Paige Raibmon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Authentic Indians

Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest CoastBy PAIGE RAIBMON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3535-1

Contents

List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………………..xiAcknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiiiIntroduction Authenticity and Colonial Cosmology……………………………………………………………………..1One Local Politics and Colonial Relations: The Kwakwaka’wakw at Home on the Northwest Coast………………………………15Two “The March of the Aborigine to Civilization”: Live Exhibits and the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893…………………34Three Theaters of Contact: The Kwakwaka’wakw at the Fair……………………………………………………………..50Four Picking, Posing, and Performing: Puget Sound Hop Fields and Income for Aboriginal Workers……………………………74Five Harvest Gatherings: Aboriginal Agendas, Economy, and Culture……………………………………………………..98Six Indian Watchers: Colonial Imagination and Colonial Reality………………………………………………………..116Seven The Inside Passage to Authenticity: Sitka Tourism and the Tlingit………………………………………………..135Eight “The Trend is Upward”: Mission and Cottage Life………………………………………………………………..157Nine Civilization on Trial: The Davis Case………………………………………………………………………….175Conclusion Authenticity’s Call……………………………………………………………………………………..198List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………………..209Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………211Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………..261Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………295

Chapter One

Local Politics and Colonial Relations: The Kwakwaka’wakw at Home on the Northwest Coast

Ten thousand spectators gathered on a hot August evening in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. Inside the stifling hall of the “Cavern of the Cliff,” under the glare of electric lights, the audience watched Kwakwaka’wakw performers from Vancouver Island. That night the troupe performed a dance adapted from their sacred winter ceremonial, the root of their spiritual and material order. When the two main performers stepped to the side of the stage and pulled off their shirts, the audience assumed the performance had ended. At that moment, however, the rest of the troupe surrounded the two young men and began singing and chanting to the beat of a drum. Horror-struck spectators watched as the troupe’s leader, George Hunt, used a razor to slash four deep gashes across the back of each initiate. Neither man flinched as Hunt lifted the loose strips of flesh off their backs, slid ropes beneath them, and tied the ends together. As several performers yanked violently on the loops of rope, attempting to tear the flesh loose, the intensity of the singing increased. The initiates finally grabbed the ropes themselves, ripping flesh from their backs. The performance reached a fever pitch when George Hunt reappeared on stage and calmly offered his arm to one of the initiates. The young Kwakwaka’wakw man sank his teeth into Hunt’s arm until he was dragged away, apparently having bitten off a piece of flesh as large as a silver dollar. The audience was immobilized with shock. No one understood that this was a theatrical performance prepared and orchestrated by the Kwakwaka’wakw.

The spectators in Chicago watched with a mixture of fascination and revulsion as their most lurid imaginings of wild and savage Indians played out before their eyes. Like colonial officials in British Columbia, they misinterpreted Kwakwaka’wakw behavior as attachment to superstition and tradition, in opposition to modernity and change. The Kwakwaka’wakw seemed to belong, as the New York Times asserted, to “an almost extinct race.” But even as the Kwakwaka’wakw enacted a drama that reinforced entrenched stereotypes about Indians, they simultaneously proclaimed their cultural survival and political defiance. Interaction with the colonial world was more than a defensive reaction aimed at preserving static tradition. At home on the Northwest Coast and on stage in Chicago, the Kwakwaka’wakw asserted their right to simultaneously engage modernity and tradition in distinctly indigenous-distinctly Kwakwaka’wakw-ways.

The Kwakwaka’wakw found themselves at the center of an ideological dispute within colonial society. On the one hand, anthropologists and tourists encouraged them to enact the most “traditional” elements of their culture, while on the other, missionaries and government officials pressured them to abandon “tradition” in favor of “civilization.” The performers allied with the former groups when they traveled to Chicago. When they returned home, they used wages from the trip to further frustrate church and state officials, and in so doing continued a long pattern of using wage labor for their own devices. The Kwakwaka’wakw performers in Chicago played colonial viewpoints off one another in a manner that furthered their attempts to retain control over their lives. They rejected the dichotomies that animated colonial ideas at the same time as they used them.

The Kwakwaka’wakw had long engaged capitalism, Christianity, and civilization. The performers’ trip to the Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition) positioned this local conflict on a global stage in ways that unsettled Canadian authorities as much as it startled fairgoers. In Chicago, the agendas of the Kwakwaka’wakw performers, the Canadian government and Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), an Anglican missionary, and the anthropologists who organized the Kwakwaka’wakw exhibit clashed, generating multiple meanings around the seemingly discrete spectacle of the World’s Fair. To understand these multiple agendas, we must consider the Kwakwaka’wakw “backstage,” at home on the Northwest Coast of British Columbia. We must look as well to the ideology of late-nineteenth-century world’s fairs that shaped exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Placing the controversial performance within these two colonial contexts clarifies the meanings and implications of the performance for Kwakwaka’wakw performers and colonial authorities alike. It illuminates the creative responses of the Kwakwaka’wakw as they engaged in internal and external power struggles.

* * *

Late-nineteenth-century missionaries in British Columbia viewed the Kwakwaka’wakw as the most recalcitrant of Indians. When one missionary stated that four-fifths of the “heathen” in British Columbia were Kwakwaka’wakw, he implied that they remained, as ever before, in a timeless state of uncivilized darkness. But while much about the lives of late-nineteenth-century Kwakwaka’wakw would have been familiar to previous generations, other conditions would have seemed strange and unfamiliar. Change and continuity coexisted.

Nineteenth-century Kwakwaka’wakw communities occupied their traditional territory along the coast of northeastern Vancouver Island from Campbell River to Cape Cook and along the mainland fjords opposite Campbell River north to Smith Sound. They followed a seasonal round based on a solar year divided into winter and summer. The change in seasons was more than a change in weather; it was a transformation of the state of the world and a transformation of social roles. Winter villages were the sites for ceremonial and social activities. There, people met not only extended kin but spirit beings who visited human villages in the winter season. The grandparents and great-grandparents of the Chicago performers expected visitations by the warrior spirit Winalag[??]lis during their winter ceremonials. In the late nineteenth century, Kwakwaka’wakw more commonly encountered Ba[??]ba[??]alanu[??]siwi, a spirit with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. Dances associated with this latter spirit would become the target of non-Aboriginal attack on Kwakwaka’wakw spirituality and culture, an attack that set the context for the Chicago performance. Transition to the summer’s intensive food-gathering period began with the oolichan and herring runs, which were followed by the halibut and salmon fisheries. Clams, berries, meat and cedar roots, bark and planks were other important resources.

From the late eighteenth century, the Kwakwaka’wakw augmented this cycle with income-earning opportunities that arrived on the coast with Europeans and Americans. They participated in the maritime fur trade, the advent of colonial capitalism on the coast, beginning in the 1790s. Kwakwaka’wakw communities competed with other Aboriginal peoples for this new source of wealth, jockeying for positions as middlemen, and, when unable to obtain direct access to the trade, using war and pillage to gain the desired goods. In particular, the Lekwiltok, the southernmost Kwakwaka’wakw, made warfare into a way of life, dramatically expanding their territorial reach by attacking Salish communities to the south. Following the establishment of Fort Rupert by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1849, the Kwakwaka’wakw incorporated coal mining and the land-based fur trade into their economic round. If there was a measure of consent in the Kwakwaka’wakw accommodation of the HBC presence, it was offset by a strong dose of coercion: in 1850, Company officers deployed British gunboats to destroy two Kwakwaka’wakw villages on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. In subsequent decades, Kwakwaka’wakw communities lost access to valuable land and resources as the initial transitory newcomers made way for more settlement-minded ones. The recruiter of the Chicago troupe, George Hunt, was a child of this transitional era. His father, Robert Hunt, was an English fur trader at Fort Rupert, and his mother, Mary Ebbetts, was a Tlingit from Alaska.

A generation after the establishment of Fort Rupert, opportunities in fur and coal had declined and others had emerged. Kwakwaka’wakw migrated down the coast to Victoria where they found various types of employment. Some women worked as washerwomen and some as prostitutes. Others joined male relatives fishing and canning on the Fraser River or picking hops in Puget Sound. Traveling farther still to San Francisco, Hawaii, and Japan on whaling and sealing expeditions also became lucrative options. Fort Rupert grew into a recruiting center for these jobs, which often took workers well beyond the bounds of their traditional territory. By 1893, many Kwakwaka’wakw were accustomed to migrant labor.

Income from the colonial economy had implications for the Kwakwaka’wakw system of social rank within which wealth had previously circulated among a confined group. Like many others on the Northwest Coast, Kwakwaka’wakw organized their society into a hereditary hierarchy. For the Chicago performers, as for their grandparents, particular rights and obligations accompanied one’s place in society, be it as noble, commoner, or slave. Members of each extended family unit, or numaym, meaning “those of one kind,” shared a common supernatural ancestor. Each numaym contained a fixed number of positions or seats for which the nobility alone was eligible. Ranked seats bestowed access to material and symbolic property granted by the original ancestor. Material property included fishing, hunting, gathering, and other territorial rights; symbolic property included dances, songs, and masks of winter ceremonials that affirmed the relationship to the original ancestor. The winter ceremonials themselves were the source of the ecological world that sustained human life. Spiritual origins were inextricable from material existence.

Slaves, along with resources and rituals, were part of privileged property owned by elite numaym members. The Kwakwaka’wakw obtained most of their slaves through raiding and warfare. They viewed slaves as “wealth items” that enhanced the prestige of their high-status owners. They could be traded or given away. And they could be killed by their masters in ceremonial displays of wealth. While not the plantation system of the American South, this was no benign form of servitude. The number of slaves held by Kwakwaka’wakw masters swelled in the first half of the nineteenth century, as the range of the Lekwiltok raids reached Puget Sound, hundreds of kilometers away. The indigenous slave trade declined at midcentury and may have been only a memory for the Chicago performers.

The Kwakwaka’wakw validated hereditary rights and positions through public ceremonials, known in the colonial world as potlatches. Herein was the link between wealth and status. Display and distribution of property were fundamental elements of potlatches. One needed pedigree and wealth to sustain rank. Historically, the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatched to mark community events, including marriages, coming-of-age ceremonies, apologies, debt repayment, and winter ceremonials. The dances and ceremonies performed at a given potlatch depended on the occasion and the ritual prerogatives of the host. George Hunt’s son was entitled to the high-ranking Hamat’sa dance-from which the controversial performance was partly adapted-through his Kwakwaka’wakw mother; but the legitimacy of this prestigious inheritance hinged on the presence of community witnesses at a potlatch hosted by his father. Potlatches enacted the symbiosis between the social, natural, and supernatural worlds. They linked resource rights, social hierarchy, and supernatural ancestry.

The colonial economy affected the circulation of wealth by providing non-elite Kwakwaka’wakw with access to the wealth necessary for potlatching. More significantly, it did so in the wake of a devastating demographic transformation. In the half-century from 1835 to 1885, the Kwakwaka’wakw population declined 75 percent, from 8,000 to 2,000, producing emotional and material crises barely imaginable. The tragedy had particular implications for the social hierarchy, as numayms were left without enough high-ranking individuals to fill the ranked seats. Seats left unoccupied were vulnerable; their loss meant diminution of ritual status and dispossession from resources. In the early part of the century, most of the population were commoners, with a minority of families having the symbolic and material means necessary to be counted among the nobility. By century’s end, there were more than enough seats to go around. The demographic collapse was accompanied by a democratization of wealth among those lucky enough to survive. It was a period of grim upward mobility.

The hereditary nobility had little choice but to open the ranks of the ritual hierarchy. The creation of hereditary positions, known as Eagles, accommodated this inevitable social climbing. The Eagle designation reflected both cultural innovation and elite ambivalence. It was a metaphor for “one who comes first, but not by his own rights.” Eagles are scavengers who eat either carrion or food stolen from other birds. The metaphor suggested that individuals who took up Eagle positions similarly scavenged for privileges among the Kwakwaka’wakw victims of epidemic disease. Rooted in precolonial symbolic notions, this innovation grew as a result of the incursions of disease and capitalism. The Kwakwaka’wakw responded to the disruptive forces of capitalism and disease by reinforcing the indigenous ceremonial economy as both nouveaux riches Eagles and traditionally ranked chiefs reinvested their wages into the potlatch system. When the Kwakwaka’wakw seized hold of economic opportunities brought by White immigrants, they countered the social effects of epidemic disease by accommodating additional social change.

* * *

The Kwakwaka’wakw had been interacting with Europeans since the 1790s, and large numbers of immigrants had been arriving in the colony of British Columbia since the 1857 gold rush. But few outsiders settled in Kwakwaka’wakw territory before the final decades of the nineteenth century. Capitalist entrepreneurs-such as the marble quarry operator near Fort Rupert and S. A. Spencer, owner of the Alert Bay cannery-arrived in the 1870s. So too did missionaries and government officials. In 1878, the Reverend Alfred J. Hall of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) opened a mission among the Kwakwaka’wakw; in 1879, federal government surveyors arrived; and in 1881, George Blenkinsop, the Indian agent representing the federal Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), opened an administrative and regulatory office in the newly established Kwawkewlth Agency. Examining the relationship between the Kwakwaka’wakw and these colonial representatives sheds light on Kwakwaka’wakw processes of cultural adaptation. It also shows that Hall and the Canadian government, rather than the thousands of Chicago fairgoers, were the most significant audience of the Chicago performance.

Missionary and government forces in British Columbia mounted a joint assault on Aboriginal life. Unwilling-or unable-to accept Aboriginal economic and cultural values structured around extended kinship and inherited resource rights, Christian missionaries and government officials attempted to instill a Western work ethic and a capitalist spirit. They strove to effect cultural as well as religious conversions. As early as 1881, nearly two-thirds of the province’s Aboriginal population was nominally Christian; by 1904 the figure had grown to 90 percent. The ensuing struggles between missionaries and Aboriginal people centered less on the issue of conversion than on questions of Aboriginal ideological and material self-definition.

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Excerpted from Authentic Indiansby PAIGE RAIBMON Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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