THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO UNSETTLING FUTURES: HAIDA FUTURE-MAKING, POLITICS AND MOBILITY IN THE SETTLER COLONIAL PRESENT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY BY JOSEPH J.Z. WEISS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2015 To Hilary Table of Contents Table of Figures ............................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................... v Chapter 1: An Introduction to Haida Future-Making in Old Massett ............................................. 1 Part 1: Home Chapter 2: Coming Home to Haida Gwaii: Haida Departures and Returns in the Future- Perfect ...................................................................................................................................... 52 Chapter 3: Of Hippies and Haida: Fantasy, Future-Making, and the Alluring Power of Haida Gwaii ............................................................................................................................................. 93 Transition .................................................................................................................................... 136 Part 2: Care Chapter 4: Leading “from the Bottom of the Pole:” Care and Governance in the Haida World 138 Chapter 5: Precarious Authority: Arendt, Endangerment and Environmental Protection on Haida Gwaii ........................................................................................................................................... 178 Conclusion: “What’s next? Just guess.” ..................................................................................... 216 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 233 iii Table of Figures Figure 1: The Territory of Haida Gwaii c. the early 2000s ......................................................... 54 Figure 2: Totems by the Ghost Rock, 1912, by Emily Carr ....................................................... 103 Figure 3: Vanquished, 1930, by Emily Carr ............................................................................... 104 iv Acknowledgments There are so many people to whom I am profoundly grateful, and without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I wish I could mention everyone by name, but I’m forced by restrictions of space to list only some of the many people to whom I owe my thanks. If you’re not listed here, please know that this is a failure of capacity, not of gratitude. My first and highest thanks are to the communities of Old Massett 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 Nonnie Aggie’s kitchen table, and she, her children Sammy, Neil, Robert, and Helen, Robert’s late wife Roxanne, taken from us too soon, and Helen’s daughters Christine and Leigh-Anne were my first hosts in Old Massett, and their hospitality, generosity, and kindness, in Old Massett and in Vancouver, have been unstinting and extraordinary. How.aa, how.aa, how.aa ! To Leigh-Anne I owe in addition all the gratitude of our long friendship, our shared conversations, and many shared memories. Wiretap, Original Joe’s, a made up band that must go unnamed here, there are endless wonderful moments to think of that, I hope, will always go on. I am also deeply thankful to my second hosts, Kungjaadee, Roberta Kennedy, and her son Robert, for their friendship, hospitality, and wisdom. So too, Robert and his partner Rachel have always been fast friends and confidants as we’ve figured out what it means to live in Massett together, sharing endless and wonderful potluck dinners and movie nights. I say thank you with all the warmth, affection, and gratitude that I can muster, and Hilary and I are anxious for our next dinner all together. So many huge how.aa s are also due to the students, teachers and staff at Chief Matthews, which rapidly came to feel like my other, constant home in Old Massett. My thoughts about care v begun here, seeing the many, many forms of care that passed between children and adults in this truly special place of learning. I am honoured to have been able to be a part of the school’s community. How.aa again to every single child and adult who I’ve been privileged to know, to teach, and to work with at the school! Special thanks are also due to my two amazing driving teachers, Leslie Bellis and Karen Russ and to Karen’s ever patient husband Craig, for their warmth, kindness, wisdom, and generosity, and to Sherri Burton, Alfred Adams, and Atticus, who hosted Hilary and I this summer and whose curiosity, hospitality, and insights are deeply valued and appreciated by us both. I would also like to thank the Old Massett Village Council and the Council of the Haida Nation for their patience with and support of my research on Haida Gwaii. John Disney, Patricia Moore, Harold Yeltatzie, Danny Matthews, and Ken Rea at OMVC and May Russ at CHN have all gone above and beyond in their helpfulness and guidance, and I am most thankful. This work also could not have been done without my two research assistants, Shaylene Abrahams and Shania Williams, hired in partnership with OMVC. How.aa Shaylene and Shania! Thanks are also owed to so many individuals and families in both Massetts. Though I can only name some here, to everyone who I’ve been fortunate to know on Haida Gwaii I say a most profound how.aa . I owe particular thanks to Merle and Knud Andersen and their family, to Primrose Adams, Alice Montjoy, Andrea Medley and Ariane Adams, Darlene Bates, Lucille Bell, Rhonda Bell, Dana and Tyler Bellis, Leona Clow, Sandra Dan and Ron Russ, Elvis and Freda Davis, Allan Davidson, Reg Davidson, Jaalen Edenshaw and Jaskwaan Bedard, Ken and Barb Edgars, Roxanne Edgars, Carmen Goertzen, Elizabeth Moore, Judy Williams, Christian White and Candace Weir-White, and Lisa White and Jordan Seward. How.aa, how.aa, how.aa for everything! vi On the Chicago end of things, my dissertation committee, Justin Richland, Jean Comaroff, Ray Fogelson, and Joseph Masco have provided endless guidance and support. Without them this project could not have existed, period. Julie Chu, Nancy Munn and Michael Silverstein also provided incisive and deeply productive readings of and suggestions for the dissertation. In addition, Hussein Agrama, John Comaroff, Judith Farquhar, Susan Gal, John Kelly, Carolyn Johnson, and Francois Richard have all been instrumental at various moments of this dissertation’s development. A very well-deserved thanks is also due to Bruce Miller at the University of British Columbia, who was my earliest mentor in anthropology and remains a valued and trusted colleague, guide, and friend. Equally, I owe more thanks to my friends, colleagues, and fellow graduate school travellers than I can count. I am grateful for all of you, but I should make special mention of Eleanor Bush, Lee Cabatingan, Colin Halverson, Eric Hirsch, Andrea Jenkins, and Jonah Rubin, who offered productive and helpful readings of individual chapters, and my writing group, Hilary Leathem, Shirley Yeung, and Xiao-bo Yuan, who are responsible for many of the strengths of the dissertation. So much of what is good in my writing comes from these friends and mentors, though of course its weaknesses are all my own. Portions of this research were supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a University of Chicago Social Science Division Summer Fellowship, and University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology Leiffer Fellowship for Summer Fieldwork. I would like to gratefully acknowledge their support for my research. Finally, my love and gratitude for my family is deeper than I can say. To my fathers, Peter and Mike, and to my mother, Kate, all I can say, which is never close to enough, is that vii you’ve made everything possible, and I am who I am, as a person and a scholar, because of your love and care. And to my partner Hilary, my love, who has read every sentence I’ve written, who has helped me push through the seemingly endless ups and downs of writing, whose ideas and suggestions imbue my writing here and everywhere, and whose love makes my life, in every sense, I say the deepest thank you that I can. It is to you, my soul mate and my future, that this dissertation is dedicated. viii Chapter 1: An Introduction to Haida Future-Making in Old Massett The Back Road There are two main roads in Old Massett. Formally, they are named Raven Road and Eagle Road, so-named for the two Haida “sides” – “moieties,” in anthropological parlance - but most often people just call them the front road and the back road. The front road faces Masset Inlet, small dips allowing vehicles egress onto the rocky beach to unload boats for fishing. You can’t miss the front road if you’re driving along the road from the small Masset airport, as the highway becomes Raven past the “Welcome to Old Massett” sign that marks the entrance to the Old Massett reserve. If you keep driving along that front road, you’d soon find Christian White’s longhouse, marked by two large poles, where the Tluu Xaadaa Naay dancers practice and perform. The poles are weathered, carved with animals and figures that sometimes represent particular