Binnema, Theodore

The Babine Archaeology Project began in 2010 and since then, many stone artifacts have been recovered. In 2014 and 2015, the project focused on excavations on Smokehouse Island (GiSp-001), on the Babine River. The focus of this thesis is an analysis of a sample of debitage recovered from Unit 8 excavated in 2015. The goal is to determine if differences are evident in how the inhabitants of Smokehouse Island reduced the different stone raw materials. Mass analysis, a modified version of the Sullivan and Rozen technique, and Magne’s scar count method were used to analyze the materials. Results suggest that core reduction is dominant for the two different raw material groups, though tool production is still present for both. Technological mixing impacts the analysis of the different materials.

The First World War was a unique and unrepeatable Gothic event, and so, this thesis examines its modern and postmodern literary accounts within the War Gothic framework. Analysing Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear, Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, it looks at the relationships of transformative states; specifically, the decomposition and destruction of the body, the landscape, identity, and masculinity along the trenches of the Western Front. Moreover, this thesis explores how the Gothic nature of WWI affects identity politics in the four novels according to personal, cultural, and national authorial subject positions. The War Gothic unites the German and French narratives with the previously unrepresented, and now re-imagined, Irish Catholic and Indigenous Canadian war experiences for the Gothic communicates the ineffable complexities of human nature and of war.

This thesis argues that Indians and White people who were sympathetic to Native issues episodically challenged racial discrimination and segregation during the post-war era by asserting Native people's growing citizenship rights while calling into question the cultural assumptions that underpinned such prejudice. Those participating in this discourse used analogies with global theatres of racial tension, namely the southern United States, to legitimize their protests. Indians articulated their demands for citizenship by leveraging their burgeoning political rights, their wartime contributions to Canada, and their growing economic contribution to post-war northern British Columbia. During this era, Indians, activists, and sympathetic Whites fought for the liberalization of Native drinking laws and the culturally deterministic preconceptions that motivated such legislation. Finally, newspaper reportage and public perceptions influenced, and to some degree shaped, public discourse on issues of racial discrimination as well as on Native political protest and activism.