Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs

David Mardiros is a lawyer and anthropological consultant in Terrace,
British Columbia.

The case of Delgamuukw v. The Queen has, in many ways, become more
famous for the negative things said and done by the trial judge when it
was decided in 1991 than for the seminal principles of Aboriginal title
set out by the Supreme Court of Canada when the case came to its final
conclusion some seven years later. Although the statements and rulings
of the Honourable Chief Justice McEachern of the Supreme Court of
British Columbia receive much deserved attention in this book, Our Box
Was Full is much more than an analysis of the misunderstandings and
miscommunications that occurred in the law courts. As with any good
ethnography, it provides a rich insight into the current cultural,
social, and economic reality of the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en peoples of
northwest British Columbia.

Although the introductory and concluding chapters of the book
(including several very interesting forewords and afterwords) provide an
interesting commentary on some of the failures of the Euro-Canadian
legal system to deal with the claims of Aboriginal peoples, much of this
material is not new. Indeed, the author and other commentators have
published a number of works that have become mainstays in university
courses dealing with the clash of cultures that occurs when Aboriginal
claims are litigated. The strength of this work, for both an academic
and a general audience, is in the rich description of the annual round,
social hierarchy, and complex economy of the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en.
The insights that Daly provides into the richness of the culture give
the reader a real appreciation of the monumental task faced by
Aboriginal plaintiffs, their lawyers, and anthropologists in explaining
this world in a court of law.