Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. The Anthropologist Who Sold Out The First Nations; Chapter 37, Part Two. by Dave Jaffe

  The Anthropologist Who Sold Out the First Nations. By Dave Jaffe. Part Two.


        Stanley Whitehead was a political conservative. He had little time  for the movements that had sprung to life in the late 1960's. These movements included gay liberation, feminism, First Nations groups, environmentalism and anti-war activism. Whitehead usually voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives and the Social Credit Party in provincial elections.
     Yet the First Nations groups were now on the march in the 1980's. They also now had their own anthropologists and their tribes started to lay claim to large parts of British Columbia. They also insisted that oral testimony and history counted as evidence in court cases. This was a most important issue since most aboriginal groups didn't have a written language before some white or Caucasian colonizers showed up.
    In the 1980's, important court cases involving First Nations took place. In one case, Gitskan and Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs in northwestern B.C. laid claim to 55,000 square kilometres of land. "This is our land," they said in effect. "And it must be returned to us." Whitehead got a doctorate in anthropology while this case came to court. It had taken him some time, lots of hard work and some money to get it. So by the end of the 1980's he was now an anthropologist and an accredited expert on First Nations issues.
     Whitehead got his Ph.D. or doctorate by working with two aboriginal groups and exploring their history and culture. Without their help, he wouldn't have got his Ph.D. Then along came B.C. Chief justice Allan McEachern who was ruling on another important aboriginal land claims issue.  McEachern denied a First Nations group the right to the land they were claiming. He based some of his decision on evidence that came  from anthropologists. One of those anthropologists happened to be Stanley Whitehead.
     "This is betrayal with a capital 'B'", said someone who met Whitehead in the 1980's. "Natives helped him get his Ph.D and yet he  sided with the B.C. and Canadian governments against other native groups." Whitehead got paid well for his help. Yet he insisted that he didn't twist the truth against the land claimants. He was a trained anthropologist who dealt with the facts. "Just the facts," Jack Webb as Sergeant Friday used to say in the 1950's t.v. show 'Dragnet'. That's all that Whitehead claimed he was dealing with in the writings that he gave to the government. He just supplied the facts.
    Yet Whitehead didn't get off completely unscathed as we'll see.