Clear Voices, Blinkered Vision Cole Harris: Historical Geographer

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Clear Voices, Blinkered Vision Cole Harris
Historical Geographer

• FNAT 102 Arts One
• Lecture
• Spring/2008

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Introducing Cole Harris

• He acknowledges his own settler background how
  his ancestors came to own Bosuns Ranch
• He acknowledges his own position on the spectrum
  of academic discourse
• He acknowledges how his academic training as a
  historical geographer intersects with colonial
  history

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Introducing Harris Argument

• 1782 Smallpox pandemic swept up through the
  mid-continent via trade routes, crossed the
  Cascades, down through the Columbia River and up
  into the Georgia Straight Basin.

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Set of Related Soundings

• like spot checks for Atlantic cod, may not be
  enough to reveal very much of what has been going
  on. A great deal has been left out.

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How Does Harris Make His Case?

• Metaphor
• Imagery
• Symbolism
• Analogy
• Rhetorical questioning

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Sequencing of Evidence

• Surveys fragments of oral recordmutilated
  messages
• Surveys journal records of first European
  explorers
• Surveys accounts of inter-tribal warfare between
  Coast Salish Lequiltok
• Surveys population movements
• Surveys written accounts from explorers,
  missionaries, and traders from the Plains

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Examples of Imagery

• Uneven intersection
• Interface between theory and empiricism
• Mutilated messages
• A lens of time
• Slice of time
• Ample ground
• Blinkered scholarship

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Space in Time

• Salvage ethnography pinned peoples cultures to
  a slice of time deemed traditional by the
  anthropologists
• http//www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v4n3/inne43.
  html

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The Scholars

• Franz Boas
• Wilson Duff
• Phillip Drucker
• Robin Fisher
• James Gibson
• Robert Boyd

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Harris Questions

• Why has this epidemic been so invisible?
• Why the academic hesitation in a rigorous
  examination of the evidence of a devastating
  pre-contact smallpox epidemic?

• How is it that the smallpox epidemic of 1782 is
  not part of the lore of modern British Columbia,
  especially as it was identified, quite precisely,
  more than eighty years ago?

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Blinkered Scholarship

• Ethnographers, intent on capturing the details of
  timeless traditional culture would have to
  rethink their premise for data gathering if their
  informants memory reached only as far as the
  smallpox

• In aid of support for ethnographer assumptions,
  ignoring the evidence for the 1782 smallpox
  pandemic, also ignored the possibility for
  social/cultural disruption to static primitive
  cultures

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Concluding Questions

• Are you persuaded or convinced by Harris
  argument?
• If you are, what specifically are you persuaded
  by?
• If you are not, what is missing for you?
• What does Harris mean when he says This was a
  slice of time that ethnography transformed into
  timeless traditional culture?
• Explain what Harris means by a synthesizing
  habit of mind

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