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Experiences of Power among the Sekani
apparent exchange of questions and answers between anthropolo-
gist and host as a hierarchical relationship. By asking questions that
emerge from a series of insights temporally bounded by the field ex-
perience, anthropologists may be contributing to reproducing an in-
stitutionalized form of anthropology that needs its hypotheses to ob-
tain funding. It may be possible, in other words, that the best insights
come from forgetting we are anthropologists while in the field and
from confronting our emotional reactions to the field after the fact.
It may be that the condition of being “out of our minds” is an arti-
ficially produced condition unique to the anthropological endeavor.
Perhaps we should pay attention to what transpires while we are out
of our minds at other times, in other places.
I am not denying that being “out of our minds” in the field occurs
and leads to rich and immediate insights that would otherwise be inac-
cessible. Here, however, I would like to explore how one can be “out
of one’s mind” long after the fieldwork experience, and suggest that
the triggers may have little to do with the strangeness of the field ex-
perience bounded by time and place and more to do with the anthro-
pologist’s emotional condition. Specifically, I would like to describe
an encounter with one trait of Sekani culture, “power,” that took me
twenty years to understand, although “understanding” became possi-
ble only when I changed my definition of understanding and therefore
inadvertently came closer to Sekani thoughts on power. This, however,
was not so much the result of being “out of my mind” in the field as it
was the confluence of many coincidences and the inadvertent result of
many choices made over a twenty-year period. To help readers better
understand the process, I will briefly describe some aspects of power
as it is experienced by the Sekani and by other northern Athapaskan
and Algonquian-speaking peoples, reminding the reader that this de-
scription is the result of twenty years of struggle.
Sekani Thoughts on Power
Power is not the correct word for the quality I wish to describe because
it implies relations of force, and a Western notion of agency. Force and
agency are different for the Sekani, as I argued recently (Ferrara and
