Goulet.pdf

Bruce Granville Miller

more open to their contributions. In addition, our current period is
one in which indigenous community members view mainstream soci-
ety as defective in significant ways and demand or simply assume that
we take their views seriously and begin to engage the world in what
they take to be better ways.
There are also risks to this approach to research. Researchers may
overlook other, more mundane dimensions of life, and they may de-
pict communities as ahistorical, timeless, and “authentic.” Research-
ers may enter into long-term reciprocal relationships whose entail-
ments they cannot fulfill. In this case, it is disengagement rather than
engagement that may be the most respectful route and the one that
most fully acknowledges local epistemologies. These risks can be man-
aged, however. And, as the story of my son’s vision reveals, I might
not believe in spirits, but they believe in me, or perhaps more accu-
rately, my family. It’s hard to overlook and harder still to imagine why
we would want to.

Notes

1. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper to appear in the Acts of the XXVI In-
   ternational Congress of Americanists, following the May 2004 meetings in Perugia, Italy.


2. In legal arguments, “time immemorial” is a phrase that may specifically reference, de-
   pending on the jurisdiction, the date when the British Crown assumed control or the year
   when a treaty was signed between the U.S. government and tribes. It does not refer to the
   deep past, in the way that indigenous people and some anthropologists occasionally use
   the phrase. Similarly, legal proceedings have turned on nineteenth-century terminology that
   included whales in the category of “fish.” Anthropological use of “tribe,” within a neo-
   evolutionary scheme of social organization (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states), is very differ-
   ent from legal terminology, which references specific holders of recognition by the state.


3. Personal communications, Sonny McHalsie, cultural adviser to the Stó:lo ̄ Nation,
   February4, 2003, and March 11, 2004.