The footnote: a citation or brief explanation. But what do we do when the person we're interviewing tells us that he or she is not, in fact, the source of historical information, but merely a conduit; that the voice transmitting the “historical evidence” is not the ethnographic “other” sitting across the table from us, but the other's other — an ancestral voice acquired not from memory in the western sense, but from dreams across shamanic chasms? And how do we respond when the other's other informs us that our own voice is actually not ours, but one directed by an Aboriginal ancestral spirit whose alleged design is to influence questions so as to illicit particular responses? In such a relationship where does the power and agency reside, and more basically, how does one cite one's source? Building upon such diverse historical theorists as Michel de Certeau, Carlo Guinzburg, and Marshall Sahlins, Carlson engages with Salish indigenous knowledge and explains how he came to learn that skepticism isn't always as clever as one might think, and why a historical footnote can be a difficult thing to craft.
Keith Thor Carlson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan who specializes in the history of Pacific Coast Salish people. Before taking up his post at the University of Saskatchewan in 2001, he conducted historical analysis for and with Stó:lõ Coast Salish communities of British Columbia. He has authored or edited five books and numerous articles including the award winning A Stó:lõ Coast Salish Historical Atlas (University of Washington, 2001) and “Rethinking Dialogue and History: The King's Promise and the 1906 Aboriginal Delegation to London” (Native Studies Review, 2005). He is currently working on several new book and article projects, including The Crown's Promise: An Examination of Memory and History in Canadian Native-newcomer Relations, and The Power of Place, the Problem of Time: Migration, Memory and History in Coast Salish Collective Identity.