Dr. James Waldram: 2009 Weaver-Tremblay Award Winner
CASCA in 2009 selected Professor James B. Waldram, Chair of the Cultural Anthropology Program, College or Arts and Science, and Coordinator, Culture and Human Development Program, Dept of Psychology, at the University of Saskatchewan, for the Weaver-Tremblay Award. Jim’s outstanding accomplishments comprehensively envelop the entire range of academic scholarship and engaged practice of our professional field, fully embracing the mandate of understanding and serving the needs of communities recognized by this distinguished award.
Jim was mentored by the distinguished anthropologist Sally Weaver. His scholarship has never lost sight of her deep commitment to applied anthropology, and he has unmistakably followed in Sally’s footsteps in a most admirable tradition, carefully gathering the details and evidence to promote justice of indigenous peoples.
After attaining a Master’s degree from the University of Manitoba, Jim went to the University of Connecticut, earning a doctorate from the renowned applied medical anthropologists Gretta and Pertti Pelto. Jim has been on faculty at the University of Saskatchewan since 1983, where, in the early years, he established Saskatchewan’s first Department of Native Studies. He wrote the proposal for the graduate program and supervised its first students. Jim served as Chair of the Graduate Program for over a decade, while simultaneously holding the position of Department Head. He was instrumental in promoting the hiring of indigenous people in the Native Studies department at the University of Saskatchewan, a move taken for granted now, but novel at the time.
Most recently, he has served as the Chair of the Culture and Human Development graduate program in Psychology while assuming the position of Chair of the revitalized Anthropology program, where, over the last year, he has redesigned the entire undergraduate program and has started work on a new graduate program proposal as part of my College’s efforts to revitalize Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan.
He co-founded and was Associate Editor of the Native Studies Review, 1985-98. From his undergraduate career at Waterloo, through to chairing the Standing Committee on Social Issues and Anthropological Responsibility at the Society for Applied Anthropology meetings in Saskatchewan in 1988, to 2004 when, as President of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) he assisted in framing the charter of the World Council of Anthropological Associations, Jim has set his standards and goals high and achieves each one. As President of CASCA, Jim oversaw all aspects of the operation of our scholarly association, its annual conference, and the journal of the association (Anthropologica), where the latest research developments in the field are presented. He is currently the International Delegate for CASCA to the World Council of Anthropological Associations, and also serves as an advisory board member for WCAA. Nationally, he is a founding board member for the National Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research.
While significant benchmarks, Jim’s impressive administrative record of launching departments, programs and organizations, however important, is probably not the leading signature of his career. His major contribution is to research in applied anthropology, distinguished by the impressive development of conceptual and methodological approaches to our discipline that are readily accessible in well over a hundred (when I stopped counting) monographs and edited books, book chapters, journal articles and technical reports and used widely across Canada.
Jim’s doctoral research published in 1988, As long as the rivers run: Hydroelectric development and Native communities in western Canada, examined the social, cultural, economic and health implications of hydro development on indigenous peoples. Like Sally, Jim didn’t shirk from pointing to Canadian government policies that ignored treaty responsibilities over resource profits. His technical reports throughout the 1980s document the impact of hydroelectric expansion in and for the aboriginal communities affected by these developments.
It is his later work on traditional forms of healing in contemporary contexts, however, for which he is most widely recognized. His co-edited volume Aboriginal health in Canada: Historical, cultural and epidemiological perspectives, first published in 1995 and revised in 2006, remains on the required reading lists in university courses in Anthropology, Sociology, History, Canadian Studies, Environmental Studies and First Nations Studies across Canada as well as outside this country.
It is important to note that Jim began building an outstanding and impressive research career examining the social determinants of health long before the World Health Organization’s Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1988) and Bob Evans, Morris Barer and Ted Marmor published Why Some people are healthy and others not? (1994) purportedly kicked-off the field. Jim’s scholarship has significantly augmented this area, usually contributed to by epidemiologists, by his early on and firm location of the importance of aboriginal rights historically, and currently, within the discourse of health determinants. He has shown how Canadian policies continue to have detrimental social and health consequences for those first nations whom the government has so thoroughly neglected with respect to fiduciary responsibility. This reality, as Sally Weaver so clearly spelled out in 1981 in Making Canadian Indian Policy, and Jim continues to push forward with regards to health inequities, remains an unconscionable act of ignorance for redress in Canada.
Over the past decade, Jim has provided ethnographically detailed accounts that apply sophisticated analytical critiques to the body of conceptual knowledge and assumptions, the faulty theories, methods and data on aboriginal culture and history, that have lead to a misunderstanding and marginalization of aboriginal mental health issues. Revenge of the Windigo: the construction of the mind and mental health of North American Aboriginal peoples (2004) is a 414 page tome published by the Anthropological Horizons series at University of Toronto Press that guides the reader, including health professionals, through an impressive and intriguing history of misplaced theories of aboriginal mental health by anthropologists, psychologists and psychoanalytic psychiatrists, culminating in a powerful critique of the ethics and values of treatments and therapies in use.
Jim advanced the first comprehensive examination of forensic rehabilitation and traditional healing among Aboriginal prison inmates, including theoretical work on the issue of efficacy and traditional healing. In The Way of the Pipe: Aboriginal spirituality and symbolic healing in Canadian prisons (1996), Jim provided a thick and complex examination of the medical anthropology of efficacy and effectiveness, of therapeutic treatments that embody the vital nuances of culture that do not resort to essentialism. He displays the distinct skills of a fine craftsman by meticulously gathering and extracting the narratives of those he works among, weaving their stories to build a bridge, translating their thoughts and actions to the reader and towards positive and effective policy changes affecting aboriginals (Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2000; 14(4): 603-625). The significance and difficulty in gaining access in this first ethnographically-based study of a prison unit dedicated to the treatment of sexual offenders should not go unacknowledged. Among those with whom he has worked are arguably the most hardened criminals in prisons; this capacity to open a window into the world of a very different Other is a vocation that Jim has honed and accomplished admirably. Aboriginal healing in Canada: Studies in therapeutic meaning and practice appeared in 2008, published by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. As I write this nomination, his fieldwork in prisons appears as the headliner “Challenges of Prison Ethnography” in the January 2009 Anthropology Newsletter. An ethnography will no doubt be forthcoming.
Jim’s work has received national acknowledgement with numerous honours, including the Harold Adams Innes Book award, and has been provincially recognized by the Saskatchewan Book Award and the Margaret McWilliams Medal in Manitoba. His research is about the unanticipated effects of government policies where the voices of the local communities that should have been involved were not considered; he has developed a fine methodological toolkit to give service and voice to the narratives of people in these communities. In 2005, his lifetime of research and applied anthropology received a national honour when he was named Champion of Mental Health Research and Advocacy by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health (CAMIMH) representing eighteen mental health organizations from across Canada, for his work in understanding Aboriginal mental health.
Never one to sit back, Jim has most recently had his head turned by Mayan healers in Central America. The research was the healers’ idea – they contacted Jim. Through a Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada funded grant with the Q’eqchi Healer’s Association of Belize, he has generated several hundred hours of audio and video interviews of healers talking about Q’eqchi culture, and their healing practices and philosophy. This signals the emergence of a long-term research relationship that will continue to produce detailed ethnographic data on Q’eqchi healing that exceeds previous work in this area. The indexed audio and video materials have been returned to the Belize Indigenous Training Institute, the umbrella organization for the healers, and deposited at Tumul Kin, a Maya-centered school in southern Belize, to be integrated into elementary and high school curricula in southern Belize as part of Q’eqchi and Maya-centered school in southern Belize. Discussions are underway to place these archival resources with a branch of the University of Belize.
The astonishing level of engaged research and energetic capacity building that Jim has demonstrated to date, and his careful and detailed examination of matters of social and political concern, make him a most worthy and exemplary candidate for the Weaver-Tremblay Award. We can look forward to his continuing contribution to our discipline for many years to come.