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than the converse. There are other, darker consequences, however,
to this participation, including the entry into worlds of violence and
danger, the creation of obligations that are difficult or impossible to
meet, and the risks of depoliticizing and exoticizing indigenous expe-
riences. Miller nonetheless argues that these risks themselves lead to
new opportunities for engagement.
In the following chapter, “Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Eth-
ical Guidelines,” Jean-Guy Goulet addresses the question raised by
the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Re-
search Involving Humans, particularly as it pertains to research with
aboriginal peoples. The question asked by the Canadian Research Tri-
Councils is the following: What does it mean to involve “other hu-
mans” in a research project when investigators and aboriginal peo-
ples belong to two different cultures? Goulet argues that this question
is best answered once we have considered the significance for one’s
research project of one’s radical participation as a human being with
other human beings in their world. He shows how novel ethical is-
sues arise when the investigator is incorporated in an aboriginal world
that includes interaction with spiritual beings. Based on Spiro’s con-
cept of culture as a set of propositions (or beliefs) held to be true by
members of a society, Goulet proposes an analysis of this account that
sheds light on the conditions for mutual understanding within and in
between different lifeworlds.
In “Experiences of Power among the Sekani of Northern British
Columbia: Sharing Meaning through Time and Space,” Guy Lanoue
starts with his shared experience with the Sekani of northern Brit-
ish Columbia (Canada) of what he was conditioned to consider as
“unscientific” and thus “unknowable” and what they consider “un-
sayable” (but not unknowable). He describes Sekani experiences of
power (which is a special state of being that is not considered the re-
sult of empirically verifiable conditions) and examines how these no-
tions are communicated without recourse to semantics, leaving open
the possibility that meaning, arising out of each person’s individual in-
terpretative frame, can be shared through “mythical” means. Lanoue
shows how transformations in one’s personal life may lead to power-
ful insights in the cultures of others. It is only when he abandoned his
Epistemological and Ethical Thresholds
