Between Documentation and Dispossession: the Language of the Nuu-chah-nulth People in the Journals of James Cook’s Third Voyage

Abstract Through a case study of James Cook's third voyage and his contact with the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Vancouver Island in 1778, this article sheds new light on the epistemological dispossession of indigenous peoples that accompanied European expansion in the eighteenth century. The documentation of the Nuu-chah-nulth language in the official account of the expedition (1784) contributed to the establishment of a monopoly on history, from which indigenous forms of knowledge were excluded. The study of languages contributed to the representation of indigenous peoples as having no history and as being situated in the past of a presumed European ‘modernity’.