‘This book represented reconciliation’

Histories, Territories and Laws of the Kitwancool
by Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs (edited and with an introduction by Wilson Duff)

Victoria: Royal BC Museum, (second edition) 2022
$19.95 / 9780772680327

Reviewed by Robin Fisher

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“The authors of this book are the Kitwancool themselves…” was the first line of the introduction when this book was first published in 1959. It was also, at that time, hugely significant. The line was written by Wilson Duff, the senior anthropologist at the British Columbia Provincial Museum, whose vision and patience had produced the book even though he made it clear that he was not the author. It was significant because, when First Nations voices told their own stories, usually they were not heard and they seldom appeared in print. In its time this book was, in the words of another Provincial Museum anthropologist, a “brilliant move.”¹ It was an example of reconciliation before its time.

Histories, Territories and Laws of the Kitwancool came out of a totem pole reclamation initiative by the Provincial Museum and the Anthropology Department at the University of British Columbia. It was led by Wilson Duff who was interested in saving some of the totem poles that were still standing at Kitwancool, or Gitanyow as we now know it. During a visit to Kitwancool in the summer of 1952 Duff first broached the idea of taking a few of the poles down to the Museum and the University where they could be restored and preserved. The response from the elders was a definitive “no.” The Kitwancool totem poles were, at one level, ownership stakes in the ground. In 1927, within living memory, some Kitwancool leaders had gone to Oakalla prison for resisting the work of government surveyors in their territory. They were not going to readily relinquish their own testimonials of ownership.

Duff was concerned that totem poles were disappearing and the few that were left in the villages of the Northwest coast were decaying with time and weather. He wanted to preserve some of the artistic masterpieces and the stories that they told. Yet he understood when he was told by one Kitwancool chief that a totem pole was “a symbol of all the privileges, power, territory, traditions and prestige of the owning clan.”² Furthermore clans and their leaders no longer possessed the wealth to host the feasts that were needed to accompany the raising of a new pole to replace any taken away. Duff knew that further requests would only harden the resolve to keep the totem poles in the village.

He returned to Kitwancool six years later to find that six poles had fallen to the ground. He had to try again, this time with a different proposal. Peter Williams, the President of Kitwancool, recalled that when Wilson Duff spoke of their poles and their meaning “[h]is voice was soft and gentle, but firm with truth and honour.” He understood the power of Kitwancool history and their rights to their land.³ So he suggested that three or four poles be removed and taken to the Provincial Museum where replicas would be made as part of the Museum’s carving program led by Mungo Martin. The replicas would then be returned and raised in the village. Further conversations led to the idea of having elders tell the stories behind the totem poles to be turned into a book published by the Museum and made available for study at universities. These suggestions were accepted and, at the insistence of the Kitwancool, laid out in a contract signed by Duff for the Museum and the village leaders for their community. It was a creative agreement, based on careful conversations between the Kitwancool and the representative of a museum run by a government that for a hundred years had denied that the Indigenous people had any claim to their land. Providing a way for First Nations people to speak for themselves was not happening much in the British Columbia of the 1950s.

Wilson Duff arranged for Constance Cox from Hazelton, who spoke the Gitksan language, to spend time in Kitwancool recording the elders’ stories. They were transcribed to the satisfaction tellers and then went to the Provincial Museum for light editing and back to Kitwancool for final approval. Histories, Territories and Laws of the Kitwancool was published in the Anthropology in British Columbia Series.⁴

Then as now, the histories are the stories behind the totem poles and of the two major clans, wolf and eagle, at Gitanyow. We are told about the figures on the poles and the journeys and conflicts that led to the establishment of the community. The territories section is a description of the land owned by the clans and the Gitanyow collectively: the clearly defined boundaries, a confirmation of the land’s indivisibility by individuals, testimony about rights to resources of land and water and the consequences of trespass. The laws outline the customs around such things as use of the land, rank and power, marriage, naming of children, coming to maturity and divorce and widowhood.

After its initial publication, the book was reprinted by the Museum in 1989 and most recently it has been brought out again as a second edition. It is in a different format from the quarto sized original. This second edition is pocket book sized and the photos of the totem poles are poorly reproduced. On the other hand, the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs are recognized on the title page and they provide a new introduction to the book. “The chiefs names included in this book have since been passed on to the next generation, as they have for millennia.” The current chiefs are still grounded in the land and the teachings that are in the original publication and yet they are still fighting to preserve their culture and their territory in the face colonization and economic development. If the first version of this book represented reconciliation before its time, the second reminds us that we still have a way to go.

At Gitanyow, along the road that leads into the village, the totem poles still stand.

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Robin Fisher taught and wrote history as a faculty member at Simon Fraser University before he moved into university administration and contributed to the establishment of two new universities: the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George and Mount Royal University in Calgary. His books include Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977; second edition, 1992) and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1991). He was the recipient of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, A Life. [Editor’s note: Robin Fisher has reviewed books by Alvin Finkel, Carol E. Mayer, Ted Binnema, Jim Reynolds, Daniel Marshall, Margaret Horsfield & Ian Kennedy for The British Columbia Review, and contributed two popular essays, The Way We Were: Two Friends, Two Historians and “The Noise of Time” and the Removal of History? ]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

Notes

1. Reviewer’s interview with Peter Macnair, 17 July 2014. ↩︎
2. Wilson Duff, “Interview with Albert & Walter Douse, Wilson Duff fonds, Museum of Anthropology Archives, University of British Columbia. box 3, file 6. ↩︎
3. Peter Williams, “Tribute of the Kitwancool,” in Donald N. Abbott (ed.), The World is as Sharp as a Knife: An Anthology in Honour of Wilson Duff (Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1981), p.47. ↩︎
4. Duff, Wilson (ed.), Histories, Territories and Laws of the Kitwancool, Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir No.4 (Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1959). ↩︎