Weiss arrived in Haida Gwai with the weight of dead generations of settler anthropologists before him. These sojourners were drawn to the deep sea Haida homeland. Their fascination was rooted in a settler sense of deracination and dislocation – it is as though the settlers’ own sense of loss is salved through emersion within another peoples’ place-based society isolated and alone off the coast of Canada. After visiting the anthropologists returned home with chests and minds filled with the memorabilia of their visits. They proceed to write books that speak to audiences in metropolitan centers of colonialism, not Haida Gwaii. Weiss is part of the sojourners’ tradition, though he also speaks from within an emerging new anthropological voice that is as much concerned with Indigenous subjects as it is with the settlers’ own implication within colonialism. It’s not our father’s anthropology; it’s new kind of permission seeking sensitive anthropology that at least tries to be less controlling.
Weis is at pains to show (implicitly and explicitly) that he is not imposing himself upon Haida people to do his study. We learn clues, for example, about how Weiss navigated permission in his acknowledgements (Pp. xi-x) where he thanks, using the Haida word, the communities of Old Masset and Masset: “And first among firsts, I am grateful to Agnes Davis and her family. I learned the Haida word for thank you, how.aa, sitting at Noonie Aggie’s kitchen table, and she [and family] … were my first hosts in Old Massett” (Pp. xi). Later Weiss thanks the formal governance structures of the Haida Nation (Pp x). There is no clear foregrounding of how permission was obtained – but we know from the acknowledgements, and textual inclusions throughout the book, that it was indeed granted. This is a common thread in current ethnographies that no longer include those painfully self-reflexive chapters of an earlier generation of experimental ethnographies. Instead authors paint their authenticity and sincerity through measured inclusions – such as the challenge from ‘Lauren’ Weiss faced discussed in chapter one (see, pages 21-25): ‘what makes you different from all the others who have come and gone’ Lauren asks. Weiss doesn’t really tell us directly, but he clearly leaves the impression that he is different and, I would have to agree – he is trying hard to apply the lessons Indigenous peoples have been trying to teach settlers – respect us as we are, don’t tell us what we should be, pay attention to who we are as real present people in our own worlds.
I share a space with Weiss as an anthropologist. I share a space with Haida as an Indigenous person from a neighbouring coastal nation (Gitxaała). My own family links me to Haida people, I share an understanding of ’home’ in the same manner that Weiss describes for the Haida (pp. 63-90). As a Gitxaała person I have witnessed settler sojourners passing through our laxyuup (territory/home). As an Indigenous person paid to be an anthropologist I am of mixed minds when I read works like Weiss’. Shaping the Future, and other recent similar books are not Evans Pritchard ethnographies in which The Nuer are marched into the ethnographer’s tent from their refugee camp to answer his questions. Yet, the agenda remains driven by concerns and forces and theories that arise from the settler’s world and responds to questions the settler is asking. Where is attention paid to the authority and jurisdiction of the sm’gygyet (hereditary leadership)? The anthropologist asks for permission, but what are the conditions under which this permission is granted? This is not a critique of how individual anthropologists build respect and rapport, but an interrogation of the wider context within which individuals manoeuvre as they seek permission. Weiss does a good job navigating this dilemma.
The strength of the book is its focus on Indigenous futures. Futures here used to examine what people, specifically Haida, are doing to actively engage and shape their world. Set against a disciplinary history of chronicling the ‘disappearing Indian’ and a settler state actions to ensure ‘Indians’ did disappear Weiss listens to the different Haida voices that speak to actually existing Haida conceptions of where they are going. Weiss listens carefully to his Haida interlocuters and allows there is more than one Haida act of future making. This is important, especially in a discipline (anthropology) so strongly influenced by the euro-centrism of Durkheimian thinking. What might, perhaps link the rich diversity of future making is how it is “a way of thinking [and, I would suggest, acting] out from within the temporal brackets of settler colonialism’s” acts of disappearing ‘the Indian’ (Pp. 183).
Shaping the Future is erudite, sensitive, informed, and relevant. It is everything that one might ask for in a new-times anthropology book. Weiss is aware of his subjective location. He is cautious in making overclaims. He does not simplify Haida people into The Haida. It is a book I would commend us all to read. At the same time I realize I would rather be reading a book by a Haida author even if this settler author has given us one so sensitively and carefully done as Shaping the Future.