Border Securitization and Transnational Ethnicity

A case study of the Central Coast Salish

James M HundleyBinghamton University

“…the utterance itself is the act” (Waever 1995: 55)

Contrast with Balzacq (2010)

Security Studies

an articulated assemblage of practices whereby heuristic artefacts (metaphors, policy tools, image repertoires, analogies, stereotypes, emotions, etc.) are contextually mobilized by a securitizing actor, who works to prompt an audience to build a coherent network of implications (feelings, sensations, thoughts, and intuitions), about the critical vulnerability of a referent object, that concurs with the securitizing actor’s reasons for choices and actions, by investing the referent subject with such an aura of unprecedented threatening complexion that a customized policy must be undertaken to immediately block its development (2010: 3)

1) Securitization at border allows us to trace development of sociocultural phenomena

2) Using an indigenous research methodology allows better insight into those developments

(Central)

Coast Salish

Formal political organization Politics organized by

kinship

Labor, trade, ritual, sport…

Hop picking

Slahal game

Oregon Treaty 1846

The “Salish Sea”

Coast Salish Gathering Nawtsamaat Alliance

Collective, publically expressed identity

Tied to historic self-understanding

Responds to social context

Ethnicity

Language◦ From Lhéchelesem to Halkomelem

Human Ecology◦ Relationship to land/changing metaphors

Post-9/11 Changes

Experiencing the landscape

Tribal Journeys

From “studying” to “studying with” “Indigenous research methodology is not

simply about who is doing the research – Indigenous or not – but the way in which Indigenous protocols, values, and behaviors are honored and made an integral part of the research, its reflexivity, and results” (Dangeli 2006:9)

Decolonizing Anthropology