Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination/Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs/A Breach of Duty: Fiduciary Obligations and Aboriginal Peoples/Advancing Aboriginal Claims: Visions/Strategies/Directions/Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty Making in British Columbia

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), xii + 328 pp. Cloth. $85. ISBN 0-7748- 1186-2. Richard Daly, Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), xix + 384 pp. Cloth. $85. ISBN 0-7748-1074-2. Paper. $29.95. ISBN 0-7748-1075. James I. Reynolds, A Breach of Duty: Fiduciary Obligations and Aboriginal Peoples (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd, 2005), xxv + 336 pp. Paper. £38. ISBN 1-8958- 3025-7. Kerry Wilkins (ed.), Advancing Aboriginal Claims: Visions/Strategies/Directions (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd, 2004), 320 pp. Paper. $38. ISBN 1-8958-3024-9. Andrew Woolford, Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty Making in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), ix + 248 pp. Cloth. $85. ISBN 0-7748-1131-5. It is about ten years since completion of the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. In the intervening years, litigation, the treaty process and other negotiations have continued slowly. The background to these proceedings includes scholarship by anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, and others, independently and on behalf of Aboriginal peoples. These five books are contemporary markers of understanding of Aboriginal knowledge and traditions and indicators of the legal context of negotiations. They reveal the contributions of social research to legal and political decision-making, provide accounts of discussions of strategies for promoting Aboriginal rights and raise questions about ways forward for Aboriginal communities. Do Glaciers Listen? considers Aboriginal views of agency and change in the environment, bringing together themes from social anthropology, history and environmental studies in its analysis of local knowledge, colonial encounters and environmental change. The period of human encounter analysed by Julie Cruikshank coincides with the later phases of the 'Little Ice Age' (1550-1850). The territory it covers is the Yukon and Alaska. Cruikshank is critical of instrumental usage of 'Traditional Ecological Knowledge', raises questions about how people relate to the natural world, and makes cautionary comments about policies for environmental protection. As Cruikshank makes clear, colonial exploration and settlement in northwestern North America occurred at the same time as the environment was changing. There were contrasts between European conceptions of division between nature and culture and those of indigenous peoples, whose 'oral traditions frame glaciers as intensely social spaces where human behaviour, especially casual hubris or arrogance, can trigger dramatic and unpleasant consequences in the physical world' (p. 11; emphasis in original). She argues that the contrasting views of the environment in oral history of local people and the historical records of the colonisers have consequences for current debates about the environment, climate change, and indigenous peoples' rights. Life histories from elderly Aboriginal women who lived in southern Yukon Territory treat glaciers as active and dynamic. These accounts are compared to those by European scientists and travellers, with illustrations from maps, photographs, and drawings. The consequences of different views of the environment and associated policies are made clear. Cruikshank remarks, for example, that recent designation of areas occupied by Aboriginal people as national parks has 'disenfranchised indigenous hunters at the stroke of a pen' (p. 253). Land rights and boundary issues are at the heart of Daly's ethnographic account of the lives of the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en peoples of northwest British Columbia. Whereas Cruikshank's study is about relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans, Daly's project raises questions about relations between indigenous peoples, particularly with regard to differing Nisga'a and Gitksan- Witsuwit'en concepts of landholding and contested territory. …

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