Indigenous Oral History and Settlement Archaeology in Barkley Sound, Western Vancouver Island

Abstract

In North America, Indigenous oral historical accounts of events in the distant past are regularly subject to the critique that such histories are contrived to suit practical political purposes and/or are qualitatively less robust than are textual or material forms of historical evidence (Mason 2000; McGhee 2008). A commonly cited reason for this is the conception that oral histories are considered to be vulnerable to “inherent” degradation over time (Vansina 1985), a viewpoint that closely parallels the widespread belief that Aboriginal cultures have been “degraded” due to cultural assimilation. In Canada, such pervasive scepticism helps explain the continued privileging of colonial historical accounts over Indigenous historical experiences, exemplified by the treatment of Indigenous oral history in courts of law (Martindale 2014; Miller 1992, 2011). Archaeologists who seek to include Indigenous oral historical accounts in their interpretations are frequently charged with perpetuating a teleological (logically circular) account of history and/or cannot pass muster with scientific standards of evidence (Henige 2009; Mason 2006; McGhee 2008). However, a fundamental problem with such a critique is that it seeks to minimize consideration of oral history as a legitimate and relevant source for archaeological insight and thus further displaces the narration of Indigenous history from Indigenous peoples (Atalay 2008; Cruikshank 2005). It also posits an imbalance between Indigenous oral history and archaeological interpretation, neglecting to foreground how both represent incomplete sources of information that attempt to narrate and assign causality to human history (Martindale and Nicholas 2014; Wylie 2014).