by asking how oral histories might be incorporated into the existing court system. Through compelling analysis of Aboriginal, legal, and anthropological concepts of fact and evidence, Oral History on Trial traces the long trajectory of oral history from community to court, and offers a sophisticated critique of the Crown’s use of Aboriginal materials in key cases. A bold intervention in legal and anthropological scholarship, this book is a timely consideration of an urgent issue facing Indigenous communities worldwide and the courts hearing their cases.
The Coast Salish peoples of western Washington and British Columbia have never been subjected to the same concerted anthropological scrutiny as have their Northwest Coast counterparts. For a long time they were viewed simply as a subset of the Northwest Coast culture area, and because they underwent assimilative pressures early on it was thought that little of their culture remained to be preserved. In the early 1950s, however, anthropologist Wayne Suttles was among the first to publish pioneering and sustained research about the Coast Salish, contending that they were worthy of study in their own right. Be of Good Mind is a necessary follow-up to Suttles’ seminal work. This is the first b...
In the last few decades, as indigenous peoples have increasingly sought out and sometimes demanded sovereignty on a variety of fronts, their relationships with encompassing nation-states have become ever more complicated and troubled. The varying ways that today?s nation-states attempt to manage?and often render invisible?contemporary indigenous peoples is the subject of this global comparative study.øBeginning with his own work along the northwest coast of North America and drawing on contemporary examples from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, Bruce Granville Miller examines how national governments classify, govern, and control the indigenous populations within their boundaries th...
What happens when anthropologists lose themselves during fieldwork while attempting to understand divergent cultures? When they stray from rigorous agendas and are forced to confront radically unexpected or unexplained experiences? In Extraordinary Anthropology leading ethnographers from across the globe discuss the importance of the deeply personal and emotionally volatile ?ecstatic? side of fieldwork. ø Anthropologists who have worked in communities in Central America, North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia share their intimate experiences of tranformations in the field through details of significant dreams, haunting visions, and their own conflicting emotional tensions. Their experie...
For the indigenous peoples of North America, the history of colonialism has often meant a distortion of history, even, in some cases, a loss or distorted sense of their own native practices of justice. How contemporary native communities have dealt quite differently with this dilemma is the subject of The Problem of Justice, a richly textured ethnographic study of indigenous peoples struggling to reestablish control over justice in the face of conflicting external and internal pressures. The peoples discussed in this book are the Coast Salish communities along the northwest coast of North America: the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in Washington State, the St¢:lo Nation in British Columbia, and ...
On the twelfth floor of an undistinguished-looking high-rise, a tribunal adjudicates the human rights of Indigenous individuals. Why isn't the process working? Witness to the Human Rights Tribunals draws on testimony, ethnographic data, and years of tribunal decisions to show how specific cases are fought, and offers an in-depth look at anthropological expertise in the courts. Bruce Miller's candid analysis reveals the double-edged nature of the tribunal, which both protects human rights and re-engages the trauma of discrimination that suffuses social and legal systems. He definitively concludes that any reform must recognize symbolic trauma before Indigenous claimants can receive appropriate justice.
In these essays Bruce Granville Miller addresses critical issues facing contemporary Coast Salish people and communities. Building on his own fieldwork, on the salvage ethnography of an earlier generation, and the work of present-day anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Miller describes current-day tribes and bands as composed of family corporate groups and details their role in the transformations of gender and political systems. Miller examines tribal codes and courts, historical concepts and practices of justice, and the relations between the mainstream populations of British Columbia and Washington and the Coast Salish themselves, including the circumstances of non-recognized tribes among the Coast Salish and world wide, the efforts to use oral traditions and the language of sacredness in court, and in media reporting. Engaging theories of borderlands and globalization, Miller writes that studies of Coast Salish are constrained by the international border as are the people themselves, especially post-9/11.
JONA Volume 50 Number 1 - Spring 2016 Tales from the River Bank: An In Situ Stone Bowl Found along the Shores of the Salish Sea on the Southern Northwest Coast of British Columbia - Rudy Reimer, Pierre Freile, Kenneth Fath, and John Clague Localized Rituals and Individual Spirit Powers: Discerning Regional Autonomy through Religious Practices in the Coast Salish Past - Bill Angelbeck Assessing the Nutritional Value of Freshwater Mussels on the Western Snake River - Jeremy W. Johnson and Mark G. Plew Snoqualmie Falls: The First Traditional Cultural Property in Washington State Listed in the National Register of Historic Places - Jay Miller with Kenneth Tollefson The Archaeology of Obsidian Occurrence in Stone Tool Manufacture and Use along Two Reaches of the Northern Mid-Columbia River, Washington - Sonja C. Kassa and Patrick T. McCutcheon The Right Tool for the Job: Screen Size and Sample Size in Site Detection - Bradley Bowden Alphonse Louis Pinart among the Natives of Alaska - Richard L. Bland
The books that give us insight into human motives and experience often are based on fieldwork: people spending time with others where those others live and work. In the World Observed sixteen researchers tell how their fieldwork experiences have been transmuted into understanding. The settings range from a women's prison in Indiana to a village in Egypt, from a streetcorner in Palermo to a gypsy funeral in New York. The authors - anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, historians - relate their struggles to find meaning in the chaos of data and the ethical problems they had to confront and resolve. Their fascinating stories offer fresh insight into how we know what we know.
An important new volume showcasing a wide range of faith-based responses to one of today’s most pressing social issues, challenging us to expand our ways of understanding. Land of Stark Contrasts brings together the work of social scientists, ethicists, and theologians exploring the profound role of religion in understanding and responding to homelessness and housing insecurity in all corners of the United States—from Seattle, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley to Dallas and San Antonio to Washington, D.C., and Boston. Together, the essays of Land of Stark Contrasts chart intriguing ways forward for future initiatives to address the root causes of homelessness. In this way they are essent...