Book Description
The Dane-zaa people have lived in the Peace River area of northern British Columbia for thousands of years. Elders documented the people's history and worldview in oral narratives and passed on their knowledge through storytelling. Language loss in the youngest generation, however, threatens to break the bonds of knowledge transmission. At the request of the Doig River First Nations anthropologists Robin and Jillian Ridington present a history of the Dane-zaa people based on oral histories collected over a half century of fieldwork. Taking a poetic form that does justice to the rhythm of Dane-zaa storytelling, these powerful stories span the full length of history, from the story of creation to the fur trade, from the arrival of missionaries to cases heard in the Supreme Court of Canada. Elders document key events as they explain the very nature of the universe and how people and animals learned to live together on the land. These oral histories, told by one of the last First Nations to experience the effects of colonialism, not only preserve traditional knowledge for future generations, they also tell the inspiring story of how the Dane-zaa learned to succeed in the modern world. Robin Ridington is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of British Columbia and has worked with the Dane-zaa First Nations since the 1960s. Jillian Ridington is an ethnographer and researcher who has worked with the Dane-zaa First Nations since 1978. Their books about the Dane-zaa include Robin's Trail To Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community, and a co-authored book, When You Sing It Now, Just Like New: First Nations Poetics, Voices and Representations.
