Brian Thom's Homepage of Anthropology for Coast Salish Peoples

Welcome to Brian Thom's Homepage

Back in 1997, I started this website as a way to share my work as an anthropologist in this new form we were discovering, the Internet. You can see early versions of it here!

25 years later, I have build this website to be a collection of my writings related to my anthropological research and public practice, in a form more widely available than traditional scholarly venues. I have tried to provide Open Access versions of the work wherever possible, and have given the offical links to scholarly publication website.

I also include my comprehensive bibliography of works by anthropologists working for and with Coast Salish peoples over the past 150 years. Though not exhaustive (and less up-to-date since COVID), my hope is bibliography will be useful for other students of Coast Salish ethnography.

This website is for to community members, students, and the general public to promoting understanding and respect for Coast Salish peoples' cultures, histories, and rights.

About the Name & Spindle Whorl Image

The original name for this website was "Brian Thom's Coast Salish Homepage". I came up with that name for this website back in 1997 when I was assembling my first comprehensive bibliography and list of web resources for scholars of Coast Salish cultures and histories. I was intending to use the term "Coast Salish" -- a term invented by Anthropologists in the 19th century to refer to the peoples living in and around the Salish Sea -- to highlight the very local and culturally specific focus of the site's content. Naming this website has been a challenge for me. I do not have any grand aspirations to be speaking for or even comprehensively about Coast Salish peoples, and am not a citizen of a Coast Salish nation myself.

The site may better be called "Brian Thom's Webpage of Anthropology done with and for Central Coast Salish peoples" or something like that. Perhaps due to a lack of imagination on my part, I have decided to keep the original long-standing homepage name, and I hope you can forgive the imprecise or even inaccurate impression that the title leaves us with.

The spindle whorl image is of the beautiful maple double-headed serpent whorl used in by a Quw'uts'un family in the 1800s. This spindle whorl is now in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington DC), catalogue number 18/6534. It was collected by George Emmons, and sold to the museum in 1934. Other images on this websites are photographs taken by me in Coast Salish territories.

References

When making reference to work on this site, please cite the bibliographic entry listed on this website and point to the www.brianthom.ca URL with your accessed date.

None of the writing on this site may be published, reworked, or otherwise distributed without express permission of the author.

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