Matthew, Tina

Technology has drawn our world closer, giving us tools to share words, texts, pictures and messages with little or no effort. However this unprecedented reach can also allow us to overstep, overshare and overwhelm—especially when the existing practices tend to be viewed as proper, institutional and official. Indigenous speech communities have a strong history of contributing data to Western research efforts, though these projects generally refine research data in Western/non-Indigenous terms. That is to say the units of analysis are increasingly specific with respect to Western frameworks. However, this can be problematic for Indigenous knowledge holders seeking to refine Indigenous Revitalization tools. The Ktunaxa Nation has engaged in a new approach to research that focuses on refining data from both Western and Indigenous perspectives. The Ktunaxa Nation Council’s Elders Working Group has participated in two recent Federal research grants as vehicles to exchange scientific concepts between Western and Ktunaxa social and health sciences frameworks, with the goal of increasing the specificity of data for both groups. This “collaboratively rational” coevolution offers benefits for both Western and Indigenous partners. For Western researchers the relationship provides network stability in the face of increasingly diverse Western researchers and limited Indigenous resource experts. For the Ktunaxa Nation the approach has reified new understandings about Truth and Reconciliation and inclusion of Indigenous nuance in scientific conversation.

Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws is a journey through the 10,000-year history of the Interior Plateau nation in British Columbia. Told through the lens of past and present Indigenous storytellers, this volume detail how a homeland has shaped Secwépemc existence while the Secwépemc have in turn shaped their homeland. Marianne Ignace and Ronald Ignace, with contributions from ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, archaeologist Mike Rousseau, and geographer Ken Favrholdt, compellingly weave together Secwépemc narratives about ancestors deeds. They demonstrate how these stories are the manifestation of Indigenous laws (stsq'ey') for social and moral conduct among humans and all sentient beings on the land, and for social and political relations within the nation and with outsiders. Breathing new life into stories about past transformations, the authors place these narratives in dialogue with written historical sources and knowledge from archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, earth science, and ethnobiology. In addition to a wealth of detail about Secwépemc land stewardship, the social and political order, and spiritual concepts and relations embedded in the Indigenous language, the book shows how between the mid-1800s and 1920s the Secwépemc people resisted devastating oppression and the theft of their land, and fought to retain political autonomy while tenaciously maintaining a connection with their homeland, ancestors, and laws. An exemplary work in collaboration, Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws points to the ways in which Indigenous laws and traditions can guide present and future social and political process among the Secwépemc and with settler society.