Maps & Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier

Maps & Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier Review

The Big Boys planned to build a pipeline from Alaska down to the US Midwest, bringing energy from source to consumer. The line had to cross some hundreds of miles of British Columbia, over land that had once belonged exclusively to Indians, but which had already been invaded by trappers, sport hunters, ranchers, oil and gas explorers, loggers, drillers, and the beginnings of suburbia. By some miracle, somebody thought that it might be a good idea to see what the Indians thought about this. It seems they had never been consulted up to then. Treaties had been made, then subverted---the old North American pattern. In general, nobody had paid much attention to the Indians of northeastern British Columbia. It was believed that their way of life was kaput, that they were all alcoholics living on welfare, and that they hadn't kept their traditions. It seems they had been living for centuries in an "energy corridor" without a viable way of life. But now they were seriously in the way. Enter Hugh Brody, a British anthropologist.

In MAPS AND DREAMS, Brody accomplishes the near impossible. He writes a marvelously sensitive, interesting report, incorporating such often-boring details as hunting and land use maps, and accounts of meetings. Not only does he show that the culture of the Athapaskan Indians was alive in 1979, he allows them to speak, describes the land use situation from their point of view, and connects their economy with their culture and daily lives. His book is at once a report, an answer to those who had written off the Indians, and a readable work of anthropology. White man's dreams of ever bigger projects, ever more exploitation of the land, he says so exactly, "are the most established carcinoma of the North American imagination". They are ever poised to crush the Indian dreams. The Indian dreams, of how to find game, how to find their way to Heaven, stand in the way of the white man's maps---the maps that show where to put the pipeline, where to drill, where to stake out more claims. Both the Indian maps on paper, which showed how they used the land and their traditional dream maps, showing the way to the Beyond, stood in the way of the white man's dreams. A few thousand souls against the tide of Western visions of "progress". We don't find out what happened, but it wasn't looking hopeful. Different maps, different dreams. For good anthropology, for deeper understanding of the problems of the Far North, for just a fascinating book, you can do a lot worse than read MAPS AND DREAMS. The Canadian subarctic is a world of forest, prairie, and muskeg; of rainbow trout, moose, and caribou; of Indian hunters and trappers. It is also a world of boomtowns and bars, oil rigs and seismic soundings; of white energy speculators, ranchers, and sports hunters. Brody came to this dual world with the job of "mapping" the lands of northwest British Columbia as well as the way of life of a small group of Beaver Indians with a viable hunting economy living in the path of a projected oil pipeline. The result is Maps and Dreams, Brody's account of his extraordinary eighteen-month journey through the world of a people who have no intention of vanishing into the past. In this beautifully written book, readers go on a moose hunt; trap beaver; mourn at a funeral; drink in white bars; visit camps, cabins, and traplines by pickup truck, on horseback, and on foot. Brody's powerful commentary also retraces the history of the ever-expanding white frontier from the first eighteenth-century explorer to the wildest corporate energy dreams of the present day. In the process, readers see how Indian dreams and white dreams, Indians maps and white maps, collide.