Leslie Robertson was approached by members of the Kwagu’l Gix̱sa̱m Clan to write a book about their ancestor, Jane Cook. This book offers a different configuration than Roy’s of the relationship between archival materials, disciplinary history, and community/family engagement.
As this book is lengthy, you can skip parts VIII and IX. I realize this still leaves a lot to read. I propose the following strategy. Please get a sense through careful reading in the early chapters of what her methodology does and why she includes so many documents in their entirety. Then, for the remainder of the book, you can skim more quickly through the documents and focus on the relationship between the various voices (Robertson’s, her collaborators’, and the documents.)
**Remember that we will meet on 23 January at 11am and finish early at 12:30.
Leslie Robertson introduces ‘Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las’ that the production of history in the book is “a long conversation with versions of literary and oral pasts suspended in the present for the purpose of telling Ga’axsta’las’a story.” I’m curious about which methods throughout the book did this most successfully and what others think about doing historical work like Robertson does that acknowledges that history can hold uneasy places and rather than trying to solve something, places a story or stories in the present for historical understanding.
Reading through the first part of the book I was struck by Robertson’s interchangeable use of Jane Cook and Ga’axsta’las. I think is really interesting and doing important work. Just wondering if anybody else noticed this and how it effected their reading of the work?
I have two main thoughts so far about this book – did anyone else think/read about Robertson’s framing of her methodology as a ‘method of hope’ in relation to Eve Tuck’s method of desire from the first week? Perhaps this also links to your question Nick – which could almost be framed as a ‘refusal’ to try and solve or judge uncomfortable/contested histories?
My second thoughts may well change as I finish the last chapters of the book, and as I hear all your thoughts, but I thought that although Robertson clearly demonstrates her commitment to community based research, and there was lots of reflection on community/family collaboration and decision making/thought processes when it came to who/what to include, and even though she demonstrates understanding and sensitivity to the ways knowledge is constructed I thought there was little reflection on how her own choices shaped her representation of Cook (even though she acknowledges that she ‘wrote independently and was not hindered in my interpretations’)? I realise this isn’t entirely framed as a question, but more of a statement with a question mark.
I also wondered about the people she acknowledges were reluctant about the decision to commemorate Cook (p.10), why they had reservations about the project, and about the memories of the people who’s ancestors would have been responsible for ostracising Cook’s family – as a reflection on the motivations and perspectives of informations/participants/collaborators. I feel like perhaps this relates to who and why histories/research are/is written and for whom; Robertson acknowledges that published works by and about Kwakwaka’wakw peoples are rarely neutral. Perhaps also linking to her point about who she is authorised to write about/being sensitive to those who may not have known the actions of their ancestors. Again – this isn’t really framed as a question, but more of a discussion starter about why this was and whether it would have had a place in this book/project or not?
Hi all!
Rosie – I definitely thought of that connection(!): a method of hope as conversant with a method of desire. Building on this thought, I was reminded of our discussions on (re)centering relationships between things, people, and places (which Justice raises), when Robertson concludes the introduction: “Although research has a role, it does not constitute the whole venture. In a place where relationships are everything, the desires re-presented in this work deserve consideration as part of a larger endeavour of hope” (21). In some ways, my question is an extension of others stated here: in what ways does Robertson draw the line between “research” and the rest of the “venture” (i.e. desires and relationships)? Does she? How might she attempt to blur this line and what possibilities (and futurities) are revealed because of this?
Translation figures prominently throughout this text. In the “bicultural,” activist, life of Ga’axsta’las’ and in what Leslie Robertson is doing – translating this family and community history for a broader audience. How might we more critically engage with this idea of “translation” and the transfer of knowledge? How does Robertson think about it? How does she approach “collisions” in processes of translations (e.g. customary law and colonial law)?
Throughout the text, Jane Cook’s life story is framed as a practice of “commemoration” for her descendants. As historians, does commemoration have a place in History, the discipline? In what ways are they different, if they are? Further, the very idea of “standing up” (as articulated by Wedlidi Speck on page 52), suggests a practice of commemoration that “confront[s] [Jane Cook’s] choices” – a practice of what I view to be accountability, or critical commemoration. Do others feel that this “living text” is successful in this approach? In what ways does it fall short?
Hi everyone,
Again, I’m sorry I won’t be able to be with you this week. I’m really going to miss the conversation about this provocative book, and your questions are enriching my reading of it (I’m about two thirds of the way through the parts Paige has asked us to read).
I thought I’d throw out a few questions now.
Robertson says on page 155 that “ancestor stories are carried on the breath of the ‘na’mima.” That fact is clearly documented throughout the book. But I’d like to pick up on what some of you are also obviously thinking about, and that is the question of audience. Who is this book for? Is it for the Kwagu’l Gixsam clan? Is it for other Kwakwaka’wakw individuals and ‘na’mima? Is it for other scholars? If we think of scholarship as usually aiming for some sort of corrective or intervention – language we use all the time in, say, grant applications – what is being “corrected” or “intervened in” here? How does that relate to our practice of history (keeping in mind that Robertson is an anthropologist)?
On a related note, what are our responsibilities as readers, assuming that none of us is already a member of the ‘na’mima in question? Say, for example, you wanted to include the story of Ga’axsta’las in a lecture on Indigenous responses to Christianity – certainly a tempting prospect, given how richly her story is told here. How would you frame that story, and what would you be doing in that moment with your own breath? Here, I’m thinking of Thomas King’s adage that (I paraphrase) “you know the story now. What you do with it is up to you. But don’t act like you never heard it.” How, if at all, are we now accountable to Ga’axsta’las and her descendants?
The emphasis on names in this book is impressive – and at times, I have to admit, bewildering. There is just so much to keep track of. I’ve heard Indigenous scholars and others talk about the invocation of names and genealogies, particularly in relation to telling stories that are often understood as proprietary, as a sort of citational practice. How might we think critically about Robertson’s own citational practices here?
As someone who worked for a federally-recognized tribe which had significant human and financial resources, and which had competing claims against another, federally-unrecognized tribe, which had quite few resources of any kind, I have sometimes wondered how the presence of academic scholars and highly-credentialed researchers shapes the legal and other landscapes of Indigenous intertribal (to use the US language) politics. What does a community or tribe or nation gain from having one or more PhDs on side, and how might that reinscribe or even exacerbate dynamics that are themselves the concrete products of colonialism? Is this something we need to attend to?
One last question (sorry to throw so many out there). I was really compelled by the piece where Wedlidi Speck talks about the chaos of Ga’axstala’as’s lifetime being resonant with the chaos out of which the Kwakwaka’wakw first emerged (p. 76). He says that feasting and naming practices carried the people across those turbulences. What might this do for our sense of chronology, periodization, and narrative arc? This kind of framing will come up again in a later reading, but I wanted to signal it now.
I’ll say one last thing. I really liked Robertson’s occasional use of images and metaphors and phrasings such as “trawling” and “charting course” and “riding the wake.” They seem to resonate (there’s that word again) with the everyday lives of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples, emerging out of maritime life. It reminded me of our colleague Alejandra Bronfman’s book Isles of Noise, in which she removed all visual language and replaced it with auditory and aural language. How, in our writing, might we allow our language to rise up out of the lived experience of place and livelihood, in a way that respects territory and peoplehood? (Whoops. That’s another question.)
Coll
I’m interested in how the book uses photography. Robertson starts her first chapter with an analysis of a picture of Jane (p.24). She gives a fair amount of information and context, but no narrative build up. When reading the analysis, I thought little of it. Then, on page 214, the picture is shown again, this time “situated within the (reconstructed) arc of events in her life” (214). My reaction to the picture on page 24 was entirely different than on page 214. I found this a powerful reminder of not only the importance/influence of how documents are contextualized, but also how bottomlessly deep context is. It made me rethink all the book’s photographs: could they not just reveal information, but also suggest context we can’t access?
So, I guess I have two questions: why is the use of photography so important to Robertson and the Kwagu’l Gixsam Clan? What do you guys make of how photography compliments the book’s narrative, and vice-versa?
In Part I, Robertson traces the coproduction of the discipline and practice of Anthropology with Kwakwaka’wakw identity and histories. This community has been fundamental to the histories of Anthropology and the development of ethnography as a methodology that builds on Franz Boas’ innovations in the field, as articulated through Kwakiutl Ethnography. Robertson acknowledges how the development of early Boasian ethnography and more than a century of heavy “anthropologizing” of these people has produced both reparative and harmful interventions in the community. Standing up is positioned within this genealogy as a reparative and revisionary work that avoids reifying standards of authenticity instigated by Boas and other ethnographic works. Robertson situates “representation, authenticity, and agency” as the conceptual link between her academic interest and familial, community interest in the life of Ga’axstalas. She sees these concepts, which she characterizes as part of an “exclusive academic language” (50), as not antithetical to the concerns of the objects of anthropological and historical inquiry.
My question here is: how does Robertson complicate the divide between academic worlds and living communities? What is the relationship between academic knowledge and community knowledge and oral history played out through this book? And in what ways might this exploration compliment the deconstruction of binaries (Christian/pagan, traditional/assimilated, white/not white, reserve/urban, market economy/subsistence economy [34]) throughout the text?
Robertson writes that “the problem with finding one’s place in the past is that, for many, it affects where and how you stand in the present.” This reminded me of Edward Said’s claim that “appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.” In thinking about this we can start to acknowledge in what ways that this work is animated by its’ present, i.e. Ga’axsta’las’ descendants engagement with the potlatch and other cultural practices. Just as ‘standing up’ is a political assertion, how do we understand this book as a political assertion?
I just wanted to add another question to follow up the points raised above about who we write for – given the realities of academia, is there a research and writing model that can bridge the gap between academia and Indigenous communities and somehow speak to both academics and non-academics, and to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers within the pages of a single book? Has Robertson succeeded in doing this, and how?
The thing that has struck me the most in my reading of the book is the way that different voices are integrated and contrasted. While this appears most frequently in sections where Robertson pairs her own writing with accounts that seem to be taken verbatim from conversations that Robertson had with Ga’axsta’las’s descendants–which makes sense, given that the book’s authors are both Robertson and the Kwagu’l Gixsam clan–there are parts where the descendants provide their own commentary on textual sources. The fact that comments made by descendants about of the textual source–sources which, under a Western paradigm of knowledge production, would be privileged–gives the “last word” to those in the present who have a stake in how the past is shaped. For instance, the document on page 91 is still positioned as valid historical sources, but William Wasden Jr.’s commentary shows just how much context the original writer missed. I’m still thinking through how this changes the way a historical account functions, but I wanted to ask how others experienced the conversion of all of these voices.
I’d like to echo Coll’s mention of the bewildering array of names in this piece, and how, even with the genealogies at the front of the book, I often found myself lost. This was compounded by the genealogical nature of the storytelling; stories about how a story was told by a specific person and how that story came to them leading to a chronology that jumped around. Our colleague, Professor Paul Krause, told me during my Masters to “write as if your writing for Mom and Dad”, in other words make it accessible, readable and clearly understandable. This book seems to go against that advice (advice that we have likely all received at one point or other). Why is this necessary for this piece? Would narrative, and chronological simplification, have ruined the purpose of the book? Part of the answer to this comes back to the question of who is this for, and what is its purpose.
My second question refers more to what is referred to as a “method of hope” in the introduction. The book sets out with a clear purpose, to stand up with Ga’axsta’las and balance an unfavorable documentary and oral history, in other words to strive for a “hopped-for outcome”. Yet we are trained as historians, apparently, to approach studies without preconceptions or agendas. Do you believe this approach is a recommended way of writing history? What are the pitfalls of such an approach, and how does this text avoid these pitfalls?
I realize I am accidentally parroting Rosie’s question about the “method of hope” from above… Also that I commented on Jakub’s post rather than on the thread as a whole. Still worth considering regarding the potential flaws in this approach.