Brian Thom is a Canadian anthropologist, former land claims negotiator and Indigenous title, rights and governance advisor.
He is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where in 2010 he founded the UVic Ethnographic Mapping Lab.
Biography
Brian Thom has done extensive fieldwork since the early 1990s with Coast Salish communities in southwest British Columbia, and more limited fieldwork with other Indigenous peoples in Canada, the US, and the Russian Far East. He has frequently been interviewed or cited by the media for his anthropologist perspective on Indigenous rights and title issues. In 2014 his work on ethnographic mapping using Google Earth was featured in a 2-page weekend spread in the Globe and Mail, an article that won the reporter Justine Hunter the Jack Webster Award for Digital Journalism.
Early career
Early in his career he conducted archaeological research in southwest British Columbia which attended to the dynamics of social and cultural change and continuity in the Salish Sea over the past two millennia, and wrote. Thom received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 2005, his doctoral dissertation draws on a philosophy of place to situate a detailed political ethnography of southeast Vancouver Island Coast Salish peoples' relationships to land.
Modern Day Treaty Negotiations
Over 14 years between 2014-2010 he worked for Sto:lo Nation and the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group as a negotiator, researcher, and senior advisor. During this time he led negotiations for the HTG-Parks Canada Cooperative Park Management agreementand the HTG-Archaeology branch agreement; co-authored the HTG Strategic Land Use Plan, and Call to Action on Shared Decision Making, participated in the Common Table negotiations, and contributed to the HTG petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Scholarly work
Since joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, his research has focused on the political, social and cultural processes that surround Indigenous people's efforts to resolve title and rights claims, and establish self-government. He has published in English and French, chronicling the experiences of the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group case against Canada at the IACHR.
Brian Thom's scholarship challenges conventional approaches to mapping Indigenous peoples' territories, theorizing how they are instrumental in producing problematic discourses of overlapping claims. and the power of bring ethnographic approaches to Indigenous mapping. Indigenous legal orders have figured centrally in his ethnographic work, including of Coast Salish laws of caring for the dead and Coast Salish land tenure systems. He has led community-engaged research, including the Commemorating Ye'yumnuts project with Cowichan Tribes, and the work to Indigenize the Cordova Bay Local Area Plan.
Thom has served on the editorial board of the Canadian Anthropology Society journal Anthropologica and is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Recognition
Awards and honours
Brian Thom’s work has had impact beyond the academy, which has been recognized by several distinguished awards and honours. In 2022 Brian Thom received the prestigious Leadership Victoria award for Extending Reconciliation, in recognition of his work with WSANEC communities and the District of Saanich to Indigenize local area planning in Cordova Bay. https://www.leadershipvictoria.ca/vcla-winners; https://www.uvic.ca/news/topics/2022+leadership-victoria-thom+news
In 2022 Brian Thom was awarded the UVic Provost’s Award in Engaged Scholarship, a distinction for tenured faculty members who have achieved great distinction as community engaged scholars. https://www.uvic.ca/news/topics/2022+provosts-engaged-scholars+news
In 2021 Brian was a nominee for the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia Distinguished Academics award Academic of the Year. https://www.cufa.bc.ca/awards/past-winners/winners-of-the-2021-distinguished-academics-awards-nominees/
In 2020, Brian Thom was recognized by the University of Victoria Faculty of Social Sciences for outstanding community outreach https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/people/awards-honours/index.php
Selected works
(2020) Thom, Brian with Sarah Morales. The Principle of Sharing and the Shadow of Canadian Property Law. Pp. 120-162 in Creating Indigenous Property: Power, Rights, and Relationships, edited by Angela Cameron, Sari Graben, and Val Napoleon. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.3138/9781487532116-005