This article grapples with the seeming paradox in the notion of representing cartographic boundaries for an indigenous community whose core social relationships are embedded in a moral ethos of borderless kin networks. While ethnographic maps of the Coast Salish people (southwest British Columbia and northwest Washington) have traditionally represented territories as discretely bounded, continuous regions, contemporary land claims maps submitted by Coast Salish political leaders reveal a nest of overlapping and interlocking lines. The paper argues that delineating territories based strictly on land use and occupancy does not take into account broader relationships between people and place. Property, language, residence and identity are categories also appropriate to Coast Salish territorial boundaries, while ideas and practices of kin, travel, descent and sharing make boundaries permeable. The paper considers the boundary lines created by Coast Salish leaders within the context of land claims, which potentially, have the power to transform Coast Salish social and political relations.

This paper considers the implications of the powerful "overlapping territories" map produced by the government of Canada in its attempt to refute human rights violations charges brought by Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The map is at the core of Canada's defense in that it suggests that overlapping indigenous territories negate claims of exclusivity over the land and therefore any kind of obligations the state may have in respect of human or other indigenous rights in those lands. Revealing the limits of cartographic abstractions of indigenous spatialities, as well as the perilous stakes for indigenous peoples when engaging in conventional discourses of territoriality, these issues have broad significance.

Indigenous peoples in the Russian Far East are engaged in vibrant cultural and linguistic resurgence and revitalization through their community and regional organizations. Through the activities of one of these organizations, a computer-aided cultural mapping project was initiated in collaboration with indigenous villages along the Kamchatka Peninsula, working with youth and elders to map out the histories of special cultural places. The project utilized innovative participatory methodologies using Google Earth and related Google mapping tools, which are freely accessible and desired for use in the communities, providing an accessible, low-cost, easyto-use computer application for detailed digital cultural mapping. This article elaborates on the use of these technologies to empower a community-based collaborative research project and reflects on critical issues in aligning community, corporate, and scholarly objectives in successful projects.of Culture in Kovran, and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography, we set about a project to train community members to use freely available, easy-to-use software (Google Earth) to create a digital atlas of indigenous language place names and accounts by the community of culturally significant places. While representatives of several indigenous communities in Kamchatka have participated in the training, the fieldwork has so far been mainly centered in Kovran, an Itelmen fishing community on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula where the subsistence economy is vital for the community, and where many families are significantly involved (Koester 2012;Murashko 1997).Like many indigenous peoples worldwide (Bryan and Wood 2015;Chapin et al. 2005;Eades 2015), Itelmen peoples have several goals in setting about to collaborate on a digital atlas with Indigenous-language place names and cultural sites detailed in text, video, and photos. One objective is to engage school-aged youth in conversations with elders about indigenous language, tradition, and cultural heritage. In turn, goals of documenting and celebrating indigenous cultural heritage knowledge for use in village schools and throughout the broader public benefits all Kamchatka residents, and most especially Kamchatka youth who are engaged in the contemporary resurgence of indigenous cultures.Through documenting and making accessible indigenous peoples language, history, and places of significant cultural identity, the project seeks to benefit youth, elders, and local educators/specialists in Kamchatka. The atlas materials highlight and celebrate indigenous language materials and history, they also have contextual information in Russian and English of interest to researchers and others more broadly. The digital atlas also has potential as an instrument for public policy that uniquely positions communities to communicate key values associated with particular locales in the spirit of cross-cultural collaboration.

This paper is a critical history of anthropological research on the oral traditions of the cultures of the Northwest Coast of North America, where much influential work has been done using the vast text collections compiled by Boas and his collaborators. The paper reviews the development and legacy of the Boas collection and analyses of Northwest Coast texts. In addition the paper analyzes responses to this body of work by functionalists who have looked to Northwest Coast myth as a way of understanding property, and responses by structuralists who have sought ways of understanding underlying meanings in these traditions. Recent contributions have focused on a more literary analysis of oral traditions. Finally, suggestions are made as to some future avenues for future study of Northwest Coast oral traditions.

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This chapter reflects on the work happening at the intersection of anthropology and law in Canada with respect to Indigenous peoples’ rights, title, governance, and legal orders. Indigenous legal scholars have ignited an important new engagement with Indigenous legal orders that are reshaping mainstream Canadian legal discourses. The chapter reviews how this work has profound implications for the direction of the recognition of Indigenous land title, territorial rights, and Indigenous jurisdictions. It argues that anthropologists have the opportunity to shift their engagement with Indigenous law from essentialized production of traditional cultures to ethnographically engaging with the logics and practices of Indigenous legal orders. The chapter develops a brief ethnographic case-study involving several closely related Island Hul’q’umi’num’ (Coast Salish) communities on the east coast of Vancouver Island (British Columbia) as they work to mobilize longstanding Indigenous principles and understandings of land tenure and harvest rights among themselves in a complex, state-regulated environment of shellfish harvesting. The purpose of the case-study is to highlight a path of anthropological engagement with contemporary Indigenous law, working both to appreciate the ways Indigenous and state legal orders are brought to life concurrently over time, and to reflect on the on-the-ground ways legal pluralism is experienced. The case also offers conceptual opportunities to transcend problematic state discourses of ‘overlapping claims’ and makes space for workable principles of co-existence through Indigenous legal sensibility.