SPECIAL INTEREST • NATIVE STUDIES / ANTHROPOLOGY / CANADA
People of the Saltwater An Ethnography of Git lax m'oon charles r. menzies
In People of the Saltwater, Charles R. Menzies explores the history of an ancient Tsimshian community, focusing on the people and their enduring place in the modern world. The Gitxaala Nation has called the rugged north coast of British Columbia home for millennia, proudly maintaining its territory and traditional way of life. People of the Saltwater first outlines the social and political
“Menzies’s ethnography of the Gitxaala people is highly personal, enjoyably engaging, and a welcome contribution to community-based scholarship on the Northwest Coast. . . . Menzies’s analysis adds a clear voice to conversations about the impacts of global industrial processes on local peoples.”—Thomas McIlwraith, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Guelph and author of “We Are Still Didene”: Stories of Hunting and History from Northern British Columbia
relations that constitute Gitxaala society. Although these traditionalist relations have undergone change, they have endured through colonialism and the emergence of the industrial capitalist economy. It is of fundamental importance to this society to link its past to its present in all spheres of life, from its understanding of its hereditary leaders to the continuance of its ancient ceremonies. Menzies then turns to a discussion of an economy based on natural-resource extraction by examining fisheries and their central importance to the Gitxaalas’ cultural roots. Not only do these fisheries support the Gitxaala Nation economically, they also serve as a source of distinct cultural identity. Menzies’s firsthand account describes the group’s place within cultural anthropology and the importance of its lifeways, traditions, and histories in nontraditional society today. Ch ar l es R . Menzies (Gitxaa la) is a professor of anthro-
pology and director of the Ethnographic Film Unit at the University of British Columbia. He is the editor of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management (Nebraska, 2006), the author of Red Flags and Lace Coiffes: Identity and Survival in a Breton Village, and coeditor of the journal Collaborative Anthropologies.
September 192 pp. • 6 x 9 • 5 photographs • 2 maps • 1 table $45.00s hardcover • 978-0-8032-8808-9 $67.50 Canadian/£32.99 UK EBOOK AVAILABLE Contributing Contributing to to thethe World’s World’s Library Library forfor 7575 Years Years| university of nebraska press
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