The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community

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

Ethnography, the detailed description of a cultural group from the
perspective of its members, has come a long way in the past few decades.
Once the preserve of scholars interested in describing exotic and
endangered cultures, it was in danger of becoming endangered itself with
increasing globalization and the disappearance of what were seen as
“traditional” cultures. Despite changing fashion, the methodology
itself, focusing on painstaking participant observation and
interviewing, still had validity. As Elizabeth Furniss describes in her
introduction to this volume, anthropology has been urged to reinvent
itself—to provide critiques of our own society through examinations of
the assumptions and perceptions that guide and shape our appreciation of
other cultures. This book, a study of cultural politics in Williams
Lake, British Columbia, is an admirable exponent of this reinvention of
ethnography.

The study of relations between aboriginal and nonaboriginal people in
rural areas of Canada is a difficult topic to explore with any
sensitivity. Furniss discusses the fact that there are a number of
different aboriginal cultural groups in the study area, and a number of
factions exist within those cultural groups. Similarly, the
nonaboriginal population is not monolithic. Diametrically opposed
positions about the settlement of Native land claims are represented in
the local communities as they are in the rest of Canada.

Furniss acknowledges that she has tried to take a different approach to
describing the state of relations between the aboriginal and
nonaboriginal residents of Williams Lake. In place of the orthodox
ethnographic technique of describing and analyzing the perspectives of
individuals from a single perspective—the perspective of one group or
community—the author aims to gain an understanding of the two
different (and often opposed) cultural realities. Furniss presents
information gleaned from a variety of sources, historical and
ethnographic, and brings them together to form a balanced view of the
perceptions of both aboriginal and nonaboriginal people. Hence the book
is a refreshing portrait of diversity both within and between the
aboriginal and nonaboriginal communities, and the variety of views
represented shows the complexity of the issues within their proper
historical and cultural contexts.