Bruce Granville Millermunities to the topic we refer to as the anthropology of extraordi-
nary experiences? What is the play of power within communities and
between communities and the outside world that must be accounted
for in such an anthropology? I examine these issues and provide il-
lustrations from my own experiences with members of the Coast Sal-
ish communities of Washington State and the province of British Co-
lumbia over the last thirty years.
There are some fifty Coast Salish communities concentrated in Puget
Sound, Washington, and along the lower stretches of the Fraser River
and on Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland in British Co-
lumbia (Miller 2002 ). My work in these communities has focused
on justice and legal practices, tribal political life, and relations with
the mainstream societies of Canada and the United States. As the co-
director of a graduate ethnographic field school sponsored by my own
university, the University of British Columbia, in conjunction with the
Stó:lo ̄ Nation, a Coast Salish tribe, I’ve had the opportunity to spend
eight summers in a longhouse, the site of winter spirit dancing, with
community members and hosted by a band chief and ritualist. In part,
the field school participants and I were invited in to help keep spirits
out of the longhouse during summer months, but spirits clearly per-
vade the location, and anthropology graduate students, particularly
those who are themselves indigenous, have had complex, sometimes
disturbing, relations with the spirits in this location.
As I will indicate in the last part of this paper, my family and I have
had our own relationships with the spirit beings there and in other
longhouses. I wish to consider my own examples of extraordinary
experience to make my related argument that an experience-near an-
thropology may no longer be seen as a fringe activity, but, rather, as
increasingly in touch with changes in social science methods that are
more responsible to indigenous peoples’ concerns and perspectives.
I also must add that I do not find it unusual for anthropologists to
have experienced the “extraordinary” events I recount here. Indeed,
it is probably more often the case than the other way around. Nor am
I suggesting that only indigenous peoples engage in such events and
processes. Clearly, other peoples have well-known cultural practices
such as second sight. However, social scientists ordinarily do not yet