SENRI ETHNOLOGICAL STUDIES 56 Denendeh: anthropologists, politics and ethnicity in the reorganization of the Canadian Northwest Territories

• Main Authors: Jean-guy A. Goulet, Saint Paul Universio
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Northwest Territories; Subarctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.520.4669; http://ir.minpaku.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10502/946/1/SES56_012.pdf

This chapter examines epistemological assumptions that underlie, on the one hand, the anthropological knowledge and descriptions of Northern Athapaskansi or Dene and, on the other, Dene knowledge and presentation of themselves.2 The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part shows that `cumulative knowledge ' about Northern Athapaskans of the past, gathered in volume 6 of the Handbook of North American lndians (Helm l981) and reproduced in many publications since, is organized around categories that are theoretically ill-defined. It suggests that anthropological descriptions and presentations of Dene tribes tend to legitimize and reify, rather than analyze, the socially and politically salient ethnic labels in terms of which residents in the subarctic have attempted to organize their relationships in the fur-trade era. The second part of the chapter argues that this is true also for the more recent anthropological presentations of the Dene as constituting a First Nation within its own tenitory, Denendeh. The chapter addresses the following questions: how are English terms or labels adopted by Dene and non-Dene to identify Iocal Dene populations? How does the adoption and use of these English terms enter the process of reification whereby Dene