Epistemological inequality : Aboriginal labor and knowledge in the geological surveys of George Mercer Dawson, 1874-1901 ...

• Main Author: Prkachin, Eva Jean
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2009
• Subjects: Yukon; Canada; British Columbia; Mercer; Dawson
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0067517; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0067517

Historical studies of Canadian science often ignore the assistance that Aboriginal people provided to frontier scientists. Monographs and biographies detailing the extraordinary career of Canadian geological surveyor George Mercer Dawson in the late nineteenth-century subsume the role that Aboriginal people played in his explorations. Postcolonial scholarship dealing with science criticizes the low epistemological status that scientific explorers accorded to Aboriginal knowledge, but neglects how collaboration between Aboriginal people and scientists influenced the knowledge that they produced in the New World. Dawson’s journals, technical notes, and scientific publications detail the numerous types of physical and intellectual labor that Aboriginal people contributed to his surveying expeditions in western Canada, particularly British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon. Using Aboriginal guides, general laborers, and informants enabled Dawson to cover substantial amounts of terrain during short surveying ...