Final: Resilience Theory and Potlatch

Question 1

William Housty Addresses NEB on Heiltsuk Culture
Video:
What are his main points?

Answer 1

Against Pipeline due to threat of oil spill

• Cultural Significance of Salmon
• Cultural Importance of Language - Sense of place, connection with environment, self-identification.
• Changing environment will change the way the people will look and talk about the place: different place names.

Question 2

What is resilience?

What does it include?

Answer 2

the ability to absorb disturbances, to be
changed and then to re-organise and still have the same identity.
Includes learning from disturbance.

Question 3

2 Assumptions of Resilience?

Answer 3

1) Humans and nature are strongly coupled and coevolving –> systems are socio-ecological systems
2) Systems in constant flux, highly unpredictable

Question 4

In regards to resilience, what are the 2 contrasting visions of stability?
what are they? what are the outcomes?

Answer 4

Traditional model:
- single equilibrium, global stability, near-equilibrium states
- Traditional model leads to maximizing efficiency, fixing
carrying capacity and minimizing variability and
disturbances
- Outcomes: Stability, Complete collapse

Dynamic model:

• multiple stable states, high variability, surprise and inherent unpredictability
• A resilient system can withstand shocks and build itself when necessary

Question 5

3 main features of Resilient Systems?

Answer 5

• The amount of change the system
  can undergo and still retain the same
  controls on function and structure.
• The degree to which the system is capable of self-organization.
• The ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation.

Question 6

Pacific Northwest coast provided all three
Resilience characteristics, what are they?
- What is their premise?

Answer 6

• the ability to buffer disturbance,
• the ability to self-organize,
• and the ability to learn

Premise: : Archeology and oral history suggest persistence, which may have argued implies sustainability.

Question 7

What is a Potlatch?
What do they organize? Socio… (hint)
How do they organize?

Answer 7

Potlatch ceremonies/practice organize a (social) system, but the system.

• also includes nature (putting the ‘ecological’ in ‘social-ecological’).
• Titleholders of houses organized ceremonies for their “houses”.
• Organized with law. Even being present on a houses land required approval; trespass was a capital offense that would be enforced, usually after a warming.

Question 8

Pacific Northwest coast provided all three
Resilience characteristics:

How do they buffer disturbance (from both human and ecosystems)?
(2) - explain why?

Answer 8

1) Reciprocal exchanges as “social insurance” buffer,
- On smaller scales, within tribes, reciprocity fosters cooperation; less incentive to over-harvest as individuals or families.
2) Leadership choice as buffer,
- Titleholders had to maintain their “commoners” and show good
management (accounting by “counters”)…or risk losing their job

Question 9

Pacific Northwest coast provided all three
Resilience characteristics:

How do they self-reorganize?

Answer 9

• Reorganize ways in which salmon harvests were conducted.. to confront major shifts in ocean productivity
• Shifts among species as they varied in abundance - fishes, intertidal.

Question 10

Pacific Northwest coast provided all three
Resilience characteristics:

How do they have the ability to learn?
Why do they need it?

Answer 10

• The house organization provided a basis for learning.
• New titleholders had to demonstrate that they knew the stories of the founding of their houses (stories provide vehicles for lessons/learning to be reinforced)
• Why learning must have occurred: proprietorship of a stream/its salmon
  would allow titleholders to benefit from learning how to manipulate run.

Question 11

What did the Hamatsa dance involve?

What is its significance?

Answer 11

The fearful drama of the hamatsa dance involved the taming of a cannibal, thus controlling dangerous hunger.

The natural system was not separate from the human system; both were linked, requiring proper human behavior in order to preserve the entire system.

Question 12

6 Ideas/Concepts included in Pacific Northwest societies?

What did the Canadian Government do in 1885 - 1951?

Answer 12

(1) cooperative decision-making,
(2) social learning,
(3) environmental ethics,
(4) contingent proprietorship,
(5) balanced reciprocity, and
(6) public accountability.

When Canada outlawed pot-latching between 1885 and 1951, itinterfered with this self-governance and method for society to achieve sustainability.