homework

So my homework is not going well. I was supposed to find a Dakelh word for "installation" or some such. Of course, duh, there is none. Here is what I have that might work: "yats'uzkih" -- we landed (by boat) and "taba" -- shore. I will have to check a possible dialect issue; these are words from the Nak'azdli dialect, not Dakelh.

Also, hey hey hey!! What about we canoe down to the spot where the Story of the Salmon takes place in April! Instead of final exam!

Hi all, if you have a chance, go down to the Lheidli pavilion at 6th & Dominion. There is a display beside the canoe we might want to emulate or borrow/repurpose.

FN Studies canoe carving course

Edie Frederick and Robert Frederick: "'Astas Story of the Salmon"

Cottonwood canoe at 2015 Canada Winter Games Opening Ceremony

letter, final version

       February 5, 2015

To: Lheidli T’enneh Band Council and Elders Society
Lheidli T’enneh
1041 Whenun Rd.
Prince George, B.C. V2K 5X8



Chief Dominic Frederick, Honoured Elders and Council Members,

We are deeply honoured to be able to work on the project of the installation of “The Story of the Salmon,” as shared and carved by Elder Robert Frederick in 2012.  We are also honoured by his gift of teaching the story and carving to the UNBC students in the winter of 2013, during a First Nations course. Our hope is that the canoe will be officially installed on June 21st 2015 in the Rotunda Art Gallery at UNBC. We will continue working with Elders Robert and Eddie Frederick to properly present the canoe so that it gives both instruction and cultural understanding.

We appreciate the challenges that we face in representing your culture within the University of Northern British Columbia. We hope it is understood that we wish to ensure all information is shared with you throughout the process. We hope that any Elders in the community, who wish to be a part of this process, will feel welcome to be a part of accurately representing this story, for the benefit of the entire community. We wish to be respectful and mindful of appropriate protocols regarding the representation of culture and community, given that each story is a living entity that deserves the respect of the hearers.

We look forward to this opportunity to build a deeper relationship with you and the community of Lheidli T’enneh.

We are also aware that the UNBC Arts Council is currently drafting a formal letter toward the use of the canoe for the duration of the Winter Games to display Lheidli T’enneh culture and the journey of the canoe, as a living being, which represents our continuing relationship and communication.

Respectfully,



Trina Johnson,
on behalf of Robert Budde and graduate students,
ENGLISH 700: Indigenizing Scholarship

Place Theory

Elements of "Place Theory"

 “If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.”

                                                            -- Charles Baudelaire

Place is also a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world. When we look at the world as a world of places we see different things. We see attachments and connections between people and place [. . .] Here ‘place’ is not so much a quality of things in the world but an aspect of the way we choose to think about it—what we decide to emphasize and what we decide to designate as unimportant. . .                                                                         (Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction.

                                                                        Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2004. 11)

           

                                                *****

Epistemology: study of the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity.

            Is what we know about a place real?

‘habitus’ 

--socialised norms or tendencies that guide behaviour and thinking.

“the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them” (Navarro 2006: 16).

Pierre Bourdieu:

                                                “the habitus is the product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for those products of collective history that are the objective structures (eg, language, economics, etc..) and is able to reproduce the form of lasting dispositions in all organisms (which can, if you will, call individuals) permanently subject to the same packaging, then placed in the same material conditions of existence ”

Habitus is neither a result of free will, nor determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between the two over time: dispositions that are both shaped by past events and structures, and that shape current practices and structures and also, importantly, that condition our very perceptions of  these (Bourdieu 1984: 170). In this sense habitus is created and reproduced unconsciously, ‘without any deliberate pursuit of coherence… without any conscious concentration’ (ibid: 170).

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London,             Routledge.

Navarro, Z. (2006) ‘In Search of  Cultural Interpretation of Power’, IDS Bulletin             37(6): 11-22.

                       

******

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity...as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question Who am I? than by some riddle as Where is here?

                        Northrop Frye, The Literary History of Canada

“It's only by our lack of ghosts / we're haunted.”            

                        Earle Birney “Can. Lit.”

 ******

Henri Lefebvre

Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world, spaces are the realisations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series of times, the rhythms or the city, the rhythms of the urban population...the city will only be rethought and reconstructed on its current ruins when we have properly understood that the city is the deployment of time.... of those who are its inhabitants (Lefebvre 1967e:10) 

It is a question of discovering or developing a unity of theory between fields which are given as being separate,...Which fields?...First, the physical, nature, the cosmos, - then the mental (which is comprised of logic and formal abstraction), - finally the social.  In other words, this search concerns logico-epistemological space - the space of social practices, - that in which sensible phenomena are situated in, not excluding the imaginary, projects and projections, symbols, utopias (Lefebvre 1974a:19).

Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place”

—1. Place is a process

—2. Place is defined by the outside

—3. Place is a site of multiple identities and histories

—4. A uniqueness of place is defined by its interactions 

                                                (quoted in Cresswell, 74)      

Reporting in Indigenous Communities

http://www.riic.ca/

Banff Center brings you WISE PRACTICE APPROACH.

http://www.banffcentre.ca/indigenous-leadership/library/pdf/best_practices_in_aboriginal_community_development.pdf

Brought to you by,

Nexen!

Still worth a read.