When I spent time in BC in the late seventies, I was constantly struck by the difference in quality of life between Coast Salish people on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands and the Lushootseed/Puget Salish peoples I grew up with. The housing and public facilities on reserves was much like what it had been down sound when I was a small child, before LBJ's anti-poverty programs and the Boldt decision gave the people I knew more autonomy and better access to resources. I knew, intellectually, about the anti-Potlatch acts and other attempts at cultural genocide, but it was disturbing to see a level of day-to-day racist behavior which was public and unashamed and seemed like something from the dim past.
Julia, my first Anthro professor worked with the "Tsimshian" now Gitskan, on the Yukon side of the border, and had a lot to say about how family wealth had passed out to the Alaska side of that border- mostly, I think, because as little attention as Canada paid to its NW, it was a lot more than the US had for the Alaska panhandle
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When I spent time in BC in the late seventies, I was constantly struck by the difference in quality of life between Coast Salish people on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands and the Lushootseed/Puget Salish peoples I grew up with. The housing and public facilities on reserves was much like what it had been down sound when I was a small child, before LBJ's anti-poverty programs and the Boldt decision gave the people I knew more autonomy and better access to resources. I knew, intellectually, about the anti-Potlatch acts and other attempts at cultural genocide, but it was disturbing to see a level of day-to-day racist behavior which was public and unashamed and seemed like something from the dim past.
Julia, my first Anthro professor worked with the "Tsimshian" now Gitskan, on the Yukon side of the border, and had a lot to say about how family wealth had passed out to the Alaska side of that border- mostly, I think, because as little attention as Canada paid to its NW, it was a lot more than the US had for the Alaska panhandle