BC Studies no. 152 Winter 2006-2007

Melissa Meyer, from the Tsimshian Nation, Lax Kw’alaams/Port Simpson, BC, is a University of British Columbia graduate in Fine Arts, a traditional weaver, and a Psychology of Vision trainer. She was still weaving Chilkat and raven’s tail, and doing all the traditional dying herself, when she assisted Susan Neylan with interviews at Lax Kw’alaams/Port Simpson in 2003.

Susan Neylan, a specialist in vernacular Christianity among the Tsimshian of northern British Columbia, is an Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. She holds a doctoral degree in history from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Neylan has published papers in Histoire sociale/Social History, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, and Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, and is author of “The Heavens are Changing”: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

Dianne Newell is a Professor of History and Director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. A specialist in the socio-econmic history of technology, she has published extensively on Canada’s Pacific coast fisheries, including: Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada’s Pacific Coast Fisheries (U. of Toronto Press, 1993). She has published one other collaborative essay with Dorothee Schreiber, “Why Spend a Lot of Time Dwelling on the Past?: Understanding Resistance to Contemporary Salmon Farming in Kwakwaka’wakw Territory,” in Arif Dirlik, ed., Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest.

Susan Roy is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. She has worked as a research consultant for the Musqueam Indian Band and other First Nations in British Columbia. She is presently teaching in the First Nations Studies Program at UBC.

Dorothee Schreiber is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. Her current research deals with Native-settler conflicts over natural resources, and the colonial administration of Native fisheries.