Getting the youth back to the land: Community-based collaborative Archaeology at Tl’ches

Abstract

Tl’ches is an island group in the Salish Sea near present-day Victoria. As Songhees Nation reserve land, it is an archetypal Cultural Keystone Place that has been inhabited by Lekwungen-speaking families for generations. Ongoing community-based archaeological and ethnoecology research regards this archipelago as an ecosystem shaped by millennia of indigenous resource management and subsistence practices. An ongoing collaborative research project is centred on the community value of “getting the youth back to the land,” and combining community knowledge and priorities with archaeological and historical ecology data and methods. Together we explore indigenous soils, blue camas and spring bank clover root gardens, and a complex of pre-contact and post-contact villages. Importantly, youth are increasingly involved in not just learning, but in contributing to research goals, methods, and practice. Tl’ches offers a complex and robust Lekwungen and environmental record—it is an eco-cultural legacy of sustainable Indigenous inhabitation and management. In effect, it is also simultaneously a place of co-discovery and shared knowledge production