The Contemporary Coast Salish: Essays by Bruce Granville Miller (Journal of Northwest Anthropology)

In these essays Bruce Granville Miller addresses critical issues facing contemporary Coast Salish people and communities. Building on his own fieldwork, on the salvage ethnography of an earlier generation, and the work of present-day anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Miller describes current-day tribes and bands as composed of family corporate groups and details their role in the transformations of gender and political systems. Miller examines tribal codes and courts, historical concepts and practices of justice, and the relations between the mainstream populations of British Columbia and Washington and the Coast Salish themselves, including the circumstances of non-recognized tribes among the Coast Salish and world wide, the efforts to use oral traditions and the language of sacredness in court, and in media reporting. Engaging theories of borderlands and globalization, Miller writes that studies of Coast Salish are constrained by the international border as are the people themselves, especially post-9/11.