People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwich’in Elders
Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Shirleen Smith
This is, I believe, the third time that the Turner Prize Committee has decided to make an extraordinary award for the humanistic achievement of a project rather than the writing per se. The overall category of collaborative research and oral history encapsulates the goals of SHA in that the ethnography part of ethnographic writing is the sine qua non of our disciplinary credibility.
This year we acknowledge the Vuntut Gwitchin oral history project. The community’s anthropologist, Shirleen Smith, is less visible on the surface than most anthropologists as authors and we are delighted to have her with us today. Shirleen and I go back a long way, to the University of Alberta back in the dark ages. I first came to know Old Crow, Yukon Territory, through reading the Edmonton Sun columns of Edith Josie reprinted from the Whitehorse Star. Old Crow has also been mightily visible in the world outside its boundaries through its stewardship of the porcupine caribou herd and now shares its traditional knowledge of land and community through this elegant volume of texts and photos—kudos to U of A Press.
The text is organized by generation to reflect the real-world mode of transmission of knowledge, a longitudinal perspective that animates the dynamism of oral tradition by linking generations through experience-based narratives of known and named persons. “Long-ago Stories” come from the generations no longer remembered by name; the first generation of elders were interviewed in the 1980s and speak about 19th century rapid changes. The second generation of elders, many of them still active, were the last generation to live fully on the land. Oral history continues today in the teamwork on the oral history project by young people from the community and in the archive they have built together around the words of generations of elders. It is a pedagogical resource for the community and for outsiders seeking to understand the continuity of traditional ways in northern communities despite extensive consequences of historical events.
Regna Darnell
Chair, Victor Turner Award Committee
Society for Humanistic Anthropology
University of Western Ontario, Anthropology
Regna Darnell and Shirleen Smith
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