Graduate Research Focus
UW graduate students are engaged in some of the most innovative research projects on Canada in the United States. Following are articles by students on their projects including field research trips to Canada during the 2008-2009 academic year.
2007-2008 Graduate Research Focus
Researching Dane-zaa in British Columbia
by Julia Colleen Miller, Linguistics
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| Julia Colleen Miller with Edward Apsassin, Doig River Drummer and Dane-zaa language specialist. Photo taken at the Doig Days Cultural Fair, Doig River First Nation, June 2009. |
Julia Miller is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics. She has received FLAS fellowships to study the endangered First Nations language of Dane-zaa, spoken in north-eastern British Columbia and north western Alberta, Canada since 2006.
This past summer brought me back to beautiful British Columbia. This trip focused on two main projects. The first was to work with community members of the Doig River First Nation to translate stories and conversations we collected over the past year. The second was to collect similar narratives at the Halfway River First Nation, and begin translations of those. During the past three years, these sessions have brought together linguists, anthropologists, Dane-zaa chiefs, councilors, elders and other community members to discuss language endangerment, revitalization efforts and language policy. These stories and conversations I have collected will be used by the community members for language and cultural education. Thanks to my Canadian Studies FLAS fellowships, I have been able to take an active part in this ongoing project.
This project was supported, in part, by funding from the Center’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Grant, US Department of Education, Office of International Education and Graduate Program Services.
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Natives Voices Program News
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| Dan Hart (far left) and Luana Ross (far right), co-directors of the Native Voices Program at the University of Washington, celebrate the Daybreak Star Cultural Center graduation ceremony with graduate student, Francine Swift, and Cetan Williams. |
One interesting aspect about working with both the Canadian Studies Center and the Native Voices Program at the University of Washington is the unique perspective that indigenous research brings to the whole concept of “border.” Within Canadian Studies, cross-border research and education is vital to our role within the university and our mission as an international studies center. Within Native Voices and Indigenous Studies, however, the whole concept of border tends to get turned on its head. For many First Nations and Native American communities and individuals, the US-Canadian border is an historic and continuing reminder of the decimating separations it brought into their lives.
A new Native Voices production has caused us to think about the border and its devastating effects upon the lives of Native peoples in Canada and the US. Graduate student in Native Voices, Francine Swift (Port Gamble S’Klallam), recently completed a thesis project about her community and their historic lands. Her community, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Nation, live on a reservation of 1,340 acres near Kingston, Washington. They are a small tribe, consisting of about 1,100 members. But historically, they belonged to a vast nation, which extended from central British Columbia through northwestern Oregon and the interior Fraser and Columbia River basins. For centuries, S’Klallam individuals, families, and communities would freely move about their territories. Francine’s motivation for creating her film was to be able to tell young people in her community the vast scope of their homelands, not just the borders created by the Canadian and US governments.
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UW Graduate Student Studies Dane-zaa in British Columbia
by Julia Colleen Miller, Linguistics
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| Julia Colleen Miller, Linguistics and 2008-09 FLAS Fellow (Dane-zaa), standing in front of a birch grove after a day of helping pick up trash outside the Halfway River Reserve in British Columbia. |
Julia Colleen Miller is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics and a 2008-09 FLAS Fellow (Dane-zaa). Her dissertation focuses on the acoustic properties of lexical tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa: Doig River and Halfway River.
This quarter, research pertaining to my FLAS fellowship has been two-fold. I have been studying the Dane-zaa language, a First Nations language spoken in northern British Columbia and Alberta, through the use of stories and conversations that I have helped collect over the past four years. Additionally, I am exploring the importance of geography in the Dane-zaa culture. During these past four years I have part of a language documentation team (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/projects/beaver/languages) that has been working to bring these two concepts together, by documenting the Dane-zaa language from a place names perspective. The documentation team, together with Dane-zaa community members, has collected hours of linguistic data that derive from narratives of culturally relevant locations and personal migration histories. These materials, which have been deposited into our digital language archive (http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser?openpath=MPI689499%23), include stories, conversations, folklore and procedural recordings that are intrinsically tied to the land.
My colleague, Gabriele Müller (University of Münster), and I envisioned an alternative way to access the archived materials, one that reflects the geographic knowledge of the Dane-zaa. To this end, we created map layers (.kml files) for use with Google Earth. One layer represents specific locations, chosen by the elders as historically significant locations. Each geographic point has various media files associated with it. Direct links to these media are provided in the layer, as well as links into the archive. A second layer provides place names in Dane-zaa, which are hyperlinked to audio files of elders pronouncing the names. We will be presenting this project at the first annual meeting of the International Conference of Language Documentation and Conservation, held on March 12-14, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Thanks to the FLAS awards I have received from the Canadian Studies Center, my work with the Dane-zaa elders, and my academic adviser here at UW, Sharon Hargus, Linguisitics, I am able to continue my scholarship of the Dane-zaa language as well as pursue my interests in geography and language archiving. It is my hope that I can create materials that will aid in the continuing efforts of language documentation and revitalization within the Dane-zaa communities.
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