How We WENT Asourt IT

determining various arrangements of materials, hunting and gathering and produc-
ing new materials ourselves, and commissioning work to fill perceived gaps in the
projected anthology. Resource materials already at hand included pieces I had col-
lected over the years from my English classes, essays and narratives from Marianne
Ignace’s First Nations courses, George Nicholas’s collection of writings about the
Archaeology Field Schools, and works from Marilyn Dumont’s Creative Writing class-
es, some of which had been workshopped by Tomson Highway when he was Writer-
in-Residence in the Program, as well as transcriptions and translations of Elders’ sto-
ries and recollections. In addition to their own writing and editing responsibilities,
each member of the editorial circle was also responsible for a commissioned work
for the anthology: this latter activity was vital for it allowed us to draw on the SCES-
SFU community as a whole, as well as the community at large.

The four-part structure that evolved over the second semester in which we were
focusing directly on compiling/creating the anthology seemed most fitting and
appropriate in that it offered a clearly discernible sequence, in terms of both the-
matics and chronology, without excluding the non-linear doubling-back so charac-
teristic of Coyote’s own tales and trails. In other words, certain key themes of lan-
guage and voicing, particularly as they relate to the catastrophic cultural breakdowns
of the Residential School period, appear and reappear throughout the collection,
although the second section of the anthology is devoted more specifically to it. The
opening section gives an historical background to the whole collection via the teach-
ings of Chief Louis and other Elders with reference to the Laurier Memorial and the
whole question of Native rights and land claims. The traditional Native ways of learn-
ing as embodied in the stories and lives of grandmothers are also an important back-
ground for subsequent developments in the anthology. The third section focuses on
the SCES-SFU Program itself and highlights such key areas of cultural reappropria-
tion as the Language School and Archaeology Field School. The fourth and con-
cluding section is in many ways the most provocative in that it deals with a2 number
of issues of a highly emotional and political nature such as “status,” definitions of
“Indianness,” issues of race, and the challenges that face that “new breed” of Native
thinkers, writers, and leaders whom Maria Campbell prophetically referred to at the
end of Half-Breed (1973).

Our aim was to put together a collection that would capture some of the key