Guy Lanouenearly two hundred people, was reduced to about seventy-five people.
Had this occurred in a non-Indian population, I am sure it would have
been classified as genocide by the media. No doubt, Sekani feelings of
despair were exacerbated because they were ignored, left to fend for
themselves except for government retraining programs mostly aimed
at the young who spoke English fluently. The relationship between
traditional knowledge and social continuity was irrevocably broken.
Old and young no longer lived in the same world.
Contrary to some contemporary ideas of how culture is transmit-
ted in Indian societies, the Sekani placed no great stock in orality or
on the role of “elders” as repositories of knowledge, nor did they
have any concept of “tradition” as such. It was not normal for “el-
ders” to give explicit instructions in the lore and practices younger
people would need as adults. In fact, it is arguable that the category
“elders” is a response to the politicization of Indian bands by federal-
government policies that have created a new Indian elite (Bousquet
2002 ) whose political constituency and power base is more attuned
to interacting with various Euro-Canadian government power struc-
tures than it is to solving problems of spatial organization, the nor-
mal domain of power in these hunting peoples. These “new” politi-
cians often seek legitimacy by extolling their links to “tradition” and
so claim a continuity of political practices by appealing to the older
generations, who are generally excluded from the new power struc-
ture by choice and culture. Sekani learned by doing, especially since
it was believed that knowledge was keyed to individuals and could
not really be shared except at the most banal levels such as teaching
someone about topography. Parents saw their roles as placing chil-
dren in situations that would lead to learning by experience. For ex-
ample, young men had to learn to acquire power by entering a par-
ticular sort of situation.
Acquiring power was based on Sekani beliefs concerning the spe-
cial and indescribable qualities that are part of the transcendental di-
mension of animals, which is thought to be a holdover from the be-
ginning of time. Sekani are ambiguous about the creation of the world
but clear about the Transformation, an epoch in which a Trickster-like
creature (a beaver for the Sekani, although it takes many forms among