Yakuglas' Legacy: The Art and Times of Charlie James 9781442620131

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YAKUGLAS’ LEGACY THE ART AND TIMES OF CHARLIE JAMES

Charlie James (1867–1937) was a widely known and prolific carver and painter from the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation of British Columbia. Also known by his ceremonial name, Yakuglas, he created a vast legacy as an artist, teacher, and activist. During the early part of his career, James primarily carved totem poles, masks, and other items for use in potlatches and other ceremonial practices within Kwakwaka’wakw society. ­Despite government oppression of the main source of his commissions – potlatches were officially banned in 1884 – James continued to produce his art and promote the culture of his people. In the 1920s, as he branched out into creating more miniatures and paintings, his art found a broader audience, with his reputation growing among non-Native Canadians. Through a close study of James’ artistic production in its historic context, Ronald W. Hawker argues that James’ shift to contemporary art forms allowed him to make a political statement about the resilience and vitality of Kwakwaka’wakw culture. One of the most important and curiously understudied of the late-­ nineteenth/early-­twentieth-century artists, James was a key player in the popularization of Northwest Coast art outside the walls of the ceremonial longhouses. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Yakuglas’ Legacy is a long-awaited tribute to James and his contribution as an artist. rona ld w. hawk e r was formerly Associate Chair of the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design and an associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at Zayed University. He now lives in Prince Edward Island.

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YAKUGLAS’ LEGACY THE ART AND TIMES OF CHARLIE JAMES

Ronald W. Hawker

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4940-8 (cloth)  ISBN 978-1-4426-2675-1 (paper) Printed on acid-free paper.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hawker, Ronald William, 1963–, author Yakuglas’ legacy : the art and times of Charlie James/Ronald W. Hawker. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4940-8 (cloth). – ISBN 978-1-4426-2675-1 (paper) 1. James, Charlie, 1867–1937.  2. Painters – British Columbia – Biography.  3. Carvers (Decorative artists) – British Columbia – Biography.  4. Kwakiutl Indians – British Columbia – Biography.  5. Kwakiutl art – British Columbia.  I. James, Charlie, 1867–1937. Works. Selections.  II. Title. N6549.J34H39 2016   709.2   C2016-903913-7 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

CONTENTS

List of Figures

vii

Preface

xiii

INTRODUCTION

3

chapter one

JAMES’ WORLD

9

chapter two

STYLE

chapter three MASKS AND CEREMONIAL OBJECTS

27 73

chapter four

TOTEM POLES

117

chapter five

MODEL POLES AND CURIO ITEMS

153

chapter six

TWO-DIMENSIONAL ART

181

CONCLUSION: YAKUGLAS’ LEGACY

209

Notes

217

Bibliography

235

Index

241

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FIGURES

0.1 Charlie James with objects he created for Bill Webber in Vancouver around 1928

4

0.2 Territories of the Kwakwaka’wakw

8

1.1 McKenna–McBride Indian Reserve Commission in session in Victoria in 1916

18

1.2 Ceremonial treasures laid out for viewing by the visiting McKenna–McBride Commission, ca. 1914

18

1.3 Pole erected outside of St Michael’s Residential School at Alert Bay 23 1.4 Last known photograph of James, with his wife Sara Nin, and an elderly visitor at Alert Bay in 1936

24

2.1

28

’Namxxelagayu mask

2.2 Echo mask

30

2.3 Cape from the ’Namxxelagayu mask

33

2.4

37

’Namxxelagayu mask

2.5 Model pole by James, inspired by his own monumental pole erected at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria in 1925

39

2.6 Close-up of James’ 1925 pole with characteristic “fluted” textures

41

2.7 Sun mask by James characteristic of mature style

45

2.8 Varnished model pole by James

46

viii Figures

2.9

Willie Seaweed’s bumblebee mask used in the Hamatsa rituals in 1948

47

2.10

Komokwa mask of Charlie George, Sr

48

2.11

Mask from the Atlakim representing a salmon, attributed to Joe Seaweed

49

2.12

Dzunukwa mask by Charlie George, Jr

50

2.13

George Walkus’ Sneezey, or asaxagamlh figure, of the Atlhaq!im or Atlakim dancers

51

2.14

Willie Seaweed, in Blunden Harbour in 1955

52

2.15

Headdress representing sisiutl, the double-headed serpent, carved by Dick Price

53

Dick Hawkins’ mask representing Raven at the north end of the world

54

2.16

2.17–2.18  Transformation mask by Herbert Johnson

55

2.19

Potlatch bowl by Tom Patch Wamiss

56

2.20

Transformation mask by Bob Harris

57

2.21

Whale mask carved by John Davis for the Cranmer family before 1919

58

Atlaq!im mask representing Door Keeper of the Woods, Tl!atl!apalagals, by Arthur Bondsound

59

2.23

Model pole by James

62

2.24

Model pole by Willie Seaweed

63

2.25

Dzunukwa mask carved by Willie Seaweed

66

2.26

Dzunukwa mask attributed to either James or Mungo Martin

66

2.27

Model pole by Henry Hunt

68

2.28

Wooden drum by Tony Hunt

68

2.29

Qolus headdress by Richard Hunt carved in 1995

69

2.30

Early model pole by Mungo Martin

70

3.1

Galokwudzuwis (Crooked Beak) mask attributed to James at the Portland Art Museum

83

2.22

Figures ix

3.2

Hokhokw mask attributed to James at the Portland Art Museum 83

3.3

Tsegamis mask, collected 1897

84

3.4

Winalgilis prop

87

3.5

Ancestral figure mask

90

3.6

Sun Mask, ca. 1915

93

3.7

Sisiutl mask, made before 1914

95

3.8–3.9 Mink’s sisiutl mask

96

3.10 Dzunukwa painting by Mungo Martin

97

3.11–3.12  Transformation mask

99

3.13 Sandhill crane mask

101

3.14 Sandhill crane mask by Mungo Martin, ca. 1953

101

3.15 Sandhill crane mask attributed to either Mungo Martin or Charlie James

102

3.16 Q’o’mogoa mask with cloth drape

104

3.17 Swan headdress

106

3.18

107

Galgyalis (ancestral bird) gigamlh (headdress)

3.19 Painting of a loon, attributed to Bob Harris

109

3.20 Monumental mask

110

3.21

Salmon prop

112

3.22–3.23 Sisiutl feast dish

113

3.24 Sun mask

115

4.1

Kwakwaka’wakw house with its associated elements

118

4.2

Tatantsit pole photographed in situ in Fort Rupert in 1914

122

4.3

Detail of the Tatantsit pole

123

4.4

James’ Tatantsit pole, relocated to the University of British Columbia in 1947

123

Photograph of James’ Kalugwis pole in situ

127

4.6–4.7 Painted box for canned salmon by James

136

4.8

136

4.5

Drawing attributable to Bob Harris

x Figures

4.9

James’ grave pole in the cemetery at Alert Bay

138

4.10 James’ pole in Alert Bay cemetery, July 2012

140

4.11 Kwi kwis or sea eagle painting by Mungo Martin

141

4.12 Sculpin painting by James

141

4.13 Sculpin transformation mask

142

4.14 Grave tableau by James located in the cemetery at Alert Bay

143

4.15 Grave tableau with main qulos and sisiutl attributable to James

143

4.16 Ed Whannack pole by James, 1937

145

4.17 Model of the Whannack pole

146

4.18 Memorial Hall pole by James, carved for his son-in-law James Newman in 1925

148

5.1

Model pole by James

154

5.2

Single Thunderbird figure

155

5.3

Famous Thunderbird and Bear Mother house posts at Alert Bay 156

5.4

Rare pole in Northwest Coast art history carved from whalebone

162

5.5

One of a series deeply carved model poles in cedar by James

163

5.6

Unusual model pole with a carved and painted James model mounted between a set of deer horns

164

5.7

The only piece of silver jewellery attributed to James

164

5.8

Model pole by Arthur Shaughnessy

167

5.9

James’ model pole of a grave monument in the Alert Bay cemetery originally carved by Arthur Shaughnessy

169

Model of the Anglican Hall pole

170

5.10

5.11 Carved model pole by James

172

5.12 Thunderbird and sisiutl painting from the Vancouver Museum sketchbook

174

5.13

Single figure, likely representing a shaman removing a spell, collected in 1900

176

Figures xi

5.14 Two-dimensional representation of a feast dish in James’ sketchbook

176

5.15 Two-dimensional representation of the famous Dzunukwa feast dish painted by Mungo Martin in 1951

177

5.16 Monumental wolf dish collected in 1947 by Barbeau and Price

177

5.17 Model of a Dzunukwa feast dish, with multiple parts, by James 178 5.18 Dzunukwa painting by Mungo Martin

178

5.19 General view and detail of a Dzunukwa feast dish

179

6.1

Codfish painting by James from his Vancouver Museum sketchbook 182

6.2

Untitled painting of a sea otter with a sea urchin painted by Mungo Martin, 1951

182

6.3

Early serigraph by Ellen Neel

184

6.4

Painting from James’ sketchbook with a notation identifying both James and Ellen Newman as the responsible artists

185

6.5

Henry Speck painting

187

6.6

Henry Speck, drawing ca. 1930

188

6.7

Mungo Martin Pugwis painting

188

6.8

View of New Vancouver showing two monumental house front paintings

191

The painted Chief John Scow house at Gwayasdums on Gilford Island

191

6.10 Mungo Martin’s Wa’waditla house, opened in Thunderbird Park in 1953

192

6.11 Bullhead house front painting by James, ca. 1935

192

6.12 Box for sale by James, ca. 1930

194

6.13 Second box for sale by James

194

6.14 Painting of a copper from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook

196

6.15 Hamatsa bird painting by James

197

6.9

xii Figures

6.16 Chief in a sisiutl-adorned canoe from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook

199

6.17 “Hohhok Raven” from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook

200

6.18 A second Hokhokw mask from James’ sketchbook

200

6.19 Painted wooden panel with an avian figure design by James

201

6.20 Painted wooden panel by James of a frog holding a copper

203

6.21 Frog and copper composition from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook

203

6.22–6.23 Two sides of a painted paddle by James

204

6.24 Two sides of a second painted paddle by James

205

6.25 Pugwis mask attributed to Martin

207

6.26 Painted tray by James

207

PREFACE

I met Pam Creasy in 2003 in Salem, Massachusetts. We had both been invited to present by the well-known Northwest Coast art scholar, writer, curator, and editor Aldona Jonaitis, for a session on Northwest Coast Art from 1900 to 1960 at the Native American Art Studies Association (NAASA) biannual conference. At that time, Pam was a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was an assistant professor at Zayed University in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It was the first conference on Aboriginal art I had participated in since the publication of my first book, Tales of Ghosts: First Nations Art in British Columbia 1922–1961. While intended as an institutional history, Tales of Ghosts contains tracts on several key Kwak­ waka’wakw artists, including Charlie James, his stepson Mungo Martin, and his granddaughter Ellen Neel. “I’m Ellen Neel’s daughter,” said Pam somewhat fiercely. “Small world,” I mumbled back, trying hard not to appear intimidated. At some point over the next few days, I’m not sure when, Pam and I decided we liked each other. Maybe it was because Les Dawn, our mutual friend and a professor at the University of Lethbridge, and I act like Laurel and Hardy when we’re together. Anyway, we kept in touch, maintaining conversations over e-mail and conference appearances. In 2005, Pam invited me to speak on Charlie James for a session she was organizing on the great artists in her family for the next NAASA conference in Tempe, Arizona. I told Pam that I didn’t really feel like I knew anything about James. She replied, “You know more than anyone else.” I never fully bought that response, but her confidence meant everything. Charlotte Townsend-Gault

xiv Preface

from the University of British Columbia gave a critical introduction. I talked about James. My old friend Les spoke about Mungo Martin. Pam presented on her mom, and Caroline Butler-Palmer from the University of Victoria delivered a paper on David Neel. That’s when this project began. I subsequently published a short paper on James in American Indian Art Magazine based on the presentation in Arizona, but I kept feeling there was much more that could and should be said. James and his generation needed more attention. James was personally responsible for a series of monumental crest poles – arguably the most significant works of art in Canada from that time period, Group of Seven included. I started on a wide-ranging research campaign and looked to one of the long-standing works on historic individual artists, Bill Holm’s 1983 Smoky-Top: The Art and Times of Willie Seaweed, as a writing model. Somewhere along the way, the narrative found a different structure. I’m interested in how the Indian Act affected Canadian history at both institutional and personal levels, so I tried to take a different theoretical perspective than Holm, but his work on individual artists and styles is still the most important starting point in Northwest Coast art. The Indian Act, however, was the starting point for First Nations–settler relations and shaped much of the context for events in James’ life. The Indian Act was passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1869. It was based in part on earlier British imperial policy, particularly the 1857 Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in Canada, which sought to absorb Indigenous people into the newly emerging nation-state as Canadian citizens. During the 1870s, the Indian Act was further codified, which led to the establishment of reserves for those tribes who had signed treaties.1 The same act defined a separate legal status for First Nations peoples based on patrilineal blood lines. Lands were held in Crown trust. First Nations could not claim further land through homesteading. Governance was highly controlled,2 and group rituals, especially the Sun Dance (a variable ceremony held in the summer among the Great Plains peoples “involving of acts of sacrifice in ritual reciprocity with spiritual powers so that the welfare of friends, family and the whole people is enhanced”)3 and the potlatch (a generic word for ceremonies on the west coast involving the distribution of gifts), were targeted as obstacles to civilization and enfranchisement. In 1884 the “law prohibiting potlatches was first enacted … as a result of pressure from missionaries and Indian agents, who saw the practice as heavy competition to their goal of ‘civilizing the heathen.’”4

Preface xv

While the potlatch had technically been prohibited since 1884, initial prosecution attempts were largely unsuccessful.5 The Kwakwaka'wakw in particular were perceived as openly resistant to both the ban and the introduction of Christianity and were thus targeted in renewed attempts to stamp out the potlatch following the First World War.6 Duncan Campbell Scott rose to the position of Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1913.7 He introduced amendments to the Indian Act in 1914 and 1918 to expand the definition of the potlatch and facilitate the successful prosecution of potlatch participants.8 These steps led directly to the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of participants in a potlatch hosted by Dan Cranmer on Village Island in 1921. The objects seized in the Cranmer potlatch were relocated to the national museum in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. They were repatriated to new museums in Cape Mudge in 1979 and Alert Bay in 1980. James had carved many of the repatriated objects. Indeed, James’ art shows up all over North America – the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and several regional museums in British Columbia. But most of my work was done in Dubai, thanks to the digital revolution and the plethora of excellent museum Internet sites that have developed over the last ten years. All the while, Facebook has emerged as a wonderful communication resource. Pam was kind enough to keep me in contact with selected family members, including her sister Cora Kwa Xa’latl Beddows, her nieces Sue Malley and Lou-Ann Neel, and her nephew David Neel, all of whom read a draft of the manuscript. Maybe not everyone’s idea of easy reading, but I am deeply grateful for their patience, tolerance, interest, and care. David, an accomplished artist, is also an informed historian of Kwakwaka’wakw art, and he often e-mailed attributions and images associated with James and his generation. He always seemed to begin his e-mails with a question – something simple and deceptively tricky, like, “Who do you think did this mask at such-and-such museum?” David always shared food for thought. He came as a resident artist for a week at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2014, and I cherish the knowledge and kindness he shared with me and my students. Kwakwaka’wakw/Nuu-chah-nulth artist George Hunt, Jr, another Face­ book friend, was kind enough to answer iconographic questions. I really

xvi Preface

grew to appreciate that the “old-timers,” as George says, set down a level of execution that artists today study and aspire to. And George is always quick to point out that there’s always so much more in the art of his ancestors that meets the uninitiated audience’s eyes. I hope I can at least convey a sense of that complexity here. There were a few others who asked that their names not be used, but I want them to know that even if I never quite get the whole picture, my intentions are honest. I believe it’s important for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to know our shared history, good and bad, and to understand at least some of the political and spiritual depth to the art of people like James – art that was so long ignored, marginalized, and threatened by colonialism in all its facets. The history of Canada is not just about the struggles of the settlers – it also is about the struggles of those who were here first. Canadian art history therefore must equally consider the voices beyond the evolutionary narrative of modernism. Summers were spent in archives, libraries, and museums in North America in between family holidays. The Rawlinson Fund at the Alberta College of Art and Design covered the costs of the images reproduced here. Thanks to Lynn Fisher, Anne Laughlin, and especially Doug Hildebrand at the University of Toronto Press for their support, belief, hard work, and patience over what has turned into a prolonged marathon to prepare this manuscript for publication. My wife, Laila, was indulgent enough to let me persuade her that the trip to Cormorant Island would be sufficiently pleasant that she should tolerate my hijacking our time alone in order to work. Over the course of this project, I lost some of the people closest to me: my mother Norah, my father Bill, my father-in-law Zheni, and my best friend and true brother, Norm. This book is in memory of them. And Tails and Zillion. My wife Laila and my sons Arya and Siina know what I’m talking about. I also want them to know that their support, belief, and understanding mean everything. I know that what I have here only scratches the surface of who Charlie James really was, both as an individual and as an artist, but it is a sincere attempt at reconstructing his professional career and providing the context for his creative achievements. Yakuglas’ legacy is that his art continues to inspire and inform today.

YAKUGLAS’ LEGACY THE ART AND TIMES OF CHARLIE JAMES

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INTRODUCTION

Charlie James (1867–1938) (Figure 0.1) was the most prolific and widely known totem pole carver of his generation. Also known by his ceremonial name, Yakuglas, he was a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw, or speakers of the Kwakwala language, on the central coast of British Columbia in western Canada. Kwakwaka’wakw art is famous for its extraordinary masked and costumed rituals, dramatic and imposing painted house fronts, and monumental totem poles – all of which climaxed in form and quantity during James’ lifetime. James himself was a popular artist within the ritual life of the Kwakwa­ ka’wakw. The potlatch, a generic term used to describe a diverse set of ceremonial practices incorporating ritual performances and the distribution and exchange of goods, provided the main reason for art in Kwakwaka’wakw society during James’ lifetime. Between 1890 and 1922, James carved masks for the various dances of the potlatch ceremonies, as well as totem poles that celebrated the transfer of names, positions, and goods through marriage or death. He also produced props for use in the ceremonial re-enactment of ancestral stories and painted images representing the various characters and beings of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology. In 1884, the Canadian government officially banned the potlatch. In 1922, twenty-two participants in a potlatch held in the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Memkoolish (’Mi’mkwamlis) on Village Island were imprisoned. This marked a watershed in James’ artistic career, as it did in the cultural history of the Kwakwaka’wakw people as a whole. Despite government



Introduction  5

oppression of the main source of his commissions, James continued to produce art, and his reputation grew among non-Native Canadians. Up until his death in 1938, he collaborated with Bill Webber, a well-known Vancouver curio dealer, to sell models to tourists, thus extending the circulation of his art beyond the borders of Kwakwaka’wakw society. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, James carved a vast number of model poles, canoes, figures, masks, and dishes. His model poles were often done with the same delicacy and precision as his larger works, unlike the “idiot sticks” referred to sardonically later by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Doug Cranmer, which “any idiot could carve.”1 Instead, James represented Kwakwaka’wakw mythological figures in his miniatures with the same diligence and sense of purpose that he applied to more monumental works. Furthermore, James was an important teacher. He taught in the craft program at the St Michael’s Residential School at Alert Bay, where he had such notable students as Henry Speck, who was among the earliest Northwest Coast artists to experiment with serigraphy in the 1960s. In addition, James mentored the most influential generation of Kwakwaka’wakw artists, including his granddaughter Ellen Neel, who both attended classes at St Michael’s and learned to carve at his kitchen table, and his stepson Mungo Martin, James’ partner in the production of ceremonial art early in the twentieth century and the first carver-in-residence at the British Columbia Provincial Museum in Victoria in the early 1950s. This position at the museum was dominated throughout the 1960s and 1970s by Martin’s own adopted son, Henry Hunt, thereby ensuring James’ artistic legacy well beyond his death. It is curious that James has been understudied, for he was one of the most important of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century artists. He was an important participant in Kwakwaka’wakw ritual life. At the same time, he did much to popularize Northwest Coast art outside the walls of the ceremonial longhouses. He was part of the first generation of artists known by name among Euro-Canadians; he was also a teacher and master who passed on his knowledge to his own children and relatives at the time of his culture’s greatest vulnerability.

Figure 0.1: Charlie James proudly displays objects he created for Bill Webber in Vancouver around 1928. (Courtesy of the Vancouver Museum)

6  Yakuglas’ Legacy

This book reviews James’ art and his contributions as an artist. I begin with the three factors that I believe shaped his art and what he intended to express: the structure of Kwakwaka’wakw society, the impact of the Indian Act, and his own life experiences. I then discuss James’ own personal style, relating it to the styles of other artists active at the same time, as a means of demonstrating his unique decisions as an individual. While I reference Kwakwala terms for the masks and mythological figures represented in James’ art, the discussion of form is based primarily on the vocabulary developed by the Euro-American scholars Franz Boas and Bill Holm. The danger with focusing exclusively on form using a language foreign to the artists who produced the art is that it contributes to the decontextualization of the objects from the language, rituals, and spaces that give them meaning. To counter this, I relate James’ signed or attributed objects from museums across North America back to published and archival ethnographic sources as a way of determining iconography and thus reconstructing, where possible, the ritual or mythological context of the objects and therefore their meaning. Boas, through his collaboration with Kwakwaka’wakw George Hunt, left behind an enormous body of literature, including a range of stories simultaneously transcribed in both Kwakwala and English. The Kwakwaka’wakw community does on occasion refer to Boas and Hunt’s notes. Although there are limitations to their work and the dangers of decontextualization are ever present, Boas’ ethnographies represent an important academic achievement. Additional material can be gleaned from both contemporary and subsequent generations of anthropologies and oral histories, people from within the Kwakwaka’wakw community (especially James’ descendants), letters, field notes, art histories, exhibition catalogues, geographies, government correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, and popular explanatory texts. The ancestral stories recorded in these sources are the inspiration for the art. The stories also establish and explain the basis for owned prerogatives attached to the names and their associated positions. Individuals have over time released a range of these stories, and they are accessible through these publications and archival resources. Boas and Hunt recorded the stories while James was alive, and James himself related at least two stories. Others are often from his Kwakwaka’wakw patrons. The images and carvings can be related to these specific versions of the stories. Over time, the Kwakwala language has been transcribed in many different ways. Throughout the text, I've tried to



Introduction  7

maintain some consistency. Where possible, I've also tried to provide spelling used by the U'mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay. What emerges from this method is the understanding that James and his Kwakwaka’wakw patrons asserted social status and claims to resources through their art in specific historic terms, not only to their kin and immediate neighbours within the Kwakwaka’wakw community, but also to the wider immigrant population. James and his patrons, family, and neighbours experienced the allocation of reserve land and ongoing attempts to erode conventional Kwakwaka’wakw social behaviour. When one places the art and the stories as they were recorded by Boas and Hunt in this historical context, new levels of meaning open. James’ art was elegant in how it looked, but it was also pointedly political in intent and played an important role in how the Kwakwaka’wakw struggled to maintain their own lands, resources, and ways of doing things in the face of increasing government interference during his lifetime.

Figure 0.2: Territories of the Kwakwaka’wakw

chapter one

JAMES’ WORLD

Charlie James was born Charles Jameson in Port Townsend in what is now Washington state around 1867. His father, Thomas Jameson, was a white sawmill owner, and his mother, Kugwisilaogwa, was from Fort Rupert in British Columbia. Kugwisilaogwa died when James was ten years old. His maternal grandmother claimed him and his two sisters, but his father refused to let all  of them go, choosing instead to raise the girls. James went north with his  grandmother, first to Victoria and then to Fort Rupert, at which point he is said to have spoken English well but little Kwakwala.1 At Fort Rupert (also known as Tsax̱is in Kwakwala), in Beaver Harbour on the east coast of Vancouver Island, there were several important Kwakwaka’wakw sites, ­including Tsax̱is, the winter village of the Kwakiutl tribe. At Fort Rupert, James  was immersed in the social world of his mother’s people. His great-­ granddaughter, Pam Creasy, states that through his mother, James was a member of the Gexsem numaym of the Walas Kwakiutl tribe.2 The twenty-five to thirty3 historically identified autonomous Kwakwa­ ka’wakw tribes were located on the central British Columbia coast, clustered around the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the adjacent islands and straits. Each tribe had or shared a primary winter village and then used a number of seasonal resource sites scattered throughout their traditional tribal territories. Geographer Robert Galois grouped them together spatially as tribal groups: Northern (Dzawa̱da̱’enux̱w in the orthography used by the U’mista Cultural Centre), Gilford Island (Mamaliliḵa̱la), Upper and Lower Knight Inlet (Dzawadi), Kwa­kiutl (Kwaguʼł), Nimpkish (’Na̱mg̱is), Nawitti

10  Yakuglas’ Legacy

(T̕ łat̕ łasik̕ wala), Lekwiltok (Liq̓ʷala), and Quatsino Sound (G̱usgimukw). Each of the tribal groups comprises a set of related tribes. For example, Charlie James belonged through his mother to the Kwakiutl tribe, which included four subtribes: (1)  Kwakiutl; (2) Komoyoi (rich in the middle) or Kweeha (murderer); (3) Walas Kwakiutl or Lakwilala (“setting fires here and there”); and (4)  Komkiutis (rich side).4 Franz Boas included the Gweetala as a fifth subtribe, but they were absorbed into the Kwakiutl sometime around 1850.5 Each tribe subdivided further into local or corporate kin groups. The Kwakwala word for local group, or “corporate kin group,”6 is numaym, translated by Boas as “one kind” or “people of one kind”7 and sometimes spelled numayma,8 numemot, numema,9 or namima.10 Each numaym maintained individual houses and resource sites scattered throughout its tribal region. Many resource sites included houses of multiple numayms. The numaym has been compared with the noble or royal house in British or Japanese terms; thus, the various carvings and paintings typical of Kwakwaka’wakw culture are heraldic symbols expressing the history and status of the house. It is useful to think of the numaym as a family; also useful is the idea that the unit contains titles indicating relative status, in much the same way that European royal houses have their kings, princes, dukes, and earls. The ranked positions one might hold through the numaym carried specific privileges and responsibilities that contributed to the social status of the individual. Within the numaym, the head chief was known as the Nuyamtsawe, “Myth Keeper,” who knew all the important legends and histories. He acted as both spiritual and political leader and was responsible for breaking coppers and inviting tribes to potlatches.11 The second chief, known as Winagama’yi, or “War Chief,” protected the people and culture. Trained in war, his responsibilities included village fortifications and infrastructure. He also played an important role in the Winter Ceremonies, the ćέqa, for it was he who cut the “sacred red cedar bark ring.” He could also invite tribes for potlatches and feasts. The third and fourth chiefs maintained the numaym’s industries, public affairs, and arts and held smaller potlatches and hosted feasts. Names in Kwakwaka’wakw society were derived from ancestors and passed on from generation to generation. The names were also linked to resources, responsibilities, and ranked potlatch seats. It is as if the title, duke or earl, had been collapsed into a single name derived from an ancestor, carrying with it the properties and feudal obligations associated with the title. Each name was also ranked according to the status it represented and



James’ World  11

the responsibilities and privileges it brought with it. James was known by a common Kwakwala name, Da’uma.12 His ceremonial name was Yakuglas, also cited by Boas in several stories as Yakoglas13 – in English, “Always giving things away.”14 One of the Indian Agents resident at Alert Bay recorded it as the seventh Nimpkish Kwikw (Eagle) name.15 A Kwikw was both a name and a position; Boas describes it as a new category of class-ascending commoners who were able to “out-potlatch” traditional high-ranking tribal chiefs. The establishment of twelve Kwikw seats was a way of integrating this new category of wealthy individuals into the potlatch system. In Kwakwaka’wakw lore, Namugwis, the first ancestor of the Gilgla’gam of the Komoyoi, made the seats. Either way, the ranks were unchanging. Usually the position passed from father to eldest child, son or daughter, although if the eldest died, then it might go to a younger child.16 Sometimes Boas differentiates two Yakoglas, further clarifying one as a Naqemgilisala name.17 The Naqemgilisala or Nakomgilisala came from Cape Scott on the northwestern coast of Vancouver Island and consisted of two numayms: the Gexsem and the Naenxsa.18 In the first story attributed to Yako­ glas by Boas, Hadaga, the Gwawaenuk sister of Omal, marries the prince of Komokwa, the chief of the undersea world.19 In the second, Yakoglas explains the origins of the Xwexwe dance, a well-known dance normally associated with Coast Salish groups from farther south and with the Comox (K’omoks), a Salishan-speaking group consisting of the Sathloot, Sasitla, Ieeksun, Puntledge, Cha’chae, and Tat’poos, who maintained positive relations with both the Coast Salish and the Kwakwaka’wakw.20 These two stories are related to the Gilford Island tribes, so it is likely that Hunt recorded them from James for Boas. The geographic context for other stories is northwestern Vancouver Island, hence the need for Boas and Hunt to distinguish between Yakoglas and Yakoglas from the Naqemgilisala. The numaym members laid claim to a variety of “crests and titles in a multitude of forms ranging from designs on house fronts, poles, posts, and feast dishes to privileges such as the use of a certain kind of betrothal ceremony, and certain songs, house names, and titles, even to the fixed and particular name for the dog and the canoe that belonged to its head.”21 Artists, including James, produced the material manifestations of these privileges and the supporting regalia and props for use in re-enacting their related histories. In addition, James, as a participant in the overall system, personally inherited, held, and transferred numaym prerogatives, including the rights to the story of the

12  Yakuglas’ Legacy

ancestral founder of his wife’s numaym, Tsekame, which he passed to his own son-in-law, Charlie Newman, on the occasion of Newman’s marriage to James’ daughter, Lucy Lilac, and celebrated in a totem pole James carved in 1925. In modern thought, there is a popular tendency to think of identity as singular and static. Kwakwaka’wakw identity was historically more fluid, wider ranging, and rooted in an extended understanding of kin. “I come from many places,” states Agnes Alfred, explaining the complexity of her identity as it relates to the numaym and tribe. “My father was Mamalilikulla and my mother was Nimpkish. My mother’s father was Kwikwesutinux. I come from three places. And it became four when I married a Kwakiutl. That’s the way it is.”22 It is difficult to define an individual’s Kwakwaka’wakw identity rigidly within a single numaym or even tribe, and there are contradicting reports of James’, like Alfred’s, affiliation. Nuytten, following notations made by Wilson Duff,23 writes that James was related to four tribes – the Kwik­ wesutinux, Mamalilikulla, and Nimpkish as well as the Tlitlekit (Cle-li-kit-ti or ‘Tlitluket) numaym of the Komkiutis.24 The Tlitlekit were an older group from Robson Bight on Vancouver Island that had been absorbed into the Komkiutis.25 Each of these four tribes, the numaym within them, and the positions and names within the numaym contributed to a network of privileges and responsibilities from which James could draw. Based on the objects identified as carved by James, there is a strong vein of Kwikwesutinux themes in his art. Indeed, his patronage, like his own identity, likely travelled the routes dictated by his various kin relations. James was already fluent in English and able to write, which meant that his education took a different direction in Fort Rupert as he was absorbed into the fabric of his mother’s extended family under the tutelage of his maternal grandmother. Duff recorded in his field notes that James watched the older carvers at work, preferring the Kwikwesutinux (Ḵwiḵwa̱sut̓inux̱w) in particular, once again emphasizing his connection to the Kwikwesutinux people. He then tried his own hand at carving small objects, such as fire tongs. He taught himself and became good enough for people to have him carve their ceremonial paraphernalia.26 James’ life in Fort Rupert initially revolved around the same seasonal movements that the other families participated in and the evolving links between traditional economic pursuits and the new wage labour system. Fort Rupert, with its sawmill, new school, proximity to the Nimpkish River and its salmon



James’ World  13

runs and to the new cannery at Alert Bay, the government’s new Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) office, and the Hunt family’s trading post, became a centre for Kwakwaka’wakw society. The various Kwakwaka’wakw people, scattered along the central coast, began to reorganize their lives so that they moved among traditional resource sites, the salmon fishery, various sources of wage labour, and schools and commercial centres like Alert Bay. Entire families travelled to the cannery camps. Wage labour was integrated into the traditional subsistence economy, with families continuing to use their ancestral resource sites to fish for salmon, eulachon, halibut, herring, shellfish, seal, and seaweed for themselves, supplementing the great bounty of the sea with clover rhizomes, thimbleberry shoots, silverweed roots, fern, salmonberries, stink currants, red huckleberries, and cranberries and blackberries collected from land that had been clear-cut around the logging camps. As Byron Plant records, “often sea- and land-based collection activities were combined during trips for food or commercial purposes.”27 Families from Fort Rupert would pick “eel grass in May when they went to Deserter’s Island to catch halibut.”28 During the commercial fishing season, shore hunting for deer was conducted from fishing boats. Clams were collected and exchanged for imported butter,29 a product James was said to have been particularly fond of – his granddaughter, Ellen Neel, claimed he “could eat butter by the pound!”30 A shooting accident as a boy left James’ left hand with only the thumb and the major part of the forefinger. For the rest of his life, he kept this “hidden in the pocket of his coveralls or smock when he worked and in his pants or jacket pocket on other occasions.”31 He wore a light mitten over it and, in “the presence of strangers, he acted like a person with only one arm, doing everything one handed. When alone or with his family, he used his damaged hand to hold objects through the cloth of his outer garments, while he carved or painted with his right hand.”32 James’ injury drew him towards the production of masks and other ceremonial regalia, instead of commercial fishing or hand logging. Although he was a commoner, the ruling elite of the Kwakwaka’wakw apparently put his knowledge of reading and writing to good use, and his descendants say that, over the decades of his life, he produced a detailed ledger recording potlatch activities. Fort Rupert was at the centre of this other aspect of Kwakwaka’wakw life. The first appearance of a date for his objects coincides roughly with his marriage to Sara Nina in 1895 at the age of twenty-eight, although this may

14  Yakuglas’ Legacy

simply coincide with more sustained and professional collecting in the area. Sara Nina, also known as Sara Finlay, was the daughter of a Walas Kwakiutl woman, Kasa’las, and a Scottish employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company.33 Her Kwakwala name was ‘Nagedzi, “mountain of wealth,” although she was commonly called Kumiga or Q’omiga. She had previously been married to Yax’nukwala, “no one leaves his home without gifts,”34 from the Kwikwe­ sutinux.35 The Kwikwesutinux consisted of five numayms – the Naxnaxwela, Me’mogents, Gigelgam, Ne’nelbe, and Ge’xsem.36 Yax’nukwala was from the Me’mogents.37 The Kwikwesutinux as a whole occupied the area around Tribune Channel, most of Gilford Island, and the adjacent islands to the north. They wintered at Gwayasdums until around 1856, when a Nuxalk raid destroyed the village and scattered the Kwikwesutinux, with most of the survivors going to the Mamalilikulla village of Memkoomlish, with a few moving to Tsax̱is on Beaver Harbour.38 Yax’nukwala was known to Euro-Canadians as Martin. He and Sara Nina had had four sons. One died in childbirth. The oldest was Spruce Martin, the middle one Mungo Martin, and the youngest Herbert Martin. James took all three as stepsons, and he and Sara then had two daughters, Emma and Lucy. Lucy later married Charlie Newman and gave birth to Ellen. Ellen Newman, better known as Ellen Neel after her marriage to Ted Neel in the 1930s, ­followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and established a successful totem pole carving business in Vancouver in the late 1940s. James’ stepson, Mungo Martin, was the best-known Northwest Coast artist active in the 1950s and early 1960s. Mungo, born in 1879, had originally been apprenticed as a carver to a paternal uncle.39 However, James is widely reported to have been his most important influence, and the two worked together on a number of important monumental commissions. The numaym system as a whole served as the spiritual backbone of Kwa­ kwaka’wakw society. It recorded economic and life passage transactions, organized the distribution of resources, constructed status and hierarchy, and legitimized authority. Its active expression in Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial life through a ritual feast, generically referred to as a potlatch, forged an intersection of authority, resource ownership, and identity. This system was recognized early on by the new Canadian government as a threat to its own authority and control. Anthropologist Marius Barbeau, quoting sources from within Alert Bay, summarized the challenge the potlatch and the numaym



James’ World  15

system represented in an unpublished manuscript from 1934: “The Kwakiutl will not owe allegiance to the government as long as the potlatch prevails: it excludes all other forms of government.”40 The recognition that the potlatch challenged Europeans’ authority led to a hostile campaign by Ottawa to stamp it out and to establish British notions of landownership, identity, religion, and economic practice as enshrined in the state’s legal system. The main body of law encapsulating Ottawa’s approach was the Indian Act. Its implementation would define the historical experience of people of James’ generation. One could have a potlatch for a number of different reasons, including weddings, deaths, births, and the passage of names. One could even be held to celebrate escape from injury or the wiping away of shame. Each kind of potlatch had a specific name. The potlatch also typically involved feasting, the performance of dances and songs, and the recitation of stories strictly associated with the names and privileges claimed by the host, as well as the giving of gifts. By accepting the host’s hospitality and gifts, the invited guests indicated that they accepted the legitimacy of his or her claims to the names and rights. Since each name or privilege also indicated status within the numaym, these gifts and hospitality were expected to match the quality of the name and privilege being claimed. One couldn’t simply have a feast and perform the related stories – the gifts had to be of equal significance in quantity, quality, and value. Around 1915, after James’ daughter Lucy married Charlie Newman, both James and Mungo Martin relocated with their families to Alert Bay.41 Alert Bay, with its central location and access to main transportation routes, was immediately recognized as a centre for cultural activities, even by those beyond the Kwakwaka’wakw community. The DIA Annual Report for 1910 stated that Alert Bay, which was now serviced by regular steamships from the Union Steamship Company, had eclipsed Fort Rupert in importance,42 and that it “is noted the world over for its display of totem poles either in front of, or forming part of the buildings.”43 The DIA Annual Report for the following year reported more effusively that it “has the largest collection of totem poles probably of any place in the world, and is largely advertised to tourists on this account.”44 This put James at the heart of the ceremonial and commercial production of Kwakwaka’wakw art. James was therefore at the forefront of an expansion of the potlatch system and its need for regalia. Of the five identified free-standing poles carved by James, two are from Fort Rupert and two from Alert Bay; the fifth is from

16  Yakuglas’ Legacy

Kalugwis (Ḵalug̱wis) on Turnour Island. The growing roles of Fort Rupert and Alert Bay as centres of Kwakwaka’wakw inter-group interaction fuelled the public assertion of individual and group identities and resource ownership through the poles. For the first time, the potlatches had been expanded beyond the structures of numaym and tribe to include other tribes and even tribal groups. By 1896, individuals in Fort Rupert were holding potlatches in which all Kwakwaka’wakw groups participated.45 The social pressures experienced by the Kwakwaka’wakw during this time also inspired the expansion of the potlatch. Depopulation and relocation were transforming their social landscape, accelerating inter-group marriage, and creating conflicting claims to names, potlatch positions, and resource sites. This was happening just as the Canadian government was redefining land and resource ownership by establishing reserves that would limit Kwakwaka’wakw residence and economic activities to specific plots of land. In 1871, when James was around four years old, British Columbia entered Canadian Confederation. At that point, the administration of reserve land became a particularly contentious issue between the federal government, which had been assigning reserves at a scale of 160 to 640 acres per family on the prairies, and the provincial government of British Columbia, who only agreed to a 20 acre standard.46 The allocation of reserve land was resisted by Native people throughout the province, and Canadian authorities at various levels gradually came to realize that the chiefly authority structure asserted, supported, and legitimized on the coast through the ritual potlatch cycle was enabling organized opposition to government policy. For example, under the numaym system, a single Kwakwaka’wakw individual could claim access to sites through multiple kin relations. Thus, someone like Charlie James could in theory use resource sites through his positions in the specific numayms of the Kwikwesutinux, Mamalilikulla, Nimpkish, and Tlitlekit or perhaps through his position as one of the Kwikw inherited through his parents or their siblings, his grandparents, and his wife. The passing of names and their associated prerogatives was administered through the numaym chiefs, the specialist numaym historians who counselled the chiefs, and the potlatches at which the claims were asserted and legitimized. James was part of this system; indeed, he was a key participant as a specialist artist – a role as integral to that system’s continuity as that of the historians. He was responsible for producing the ceremonial paraphernalia that supported the



James’ World  17

recitation and performance of the histories that legitimized the claims made through the potlatch. In contrast, federal control over all Aboriginal peoples in the new nation of Canada was legislated through the federal Indian Act, which centralized the administration of Indian affairs in distant Ottawa. After 1880, a series of legislative amendments targeting conventional Aboriginal authority were tabled and passed. The first was an 1880 amendment that allowed the federal cabinet to depose “life chiefs” and, where an elected band council had been imposed, that limited the authority of “life chiefs” unless they been elected to the council. In 1884, the federal government banned the potlatch directly.47 The potlatch ban undermined the way in which James’ Kwakwaka’wakw constructed identity and social status. It also threatened to destroy his livelihood. The vast majority of datable objects from between 1884 and 1922 that are attributable to James are in some way associated with the potlatch: they are either masks and other ceremonial paraphernalia used in the performance of owned songs and dances representing or re-enacting ancestral histories and the consequent prerogatives; or they are monumental carved poles raised in the openly public spaces in front of houses that assert and celebrate the transfer or acquisition of those prerogatives. It’s not coincidental that totem poles, the most public and permanent assertions of status and associated prerogatives, emerged at this time as a common artistic monument among the Kwakwaka’wakw. The poles represented a material reminder of historical presence as well as rights to land, water, and other resources at a time when those rights were being challenged on multiple fronts: through depopulation, migration, changes in economic rhythms and seasonal movements, and the external threat posed by the Canadian government. Pressure from the government came in several forms: the Indian Act, the potlatch ban, and Indian reserve commissions, such as the McKenna–McBride Commission that met from 1913 to 1916 (Figure 1.1). A photograph of a house interior with all the numaym treasures carefully laid out for viewing by the visiting McKenna–McBride Commission members in 1914 (Figure 1.2, with James’ young stepson, Mungo Martin, second from the left) suggests that the Kwakwaka’wakw expected that the ceremonial art and what it represented would serve as evidence for their claims to land and resources with the government as well. In the common Euro-American retelling of Kwakwaka’wakw

Figure 1.1: The McKenna–McBride Indian Reserve Commission in session in Victoria in 1916. (Image PABC G-00975 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 1.2: Ceremonial treasures carefully laid out for viewing by the visiting McKenna– McBride Commission, ca. 1914. (Image PABC AA-00209 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



James’ World  19

stories, the narratives are often scrubbed clean of their geographic references. The tales come across as quaint, harmless, and ultimately meaningless to English-speaking audiences. In the Kwakwaka’wakw versions, the names and geographic references are fastidiously detailed. When it is possible to identify the mythological figures on the poles or in the masks, trace them to published accounts of the stories and the numayms they are associated with, and then relate the geographical names in the stories to land claim histories, the totem poles often assert ownership over places contested between either individuals, numayms, and tribes or between tribes and the government. So the government strategically attacked the system in an attempt to dismantle it. Duncan Campbell Scott was appointed Deputy Superintendent of the DIA in 191348 and directed the most effective challenge to the potlatch through the 1920s. He introduced amendments to the Indian Act in 1914 and 1918 to expand the definition of the potlatch and to facilitate the successful prosecution of potlatch participants. The most important of these amendments, tabled in 1918, made potlatching a summary offence, which allowed the Indian Agent to act as both prosecutor and judge.49 This led directly to the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of a number of Kwakwaka’wakw individuals, including Spruce Martin, another of James’ stepsons, at a potlatch hosted by Dan Cranmer on Village Island in 1921. The Cranmer potlatch was part of a marriage ceremony. Although Cranmer was Nimpkish, his wife, Emma, and her family were Mamalilikulla, one of the four tribes James was related to directly, from Village Island. There were at least three hundred guests at this potlatch, which lasted five days. Moses Alfred, who had commissioned a monumental pole from Charlie James, oversaw the distribution of 3,000 sacks of flour.50 At one point during the ceremony, Herbert Martin, Charlie James’ youngest stepson, danced the Hamatsa,51 the most prestigious Winter Ceremonial dance. RCMP sergeant Donald Angermann investigated and charged the principals involved. All charged were convicted. In a plea bargain, the majority of participants from the Lekwiltok of Quadra Island, the Mamalilikulla of Village Island, and the Nimpkish of Alert Bay surrendered their coppers and dancing gear. “I guess it was like paying a fine so that they would not go to prison,” said Ack-koo (Agnes Alfred). “They paid with their masks.”52 Jim Hall of Kalugwis on Turnour Island and six more from Fort Rupert refused to pay the price. Angermann pressed charges in April against a further

20  Yakuglas’ Legacy

seventeen who had been present at the Cranmer potlatch and three who had been active in potlatches on Harbledown Island the previous January and February. Five were given suspended sentences for playing minor roles or signed plea agreements to submit their masks and dance paraphernalia and to never dance again. Of the remaining fifteen, all were sent to the Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby. Of the twenty-two imprisoned in April 1922, twentyone were given two-month sentences, with Nimpkish Charlie Hunt receiving six months for his second conviction.53 Upon his release, Spruce Martin gave a series of grease potlatches intended to wipe away shame and to antagonize rivals – presumably in this case the state – at several villages along the coast as he returned to Alert Bay. The surrendered potlatch regalia and coppers, including several masks by James, were put on exhibit at the Alert Bay parish hall for an admission price of twenty-five cents. Indian Agent William May Halliday charged admission in order to cover the price of the hall.54 Some items were sent to the Royal Ontario Museum and what is now the Canadian Museum of Civilization. In addition, Halliday sold a portion to American collector George Heye and his Museum of the American Indian. Because of James’ participation in the manufacture of ceremonial regalia and the role he and his family had played in the Cranmer potlatch, a number of his masks can be found in the collections based on the Cranmer potlatch seizure; most of them have since been returned to the U’mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay and the Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre at Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. I believe the attributions of objects to James through these two museums are secure, given the still existing detailed knowledge and memory of the owners and the contexts in which the objects were produced within the communities. The Cranmer potlatch and the subsequent prosecutions had an enormous impact on Kwakwaka’wakw potlatching and therefore on their art. For one thing, crest poles were no longer raised in the village in front of houses; rather, they were erected as grave markers in the local cemetery, although even this was problematic. Charles Nowell was convicted and imprisoned for three months for the funerary potlatch of 1921 at which he both raised a pole and assumed the ceremonial name previously held by his brother Tom.55 Based on legal advice, the Kwakwaka’wakw began to hold potlatch ceremonies, such as funerals, at different times than the requisite gift giving. Potlatch hosts often went door to door repaying participants instead of distributing gifts at a single community meeting.56 In this way, the necessary rituals and



James’ World  21

presentations that accompanied the passing and assumption of names and related prerogatives were hidden from the prying eyes of the authorities behind what the Europeans understood to be the normal rituals of death and mourning. Throughout the 1920s, James was personally responsible for a number of monuments raised in the Fort Rupert and Alert Bay cemeteries. In addition, since potlatches did not stop, but rather were forced behind closed doors, monumental works were completed, albeit in reduced scale and in new physical contexts. The Cranmer potlatch also changed the nature of Kwakwaka’wakw political interaction with the federal and provincial governments. Prior to 1922, the Kwakwaka’wakw had taken little interest in pan-Indian political organizations like the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia. The Allied Tribes was a political union of sixteen tribal groups formed in 1916 to pursue land claims through the Canadian courts. Between 1916 and 1922, the only major tribal groups not represented in the Allied Tribes were the Nuu-chahNulth of western Vancouver Island and the Kwakwaka’wakw.57 However, ten Kwakwaka’wakw delegates, including artist Bob Harris, joined a total of forty-five attendees at a 1922 meeting of the Allied Tribes. The purpose of this gathering was to address the land cut-offs implemented by the McKenna– McBride Commission, with the goal of gaining greater support in their battle against the potlatch ban. This project did not succeed,58 and now, facing a 1924 Indian Act amendment banning the hiring of lawyers without the written consent of the Indian Agent,59 the Kwakwaka’wakw were forced to find innovative ways to assert their political voice. After the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia was founded in 1931 as a successor to the Allied Tribes, Kwakwaka’wakw leaders like James Sewid, Dan Assu, and William Scow played major roles on its executive.60 The Kwakwaka’wakw, often through the Brotherhood, also took advantage of Euro-Canada’s interest in Kwakwa­ ka’wakw art, first manipulating Euro-Canadian audiences to accept and maintain poles and other objects that continued to symbolize the transfer of numaym prerogatives and then presenting high-level Euro-Canadian authorities with poles and names, thereby foregrounding Kwakwaka’wakw political concerns in the wider public consciousness. It is ironic that after the Cranmer potlatch, Euro-Canadians took a greater interest in Kwakwaka’wakw art, due in part to the increased value of what was now seen as a “disappearing” art form and in part to the relocation of

22  Yakuglas’ Legacy

older poles to urban centres. This interest led to the growth of a curio61 industry attached to tourism, and for the rest of his career, James produced many high-quality models for sale to outsiders. When we compare James’ work across the different media, it is clear that his models and curio paintings followed conventional Kwakwaka’wakw form and iconography. Like the monumental poles, the models carried an additional message – namely, that the Kwakwaka’wakw, their stories, and what they represented were alive and well. Until the Cranmer potlatch of 1922, the potlatch had still been expanding, to fill the numaym positions that were being vacated as a result of wage labour and industrialized fishing and logging. This was the heyday of James’ patronage, and a number of monumental poles and masks created by him during this period have been either collected or identified. The Cranmer potlatch, followed seven years later by the Great Depression, affected the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw patronage system. James continued to work on ceremonial art after 1922, albeit on a reduced scale; meanwhile, his production of objects for sale outside his own community increased substantially. Much of this work has been saved through his relationship with the curio dealer William L. Webber, who donated his remaining collection to the Vancouver Museum after his retirement in 1952. Many North American museums have large amounts of James’ curio art on their shelves. At the same time as James was selling his work through Webber’s store, he was encouraged by F. Earl Anfield, one of the teachers at Alert Bay, to teach crafts at St Michael’s Indian Residential School, run by the Anglican Church. Training in crafts was part of the federal government’s mandate to provide vocational training for Aboriginal people.62 A pole apparently carved by the students at St Michael’s was erected on the school grounds (Figure 1.3). Although there are few clear photographs of the carving, stylistically it recalls James’ earlier work, in that it combines projections with an independent qulos figure perched on an angle at the top. While the potlatch ban was still in effect, James found ways to transmit an understanding of Kwakwaka’wakw art to the next generation. This had important implications for Kwakwa­ ka’wakw cultural history, with future artists like Neel and Speck graduating from St Michael’s. Fellow artist Arthur Shaughnessy later replaced James as a teacher there. This was integral to a sense of artistic continuity despite the efforts to put an end to public Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonies.

Figure 1.3: The pole erected outside of St Michael’s Residential School at Alert Bay shows some characteristics of James’ style and was likely done by his students under his tutelage. (Image PABC I 28364 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 1.4: The last known photograph of James, with his wife Sara Nin and an elderly visitor at Alert Bay in 1936. (Image RBCM PN 11551 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



James’ World  25

James died on 29 January 1938. He had played a key role in sustaining the production of Kwakwaka’wakw art through the 1930s, and he would exert a profound influence on the next generation of artists, who made the transition from curio to fine art. Ellen Neel, a dominant artistic figure in Vancouver in the 1950s, learned to draw literally at James’ knee. Henry Speck, also known as Ozistalis, was a student of James at St Michaels and among the earliest Northwest Coast artists to experiment with serigraphy, holding a one-man show at the New Design Gallery in 1964.63 Martin, James’ stepson, was the most famous of the mid-century artists and trained yet another generation of artists, including Haida artist Bill Reid (at least for ten days), his own sonin-law Henry Hunt, and Hunt’s son Tony Hunt, who pioneered serigraphy in the early 1960s, thereby establishing an artistic genealogy that bridged the lean times between the mid-twentieth century and the renewal of public interest in the 1960s and 1970s. So James consistently contributed to the growth of Kwakwaka’wakw art from the last decade of the nineteenth century through to the 1930s, and passed on his knowledge and skills to the following generation, ensuring an unbroken continuum deep into the twentieth century. That is Yakuglas’ legacy.

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chapter two

STYLE

A photograph from the National Museum of the American Indian of museum staff member and scholar William C. Orchard1 and a crouching figure wrapped in a painted muslin cape with a monumental mask (Figure 2.1) exemplifies James’ art, and that of the Kwakwaka’wakw generally, at its most dramatic. Orchard, dressed in a suit and tie and delicately holding the mask’s large tail, provides scale to the photograph while simultaneously embodying the bewildering clash of cultures that characterized Kwakwaka’wakw society during James’ life. The costume represents ’Namxxelagayu, a halibut-like sea monster with the broad, flat body of the bottom-dwelling fish, who occupied the mouth of the Nimpkish River, and who transformed itself into a man (represented in this piece by the small man standing on his back) to join forces with a Thunderbird to complete a house and together found the Nimpkish tribe.2 The content behind James’ extraordinary mask comes from a nuyamil, or “tradition of the house,”3 which describes how the founding ancestor of a numaym “acquired certain names, crests and other important privileges in the myth age.”4 The nuyamil for James’ mask belonged to the Ts’e’ts’elwa’lagame, the highest-ranking of the Nimpkish numayms.5 This example demonstrates the intersection between the ceremonial object and the numaym prerogative – the story of what it represents, how it was acquired, how it was passed on through the generations, and how it looks. But how do we know this was carved and painted specifically by Charlie James? George Heye collected the costume and mask in 1922, likely directly from the Cranmer potlatch seizures on display at Alert Bay.6 Heye was

28  Yakuglas’ Legacy

Figure 2.1: ’Namxxelagayu mask. (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution Cat. No. 11/5212)

always looking for good historical examples, and the National Museum of the American Indian estimates the production date for the objects as 1910. Donors and collectors like Heye rarely recorded or perhaps did not even know who was specifically responsible for the works they bought, even though Heye and James may have met during one of Heye’s collecting forays to Alert Bay. Objects like these often went to natural history museums, not art museums, which suggests that these objects were perceived as biological, or even zoological, rather than cultural. In another early example, Johan Adrian Jacobsen between 1881 and 1883 assembled one of the first consolidated European collections of Northwest Coast art for the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, at a time when the central British Columbia coast still represented an epic and exotic journey for Europeans. Using Fort Rupert as a base, Jacobsen over a three-week spell in October 1881 travelled to the various Kwakwaka’wakw villages on a rented sloop, with Robert Hunt, the local HBC factor, and his son George as guides. Jacobsen recorded little about the



Style  29

four hundred Kwakwaka’wakw objects that make up the Berlin collection.7 Like many early anthropologists and collectors, he had set out to collect objects, not information. As anthropology evolved throughout James’ life and became more sophisticated in its objectives and methods, scholars began to illuminate how people spoke about the things they made. Some anthropologists worked directly with Aboriginal peoples, transcribing and translating Aboriginal terms and ideas. Franz Boas (1858–1942) first travelled to British Columbia in 1886, where he established a business relationship with George Hunt (1854–1933), the son of the original Scots factor of the HBC in Fort Rupert and a Tlingit woman from Alaska, Mary Ebbets. The Hunt family commissioned James to carve a replica of her ancestral Tongass pole for Fort Rupert around 1900. George Hunt was fully integrated into Kwakwaka’wakw society and provided both collecting and oral history expertise for Boas from the late 1880s on.8 Samuel Barrett (1879–1969), an anthropologist and director of the Milwau­ kee Public Museum, had a specific interest in linguistics. Although he focused mainly on the Indigenous peoples of California, he also recorded and translated Kwakwaka’wakw mask terminology. The terms he wrote down primarily described the characters but also contained clues from the artists on how to compose a figure.9 For example, an unattributed Xawa mask represents cracks in a rock and is composed like an echo mask (Figure 2.2) with a sea anemone mouth.10 There is thus a close relationship between the lexicon of names for the figures and how they are represented. In Barrett’s notes, ’Namxxelagayu, alternatively spelled numxialexwi, is simply a “sea monster progenitor of the numkis [Nimpkish] clan.”11 Barrett was sometimes more illustrative in his translations. Helugwiwala galokwewe is the name of one large mask. Breaking the syllables down, the combination of helu, “upper curve of the nose,” kalo kwaxlaske, “lower curve of the jaw,” and gwiwala, “on its forehead,”12 describes the shapes and forms of the mask as a whole. In other examples, Kwoyum is a whale with fin down, whereas Maxenox is a killer whale with fin up.13 Clearly, artists like James faced rigid requirements when it came to representing the figures of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology, and therefore variation in form from one artist to another is subtle. Barrett helps us understand the relationship between spoken, performed, and material forms of culture, but there is still little here to help us understand how the artists found creative and expressive freedom within the strictures of

30  Yakuglas’ Legacy

Figure 2.2: Echo mask. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Cat. No. 25.0/221)

Kwakwaka’wakw art. People must have always talked in Kwakwala about variations and innovations in the masks and other art forms, but the communities were also relatively small, and the ritual performances were collaborative in nature. Everyone in the community knew who did what. It was unnecessary for an artist to sign a work. But as the audiences for Kwakwaka’wakw and other Aboriginal arts expanded, so did the need to discuss, define, and categorize the art. Boas laid the groundwork for the analysis of Northwest Coast art as much as he did for the activities and directions of Northwest Coast anthropology. Although of course the two are interconnected, efforts to physically describe the art



Style  31

emerged from how Boas tried to locate his own studies within the larger practice of early-twentieth-century European art history. In his landmark work Primitive Art (1927),14 Boas turned to German formalism and its theorization of ornament, citing Alois Reigl among others as he sought to define Indigenous objects as art. This was in response to the more established practice of placing objects on an imaginary cultural continuum. Boas’ assertion was that these objects had their own internal aesthetic logic and that “form and its meaning combine to elevate the mind above the indifferent emotional state of everyday life.”15 Reigl, a professor of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna, represented the state of the art in design research at the time Boas began writing about the Northwest Coast style. In 1893, Reigl published Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament), in which he strived to integrate history into the analysis of material, pattern, and ornament. Inspired by the German-language art history of the time, Boas was the first to acknowledge an individual Northwest Coast artist – a contemporary of James, Haida artist Charles Edenshaw (ca. 1839–1920), whom he mentions five times in Primitive Art.16 Boas first sketched out his understanding of the formal structure of Northwest Coast art17 in his 1897 article, “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast,” published in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History; he then developed his ideas more fully in Primitive Art, in which he argued that when “the technical treatment has attained a certain standard of excellence, when the control of the processes involved is such that certain typical forms are produced, we call the progress an art.”18 For Boas, the “typical forms” of the Northwest Coast included retention of the outline of the animal form represented; the standardization of eye and eyebrow forms and certain diagnostic features of specific animals, such as the dorsal fins of marine animals and the wings of birds; and an emphasis on the head in relation to the body and limbs. Also, when an animal’s body had to be adjusted to the decorative field, its figure was distended and split in the middle to allow for wrapping it to the shape of the object it decorated. As Hawthorn summarized Boas’ ideas, “form must be made within the traditional patterns that allowed the society to recognize and accept it … These traditions prescribed identification features, elements of design and ornament, X-ray painting, and bisymmetrical split representation.”19 From this

32  Yakuglas’ Legacy

formal and symbolic vocabulary, “the craftsman could select, recombine, and re-form to make a new statement.”20 Scholars like Erna Gunther and Robert Swanton, who were Boas’ students at Columbia University in New York, were clearly influenced by his thoughts about Northwest Coast art. Through them, his ideas about Northwest Coast art maintained currency through to the 1950s, when the next generation of scholars, including Bill Holm and Wilson Duff, who had studied with Gunther at the University of Washington in Seattle, began to emphasize the links between the form of an object and its meaning as a way of determining both authenticity and, at least by implication, value. This latter approach wielded enormous influence in the 1960s and 1970s as modern Native artists, critics, and institutions established a vibrant market for contemporary Northwest Coast art through a supposed adherence to authentic form. This reflected an earlier strategy developed by social reformers in the 1930s to promote art as a cultural commodity, on the assumption that the fragile bloom of Northwest Coast art needed to be protected from competition. It was recognized that artists like James, who sold their works outside their own communities, were making a valuable economic contribution at a time when the Great Depres­ sion was raging. Reverend George Raley, an active collector and promoter of Northwest Coast art, argued in 1934 that most First Nations people could not compete on equal terms with Euro-Canadians, so the arts would be a perfect beginning for economic revival, as there would be no competition from EuroCanada.21 Raley and many of his contemporaries felt that what set the art apart was how it looked and the stories it told. Furthermore, Native arts and crafts were distinctively Canadian and were “Canada’s first contribution to the world of art,”22 and as such needed to be closely tied to tourism. At the same time that James began to sign his curio objects for sale through Webber’s store, Raley accumulated a list of places where Aboriginal art and crafts were still in production, noting that “a few good carvers could be found” in Alert Bay and the surrounding area and that the residential school at Alert Bay, where James taught, was “where Indian arts and crafts have been successfully taught to the economic benefit of the students.”23 Through the 1940s and 1950s, James’ apprentice, Mungo Martin, played anintegral role in raising the public profile of Northwest Coast art through his participation in various carving programs at museums in Vancouver and Victoria. Aaron Glass argues that Martin also played a critical role in



Style  33

facilitating the transfer of ceremonial objects from their communities of origin to the museums where he worked, noting that more than 1,300 Kwakwa­ ka’wakw objects were sold or donated to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC during Martin’s tenure there. Glass asserts that Martin’s partnership with Audrey and Harry Hawthorn and their work with students at the university also contributed to the aestheticization of Kwakwaka’wakw art.24 Martin was thus a key player in the shift in how Northwest Coast art generally and Kwakwaka’wakw art specifically were valued in Canadian society. Glass explains: “Objects and their creators characterized ‘ethnographically’ tend to be viewed as communally significant, traditional in production and meaning, and subject to particular functional contexts; whereas objects and creators defined ‘artistically’ are approached as individually significant, innovative in technique and interpretation, and available to universal aesthetic appreciation.”25 The apparent tension in these differing ways of defining an object’s significance lies in how individuals and institutions have privileged one over the other, rather than recognizing that an object and its artist can simultaneously operate and deliver multiple meanings and values. Certainly, James and his generation recognized that the objects they created were and should be beautiful. Anthropologist Jonathan Meuli seeks to evoke the aesthetics of Northwest Coast art through an in-depth discussion of the stories of Haida Walter McGregor, recorded by John Swanton in 1901. Meuli asserts that the art is “about paint and leather, the smell of cedar planks and of fishing lines, the texture of woven baskets, the stickiness of oil, the sharpness of blades and the brightness of metal. It is also about beauty – both that of the natural world and of art forms – about the red skies above the sea, finely-dressed youth, the white stripes on a whale, the animation of fine carving, the rightness of good design.”26 The tactile beauty of the art is rooted both in the stories, like McGregor’s, and in the artist’s evocation of the natural and supernatural worlds that form the setting of those stories. At any rate, Martin and the Hawthorns were part of a larger wave of recognition and support for Aboriginal art in non-Aboriginal Canada in the immediate postwar period, at a time when a language for discussing the form and aesthetics of Northwest Coast art was being developed. Martin also worked with a series of important artists who would constitute the next generation of Northwest Coast artists, including Nimpkish Doug Cranmer and Haida Bill Reid. Cranmer recalls: “I had learned everything from Mungo

34  Yakuglas’ Legacy

Martin. Mungo taught me how to carve designs: how to design something. He didn’t have to say anything – he’d just come around and take it out of my hands. Bill had spent some time with Mungo too and learned how to use tools.”27 Reid was an artistic phenomenon in Canadian art history, becoming one of the highest-paid Canadian artists regardless of ethnicity, but in Cranmer’s retelling his ability to work with Haida form on a monumental level was founded on practical work with two Kwakwaka’wakw artists, Martin and Cranmer. As Tsimshian/Haida art historian Marcia Crosby writes, Reid was also part of the postwar process in which museums, universities, critics, scholars, and artists focused “on creating standards for Northwest Coast material culture as fine art, using Western criteria of aesthetic excellence.”28 It was in this context of “creating standards” that in 1965, art historian Bill Holm, building on Boas’ work in Primitive Art – particularly his breakdown of split forms and his definition of standardized composite units or what Hawthorn calls the “traditional patterns,”29 such as the eyes and eyebrows – defined what has come to be known as the Northwest Coast formline system.30 In Northwest Coast: An Analysis of Form, Holm explains that this two-dimensional “system provided that creatures be portrayed by representing their body parts and details with varying broad ‘formlines’ which always joined to present an uninterrupted grid over the designed area. The body parts were stylized in forms consistent with the semi-angular, symmetrical, nonconcentric qualities of formlines. Certain uniform shapes resulted, the most obvious and recognizable being ovoids and U form of different sizes and proportions.”31 The grid of formlines was defined by colour. The main, undulating line, or primary formline, outlining the main shape of the figure, was black. The stylized shapes within the larger grid defined by the primary formline have been termed secondary formlines by Holm and were usually red. A third, tertiary set of formlines, uncommon among the northern peoples, was also possible. Holm’s systematization of a descriptive language that allowed us to discuss how Northwest Coast artists assembled their works also enabled us to identify where the individual might innovate or use particular patterns or combinations that were theirs alone. Holm himself began to distinguish between regional variations, and tribal ones as well, in his writings from the 1970s and 1980s, defining as he did so the ways that the vocabulary of his formline system might be used to identify



Style  35

individual hands.32 His pioneer monograph on Willie Seaweed was among the first to focus on a single artist.33 In parallel, Peter Macnair and his colleagues, Alan Hoover and Kevin Neary, wrote the catalogue for the Legacy exhibition at the Royal British Columbia Museum, asserting a sense of continuity between a new generation of artists and their forebears from earlier in the century. What separated their efforts as writers from those earlier in the century was the recognition that individuals were responsible for producing the objects they discussed. Rather than glossing over specific variations in an essential construct of a tribal style, they recognized the patterns in the objects on the museum shelves. Older artists like Charles Edenshaw, Tom Robson, and a series of Haida carvers began to emerge from the shadows of anonymity in the work of Holm and his successor, Robin Wright, author of the most complete chronological discussion of Haida art history, Northern Haida Master Carvers.34 Artists like Martin and Seaweed, who were alive and known to the museum curators of the 1960s and 1970s – specifically Wilson Duff, Audrey Hawthorn, and Holm – were re-evaluated. This is an ongoing project in which lesser known but no less important artists are being rediscovered and represented, as with Jennifer Kramer’s 2012 book on Doug Cranmer35 and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC’s 2013 exhibition on Henry Speck, which opened at the museum and then travelled to the U’mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay. Macnair, further developing the project that had been first sketched out in Boas’ formal descriptions, developed this work into a chronological stylistic history that sought to chart the influences and evolution of contemporary tribal and individual styles. The attribution of the ’Namxxelagayu mask and cape at the National Museum of the American Indian to James and Martin was done by Macnair, who used his understanding of Northwest Coast form as defined by Holm to analyse the material and stylistic decisions made by the artists. James emphasized the head in his ’Namxxelagayu by increasing the scale of the head in proportion to the body; at the same time, the distended flat surface of the halibut-like body allowed him to complete the two-­dimensional representation of the scales, main body, and tail. In the linear designs on areas like this distended body or the covering cape of the ’Namxxelagayu mask, James and his colleagues devised a system in which they defined the main body parts through enclosing “formlines,” which joined to create an uninterrupted grid over the design area. In this system, an additional pattern of

36  Yakuglas’ Legacy

Figure 2.3: Cape from the ’Namxxelagayu mask. (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Cat. No. 11/5212)

uniform shapes emerged, including characteristic ovoids and U forms of different sizes and proportions.36 The grid of defining formlines was further defined by colour. The main, undulating line, or primary formline, outlining the main shape of the figure was typically black. This formal vocabulary is clear to see in any of James’ paintings (Figure 2.3). Kwakwaka’wakw artists tended to use specific elements of Northwest Coast design in their own unique and identifiable ways. Rarely did they sign their work prior to the late 1940s. James was among the first to do so – he signed a number of his works throughout the 1930s. From the works he signed, we can extrapolate his personal style to identify a number of other objects that were likely created by him but left unsigned. An example is the ’Namxxelagayu mask and cape, for which he used a strong, undulating,

Figure 2.4: ’Namxxelagayu mask. (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Cat. No. 11/5212)

38  Yakuglas’ Legacy

unbroken primary formline to define the basic silhouette and subdivide the internal space of the figures. The bilateral symmetry referred to by Boas can be seen in the body of the Thunderbird that dominates the composition. Typically, James’ compositions are balanced rather than strictly symmetrical. For example, the Thunderbird’s head is seen in profile at a slightly raised angle and looking to the right, rather than head on. To create texture, James often repeats small, thin lines within the negative spaces created by the primary formline. His creative use of line, especially his hatching and cross-hatching for texture, separates him from most of his colleagues. He also added internal U- and split U-forms, ovoids (a shape frequently used in the eyes as well), and circles. Perhaps the most often repeated internal diagnostic feature of James’ art is the characteristic face completed on the bird’s chest. James repeated this motif in many of his works. James was a prolific artist, and his finest works combine stillness and movement, which he captures through his remarkable eye for composition and his comprehensive understanding of two-dimensional design. The patterning of his shapes and lines is without peer. One of his later works, a 1925 monumental pole for the Memorial Hall at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, inspired a set of miniature poles that followed a similar composition, including a model pole at the Vancouver City Museum (Figure 2.5). The bilateral symmetry in these works is reinforced by the extensive two-dimensional patterns, from the wings on the outstretched Thunderbird at the top through parallel lines and dots down through each of the lower figures, and then offset by a beautiful, long dorsal-finned killer whale swimming asymmetrically across the central axis of the pole, his tail hanging down one side and protruding across the other. This sense of balance is elegantly disturbed by the whale, which draws our attention to the core shape of the pole and enlivens it by breaking out of its compositional boundaries. Balance, gently broken by the possibility of asymmetry, combined with an inherent understanding of pattern, line, and the play between positive and negative spaces, is perhaps James’ greatest formal legacy. Initially, James carved canoes used for transportation between islands and for hunting, fishing, and clamming. His mastery of canoe carving and ceremonial masks made him an ideal candidate to lead the production of poles in Fort Rupert and then Alert Bay. Especially for large objects like totem poles, his material of choice was cedar, from either Vancouver Island – likely

Figure 2.5: This model pole by James was inspired by his own monumental pole erected in the Memorial Hall at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria in 1925. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A17145)

40  Yakuglas’ Legacy

around Port Hardy, immediately to the north of Beaver Harbour – or the British Columbia mainland. The tree was chosen while it was still standing by plumbing its heart with an axe to verify that it wasn’t hollow. James, or his assistants, toppled suitable trees, cut them to the correct length, and trimmed away the excess outer wood using wood wedges, looking for the portion of the wood with the fewest knots. Cedar was a particularly useful tree for large projects because of its long, straight grain. With helpers, he then removed the partly hollowed-out tree to the beach using rollers and ropes. The log was then towed to the bay in front of the village and hauled onto the beach at high tide. There, it was placed at waist height using yew wedges37 and short roller sections outside James’ beachfront workshop. He removed the bark and outer sapwood using a short-handled, double-bitted axe. He blocked out the top and bottom figures first, then the central space, which he measured and subdivided for the middle figures. He then made saw cuts around the figures and chopped away the wood to leave rough, bulky shapes. He typically carved the figures in the round, removing wedges along one side to allow the log to roll 180 degrees, then wedging the log again to work on its back. He used five adzes of decreasing size and greater precision, beginning with a large elbow adze to further shape the figures. Finishing was done with a “D” adze, the most traditional of the adzes, which usually had a crab apple or willow wood handle.38 The “D” adze resulted in the “precise fluted texture”39 that would later characterize James’ monumental poles (Figure 2.6). He typically cut his figures to such a depth that they appeared in full three dimensions rather than as simple reliefs.40 Finishing work was done with fine chisels and curved knifes. James gave the surface a smooth texture by applying wood burnishers, although traditionally, carvers also used the tail of the dogfish (Squalus acanthius) for sanding and dogfish oil for a high-polish surface.41 James was famous for adding projecting pieces – for example, the wings of a Thunderbird, the fins of a whale, or the beak of a raven. He fitted the projections onto the pole’s main trunk with deeply cut mortis-and-tenon joints.42 He then painted the surface using brushes he made himself, usually from split cedar with thick bristles held in place by wrapped spruce root.43 James favoured commercial paints in most of his work, though he was known to have ground his own pigments. The Kwakwaka’wakw gathered pigment materials from specific locations. The mortars used for mixing also varied according to the colour. Black was made from graphite gathered from

Figure 2.6: This close-up of James’ 1925 pole shows the characteristic “fluted” textures created by using D-adzes of different sizes. Compare, for example, the hands at the top of the photograph with the arms and legs. Note as well James’ use of two-dimensional form to add another layer of implied texture. (Photograph by author.)

42  Yakuglas’ Legacy

deposits in Knight Inlet and mixed with one-third salmon roe and sometimes coal. Red was made from red ochre harvested from Knight Inlet and Koskimo. Artists roasted the red ochre in a fire, poured water over it, and covered it with mats to break it into smaller pieces. Over time, the material broke down into a powder that was kept in skin bags. Green was made from copper salt found in Knight Inlet. Sometimes red and green were produced by processing different kinds of wood rot or fungus. White was generally produced by burning small clam shells. Blue was made from a bluish clay found in Koskimo. Black paints were mixed in dolerite mortars. Greens were mixed in serpentinite mortars. While painting, an artist using these sorts of pigments would keep a piece of dried salmon roe wrapped in cedar mat in his mouth, spitting the resulting saliva into the mortar for a binder, judging the consistency and relative opacity of the mix with a brush on a small piece of wood.44 A transformation mask representing the ancestral sun, attributed to James by Macnair45 and acquired in 1913 for the Royal British Columbia Museum (Figure  2.7), exemplifies his early monumental mask carving and decoration. First, his monumental work is characterized by bold colours and strong carved forms. The eyes are deeply incised; their orbits and irises are rounded squares. The deep eye sockets are emphasized by strong, flat planes in the cheekbones, an indented mouth area and chin with a wide, square mouth, and thick, prominent, tapering eyebrows. The region around the mouth is typically adorned with a painted, stylized beard and moustache of rounded, interconnected ovoids for the moustache and inverted U-forms along the chin line for the beard. The two-dimensional form is drawn freehand, and while there are thus inconsistencies in the drawing, James always emphasized a bilateral symmetry in the two-dimensional forms. The eyes are proportionately large, with ovoid and other abstract forms adorning a flat, shallow forehead. He was famous for articulated parts that came off the main shape – in this case, the face – and later for his consistent use of freehand single hatching. In works of this scale and smaller, unlike in his monumental poles, the carvings were carefully burnished and sanded to achieve a smooth surface for the paint. James used a mortar and pestle to grind charcoal as pigment, adding it to dried salmon roe to create a permanent black, but most of his colours were watercolours and, later, poster paints “filched from the residential school.”46 Relying on Neel’s recorded recollections, which were published in the

Figure 2.7: This sun mask by James exemplifies many of the formal characteristics of his mature style. (Image RBCM 1908 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

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Vancouver Sun on 26 February 1966, Hawthorn described James’ techniques, including his use of yellow cedar soaked in rainwater and herbs and cut with a short, curved knife. His earlier colours had been produced from berries, barks, and grasses and thus had a soft, rich tone.47 In his earlier work, James generally applied paint in a subdued way that selectively accentuated his carving, probably because of the delicacy of the paint and the labour-­ intensity of its production. Later, he used commercially available exterior paint in bright colours.48 Museum accession notes record his frequent use of a clear varnish to finish the carving, but this was more typical of his souvenir carvings from later in his career (Figure 2.8), and this may have been done by his customers rather than by him. As writers like Boas, Holm, and Hawthorn have noted, there were formal standards that Kwakwawaka’wakw artists were expected to adhere to in order to successfully convey the identity and meaning of what they were representing. For outsiders, the unfamiliar forms and characters can be bewildering, and initially it can be impossible for them to identify the diagnostic details, which each artist handled differently. Because of the unusual ways in which artists like James used line and colour, the art of the Kwakwaka’wakw (referred to in the past as the “Southern Kwakiutl”) is recognized as a distinctive substyle within the larger tradition of Northwest Coast art. Flamboyant, individualistic, theatrical, and elaborate, Kwakwaka’wakw sculpture was well known for its integration of two- and three-dimensional forms, with coloured patterned details laid over a white ground.49 With the Kwakwaka’wakw residing in a dozen separate villages until the 1950s,50 separate substyles emerged simultaneously in village clusters early in the twentieth century. Each of those styles was led by an outstanding artist.51 The more specific regional styles included the following: (1) the Blunden Harbour school associated with Willie Seaweed (Figures 2.9 and 2.14) and his contemporaries, Chief George and Charlie George, Sr (Figure 2.10) (both from Blunden Harbour/Ba’as), whose style was characterized by “elaborate detail, fine craftsmanship, and the use of enamel paint”;52 (2) a related Smith Inlet style represented by Seaweed’s son Joe Seaweed (Figure  2.11) (from Blunden Harbour), Charlie George, Jr (Figure 2.12), and Charley G. Walkus (Figure 2.13) (Smith Inlet/Takus or T̓a̱kus); and (3) the Fort Rupert–Alert Bay school, which included James and Martin (Figure 2.14) as well as Dick Price



Style  45

(Fort Rupert/Tsax̱is) (Figure  2.15), Dick Hawkins (Figure  2.16) (Kingcome Inlet), Herbert Johnson (Figure 2.17–18) (Wakeman Sound/Kingcome Inlet), Arthur Shaughnessy (Kingcome Inlet),53 Tom Patch Wamiss (Figure  2.19) (Kingcome Inlet), and Bob Harris (Figure 2.20) (Dsawidi/Knight Inlet)54 and his brother Xixanius.55 Barbeau adds to this latter group Yurhwayu, who was responsible for the Thunderbird pole of Wakius, which was relocated along with James’ house posts from Alert Bay to Stanley Park in the 1920s.56 John Davis, a relatively unknown artist who created at least one monumental mask prior to 1919 and who lived in Alert Bay, should be considered among this group as well (Figure 2.21), as should the Kwikwesutinux artist Arthur Bondsound (Figure 2.22). The original location of each artist is important, although sometimes confusing. For one thing, the different origins of the individual artists within each stylistic school suggest that the mature formal vocabularies defined by  scholars like Holm and Macnair emerged from the migration and regrouping of villages, tribes, and lineage groups in the context of depopulation, industrialization, and the founding of new cultural and economic centres, especially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The expansion of the potlatch at this time to accommodate newly empty potlatch places and claims to traditional resource sites was accompanied by an artistic flowering inspired in part by artists from different numayms and even tribal groups working alongside one another. The mature Kwakwaka’wakw schools were therefore conglomerate styles inspired by new relationships and funded by an albeit dwindling elite that was firmly anchored in the new economy brought on by European colonization. Both of the main Kwakwaka’wakw stylistic schools are thus characterized by the introduction of new media, new ideas, and new forms. Walkus was a Gwasela from Smith Inlet and likely wintered at either Takus (variously spelled Takawis or Takush Harbour and sometimes called Broad Bay), or at the village of Kigeh (gigex), the main winter village of the Gwasela after 1890. The Blunden Harbour artists were Nakwoktak (‘nak’waxda’xw) from Blunden Harbour or Ba’as (also spelled Paas), the main Nakwoktak winter village after 1888, at which time it had twelve houses and was close to the halibut and deep-sea fisheries. In the UBC Museum of Anthropology museum provenance notes, Charlie George, Jr, is identified as coming from “Nakwotah,” but this is a mistake, in that his tribe has been substituted for his

Figure 2.8: A varnished model pole by James. (Image RBCM 6789 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 2.9 (opposite page): Willie Seaweed carved this bumblebee­mask used in the Hamatsa rituals in 1948. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA Nb3.1363)

Figure 2.10: Charlie George, Sr, carved this expressive Komokwa mask with a loon on his head, the bubbles in the face representing air bubbles under the ocean’s surface. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A6239)

Figure 2.11: Another mask from the Atlakim representing a salmon attributed to Joe Seaweed, Willie Seaweed’s son, who often worked with his father. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A6215)

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Figure 2.12: A Dzunukwa mask by Charlie George, Jr, who was from Smith Inlet. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: MOA A4286) Figure 2.13 (opposite page): George Walkus carved this humorous Sneezey, or asaxagamlh figure, of the Atlhaq!im or Atlakim dancers, “bringing treasures from the forests,” which were typically burnt after use. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: MOA A6214)

Figure 2.14: Willie Seaweed, photographed in Blunden Harbour in 1955. (Image PABC D-00005 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 2.15: This is a headdress representing sisiutl, the double-headed serpent, carved by Dick Price and owned by Charlie Nowell. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A3790)

Figure 2.16: Dick Hawkins carved this mask representing Raven at the north end of the world, Gwaxgwaxwalanuxsiwe’, one of the servants of cannibal at the north end of the world, and danced in the ćέqa or Winter Ceremonies. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A6127)

Figures 2.17–2.18 (opposite page): Herbert Johnson carved this transformation mask, shown here closed and open. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A4497)

Figure 2.19: This potlatch bowl created by Tom Patch Wamiss is described in museum records at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology: “According to Stan Wamiss, Tom’s son, loon dishes such as this one were used at potlatches – placed at the entrance to the bighouse for people to put money in, as donations to help with the cost of the potlatch.” (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A6566)

Figure 2.20 (opposite page): This transformation mask by Bob Harris exemplifies Harris’ careful use of hatching and cross-hatching in his two-dimensional decoration. (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution Cat. No. 11/5235)

Figure 2.21: Whale mask carved by John Davis for the Cranmer family before 1919. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA 4506)

Figure 2.22: Atlaq!im mask representing Door Keeper of the Woods, Tl!atl!apalagals, by Arthur Bondsound. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A3657)

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village. George was most likely from Blunden Harbour as well. All of these artists were associated with what Galois refers to as the “Northern Tribes.”57 The Blunden Harbour/Smith Inlet style is characterized by the use of enamel paint and by broad areas of colour, thick, wide eyebrows, and bulging eye orbits with smallish eyes placed towards the sides of the face. This style is wildly expressive, with a wide variety of mouth shapes echoed and emphasized by parallel, incised lines along the cheeks. The geometry of the three-dimensional form is exaggerated to dramatize expression. At its best, in the work of Willie Seaweed, this style is remarkably precise. Seaweed used straightedges and compasses to maintain this attention to detail. The highgloss surfaces add to the sense of perfection. The artists of the Fort Rupert/Alert Bay school are either Nimpkish or Kwakiutl, or from Kingcome Inlet. Bob Harris’ family was from Knight Inlet, and he resided in Alert Bay. He demonstrates the central role that Alert Bay came to play for Kwakwaka’wakw people. The Nimpkish were originally from the watershed of the Nimpkish River on the east coast of Vancouver Island. The name Nimpkish translates as “halibut on the bottom,” a reference to the mythical halibut sea monster in tribal origin histories as well as to the ’Namxxelagayu character carved by James. The original winter village of the  Nimpkish was Whulk, which they shared with the Walas Kwakiutl. Whulk was abandoned as a village after 1840 but maintained as a fishing station. In the mid-nineteenth century, likely at the time that Fort Rupert was established, the Walas Kwakiutl relocated their winter village to Beaver Harbour and the Nimpkish relocated theirs to Cormorant Island. Fort Rupert, on Beaver Harbour, dominated the Kwakwaka’wakw political economy up until the 1880s, when it was eclipsed by the cannery town of Alert Bay on Cormorant Island.58 Alert Bay continued as a conglomerate village, with tribes relocating there from all along the central coast; however, the residents were frequently referred to as Nimpkish in the English media. The Kingcome Inlet people were from what Galois calls the Gilford Island tribes – the Gwawaenuk, Hahuamis, Kwikwesutinux, and Tsawatainuk – who wintered at Gwayasdums on Gilford Island, which by 1914 had eighteen houses and shared oolichan rights at the mouth of Kingcome Inlet.59 Arthur Bondsound was Kwikwesutinux and maintained a smokehouse at the clover root harvest site of Hada on Bond Sound. As the last resident of Hada, he gained the name Bondsound,60 but he was still deeply connected



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to the Kwikwesutinux winter village of Gwayasdums. According to Agnes Alfred, the scattering of the Kwikwesutinux after the 1856 Nuxalk raid on Gwayasdums led to an amalgamation of the Gilford Island tribes into a single tribe, the Mugemak (four) Tsawatainuk.61 Galois writes that they had formed their own quasi-independent potlatch ring and were known as qwi’kwai’ki?la (living inside the mountains). A missionary school was operated at Gwayasdums between 1891 and 1912. Since Herbert Johnson was from Wakeman Sound, he was likely Hahuamis, who traced their “home” village to Okwialis on Wakeman Sound, which was a winter village until the move to Gwayasdums between 1865 and 1879.62 The Kwakiutl tribes were based in and around either Fort Rupert or, later, Alert Bay. They comprised the Kwakiutl, the Komkiutis, the Kweeha, and the Walas Kwakiutl. Prior to 1810, these people occupied winter villages in the vicinity of Baronet Passage and Clio Channel; after that year, they relocated to Beaver Harbour after the founding of the HBC post at Fort Rupert. They used salmon fishing sites at the mouth of the Nimpkish River, controlled the southern portion of Turnour Island and the adjacent islands, and maintained oolichan fishing rights at Tsawitti. After the HBC abandoned its Fort Rupert post in 1882 (although it was bought and maintained by the Hunt family well into the twentieth century), Alert Bay slowly replaced Fort Rupert as the commercial centre of the Kwakiutl, and indeed of the Kwakwaka’wakw people as a whole. Its role as an administrative centre was solidified after the DIA established its Kwawkewlth agency there and opened an industrial school for boys in 1894.63 The close proximity of Euro-American commerce and administration had a profound effect on Kwakiutl culture and art. For instance, Holm notes that “the first Kwakwaka’wakw artist to regularly sign his paintings and carvings, and then only those made for sale to non-Indians, was Charley [sic] James”64 and that the “famous carver Charley [sic] James probably made more models than all the rest together, while, at the same time, carving great monuments for traditional use.”65 The Fort Rupert–Alert Bay style is quieter, more restrained, and arguably closer to the more naturalistic styles to the north. In contrast to the deep sockets and broad areas of colour of the Blunden Harbour/Smith Inlet style, Fort Rupert–Alert Bay details are articulated more with line, often drawn freehand and without Seaweed’s precision. To understand the differences between the Fort Rupert/Alert Bay and Blunden Harbour/Smith Inlet styles, as well as

Figure 2.23: A model pole by Charlie James. (Image RBCM 6787, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 2.24: A model pole by Willie Seaweed. (Image RBCM 15807, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

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James’ own tendencies, it is illuminating to compare works by James and Seaweed. When we compare two model poles in the collection of the Royal British Columbia Museum, one by James (Figure 2.23) and another by Sea­ weed (Figure 2.24), the differences are significant. Seaweed’s carving is more compressed. James’ figures are slender and slightly elongated. Both carve in yellow cedar, but Seaweed covers the surfaces in thick layers of finely applied paint, while James allows us to see the surface and colour of the wood under a shiny, transparent layer of varnish. Seaweed’s use of colour is restrained and subtle. His detailed carving is tightly controlled, as is his patterned integration of two- and three-dimensional forms. The feet of his top qulos figure are articulated by fine-etched lines; the toenails are painted black; the feet are orange with red socks around the ankles; there are beautiful black ovoid forms on the white knees, making a smooth transition from the black and brown of the Dzunukwa figure to the abstracted toothy-patterned face on the torso of the qolus. It is in the faces and their features – the pursed mouth of Dzunukwa for example – that Seaweed’s art is most expressive. James’ application of paint is thinner and looser. He builds up multiple interlocking patterns of linear texture through repetitive forms – dashes, dots, and wavy lines – which are laid over the blank wood in black, red, and green. His painting has an almost nervous energy, lending his work a sense of movement this is absent in the perfect stillness of Seaweed’s hand. James often conceived of the areas around the eyes almost as coloured masks – a tendency that is visible in his two-dimensional paintings as well. James also played with the inclusion of asymmetric three-dimensional forms. The black fish or killer whale swims laterally across the pole, its tail and fins projecting to one side of the pole’s axis, along which James superimposes the other figures vertically. On the Thunderbird’s chest, James repeats his abstracted face motif. Ac­ cording to Nuytten, quoting Ellen Neel, “this device takes the form of James’ personal crest, the killer whale,” in which “the central ovoids and their trailing U forms represented simultaneously the eyes of the killer whale and its tail flukes.”66 Compositionally, the repetition of this form is consistent, with the individual components shaped or emphasized in varying degrees to call attention to the whale’s anatomy. The top line of the head separates the face from three U-forms, often red or a tertiary colour in the flanking two and black in the central one, with a prominent circle recalling the whale’s



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blowhole. The face has two dominant ovoids, sometimes painted as a green mask in the more representational examples and following the pattern typical of many of James’ fully carved facial forms. Two inverted L-shaped moustache lines between the mouth and the eye planes typically frame the red ovoidal mouth. Hatching and cross-hatching fill in the remaining negative spaces. Comparing across media, it is clear as well that James created in the motifs varying levels of abstraction. In some, the face is obviously discernible; in others, the viewer has to look more closely. Another telling comparison might be between two masks attributed to Seaweed and James respectively, which in this rare set of examples represent the same character. The first is a Dzunukwa mask carved by Seaweed and now at the Royal British Columbia Museum (Figure 2.25). The second has been attributed to either Martin or James by Macnair and is now at the National Museum of the American Indian (Figure  2.26). Martin and James worked together, but James is generally acknowledged as having played a mentoring role in their artistic relationship, so the general composition of the mask reflects the sorts of design decisions common to James’ carvings and paintings. The two masks represent two different states in which the Dzunukwa was generally represented. The compression of Seaweed’s work is evident in the features of his figure. The tight organization of the facial features, with the eyes and eyebrows oriented along dramatically inclined diagonal lines and the shape of the face following an inverted triangle, contrasts with the much broader shape and composition of the James mask. James instead identifies the character and its state through a repetitive pattern of U-forms and lines. Once again, the character of the wood is transformed under Seaweed’s thick application of glossy opaque paint. James’ painting is thinner, and the broader shapes and patterns, although they obscure the wood in the positive spaces, preserve a sense of the mask’s material origins, with the wood of the negative spaces creating contrast. Macnair notes that this tendency among James and his followers was later encouraged by commercial vendors, who argued that “enamel-painted masks did not sell easily.”67 The Hunt family, with both Martin’s stepson Henry (Figure  2.27) and Henry’s son Tony trained by Martin (Figure 2.28), often use matte finishes “to color some details while leaving the primary ground in its natural cedar finish.”68 A qulos headdress carved in 1995 by Richard Hunt (Figure  2.29), Tony’s brother, who trained with both his brother and his father, demonstrates

Figure 2.25: A Dzunukwa mask carved by Willie Seaweed. (Image RBCM 14864, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 2.26: A Dzunukwa mask attributed to either Charlie James or Mungo Martin. (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution Cat. No. NMAI 100274.000)



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the adherence to this formal tradition. With large areas of negative space dominating the two-dimensional composition and left to the natural cedar ground, this headdress combines the precision of Seaweed with the linear decoration, composition, and colour choices of James. Later generations of carvers, including Richard Hunt, have excelled in carving in such a way that the final finish of sanded cedar grain enhances and emphasizes the geometry of the sculpture. Finally, an important stylistic challenge brings us back to the ’Namxxela­ gayu mask and cape: How does one distinguish between the works of closely related artists like James and Martin? Given that they often worked collaboratively and that Martin reportedly learned from James, it may be nearly impossible to be completely definitive. However, Martin also learned from Seaweed as the two worked together on commissions in 1942, and of course he had his own tendencies. Comparing a model pole by Martin collected between 1929 and 1939 (Figure  2.30), and therefore of the same approximate era as James’ mature work, with the model pole by James (the same one we compared with Seaweed’s) demonstrates a number of distinctions. The artists use similar proportions in the overall composition, as well as similar colour blocking, angles in the jutting wings, and arrangement of positive and negative space. Both use an broad colour palette that includes greens, blues, and browns in addition to black and red. There is a greater energy in James’ work through his looser and quicker application of paint, particularly in the hatching, cross-hatching, and repetition of circles to attain implied texture. There is greater use of asymmetry in the expression of the figures, and the downward angles of the some of the figures – particularly the wolf biting the killer whale (second from top) – contribute to the sense of movement and energy that characterizes James’ work. The proportions are thinner in James’ carving; Martin’s two-dimensional designs are tighter and more precise. Like Seaweed, Martin compresses the carved geometry of the figures and draws them in tightly to the main compositional axis of the pole, although he shows more of each body, whereas James arranges heads and smaller figures over the base figures. For example, the knees in Martin’s top figure, the Thunderbird or qulos, are bent and drawn together, whereas the legs in James’ top qulos stand straight. The humanoid figure in Martin’s pole (the middle figure) draws his knees up to his chest with his hands. In James’ pole, the fish held by the third figure from to top hides the body of

Figure 2.27: A model pole by Henry Hunt. (Image RBCM 14998 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 2.28: Wooden drum by Tony Hunt. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA 863/5 a-c ¾)

Figure 2.29: A qulos headdress by Richard Hunt carved in 1995. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA 1673/1)

Figure 2.30: An early model pole by Mungo Martin collected between 1929 and 1939. (Image RBCM 8308, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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the humanoid figure. James seems to be strengthening a multilevel narrative through how he superimposes the figures. In Martin’s pole, the heads of the human and humanoid characters are distinctively stretched at the eyes, and the eye sockets are deeper and more articulated. James’ carving of the sockets is minimal, and he uses colour rather than carving to express the indentation of the eye sockets. Indeed, James’ sockets are simple, thin stripes of paint. James also tends to create thicker, darker eyebrows in comparison to Martin’s thinner and more elegant arched brows. James frames the angular mouth of the lower humanoid figure with a moustache and beard, while Martin’s humanoid figure has a moustache that emphasizes the carved cheek planes but does not frame the softer, more organic mouth. Also, Martin’s heads are larger and more angular than James’. With the ’Namxxelagayu mask and cape, then, I would argue that even if both artists worked on it, it was James’ conception. James’ use of varied repeated linear forms to create implied texture, asymmetry in the overall composition of the qulos figure, with the head cocked to one side, and characteristic abstracted face motif on the qulos’ chest all appear in the twodimensional design of the cape. The shapes of the fish echo James’ representations of fish elsewhere, particularly in a group of miniature paddles he completed for the curio trade that were decorated with creatures from the sea on either side. The two-dimensional characteristics of the main mask and its body also conform to James’ style. The carving of the face is trickier. If one were to compare it only with the model poles, the argument for attribution would be weighted in Martin’s favour. The eye sockets, for example, are deeply articulated through carving. But this stylistic element is also found in James’ monumental work – for example, in his RBCM mask – although it is sometimes missing from his later and smaller model poles. Furthermore, the quality of line in the secondary elements and the way in which their thinness contrasts with the thickness of the eyebrows are also much more typical of James’ rhythmic integration of carving and painting and of different line qualities, blocks of colour, and areas of contrasting positive and negative space. James was a key figure in a group of artists who together defined twentieth-­ century Kwakwaka’wakw art. His personal style can be described as energetic: he used linear repetition, balanced colours and an expanded palette, varying qualities of line, layered figures, and a strategic compositional asymmetry, all

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to give his work life and movement. He worked with a wide range of materials in a variety of scales and was comfortable both as a painter and as a carver. He was a key participant in the evolution of a characteristic Fort Rupert/Alert Bay style in the early twentieth century, and his artistic innovations were recognized for their creativity and repeated by subsequent generations of Kwakwaka’wakw artists.

chapter three

MASKS AND CEREMONIAL OBJECTS

The monumental mask of ’Namxxelagayu, the halibut-like sea monster so proudly displayed by Orchard at the National Museum of the American Indian (Figures 2.1, 2.4, and 2.5), is one of James’ most impressive. The content behind James’ extraordinary mask comes from a nuyamil, or “tradition of the house,”1 which also provides the wording for how Kwakwala-speaking artists talked about form. The story of ’Namxxelagayu is so great in significance that it appears as a pervasive crest. Mungo Martin carved it on his 1958 British Columbia centenary pole, connecting it in the accompanying literature to the “foremost lineage of the Nimpkish tribe,”2 or the Ts’e’ts’elwa’ lagame, the highest-ranking of the Nimpkish numayms.3 Martin completed a pencil and crayon drawing of the ’Namxxelagayu in 1951.4 The same crest is depicted on the housefront of John Scow’s famous Sea Monster House in Gwayasdums. William Scow recounted the story: According to my grandparents, a long time ago the Sea Monster Numka­ lagyu emerged from the bottom of the sea in Blackfish Sound. He came to shore and helped found a group of people called ‘Namgis. In order to portray what he had seen in his travels and the supernatural powers he obtained, this ancestor used the Sea Monster design on his house. Ever since that time, only people of the ‘Namgis tribe and certain in-laws have had the privilege of using this design.5

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Kwakwaka’wakw carvings like this are richly and inextricably connected to the numaym ancestors, the first ones down, “who typically came down from the sky in nonhuman form,” or emerged from the sea or forest, “took off their masks and became human.”6 The ancestors founded the numayms and assigned the structure and order of potlatches and feasts. They gave the knowledge of their rites and distributed wealth in spiritual, terrestrial, and maritime resources. The numayms’ ranking was based on the relative age of the founding ancestors. Masks, the embodiment of the ancestors and the spirits with whom they interacted, speak and snap their jaws. They are kept in living boxes, known as kawatsi (boxes of treasure),7 and become excited with the noise and singing of ritual. “Traditionally and ritually,” states Robert Joseph, a Kwakwaka’wakw chief, “masks should always be guarded, always be hidden away. Masks are never shown until they are actually danced on the floor of the ceremonial house.”8 With the early-twentieth-century population tilt towards a majority immigrant population on what had traditionally been Kwakwaka’wakw territories,9 the public assertion of numaym origin myths came to be connected to the ownership of specific geographic locales and the resources they provided. The Nimpkish River supported large salmon runs and was of economic significance to the Nimpkish people, now concentrated at Alert Bay. The old winter village site of Whulk (Xwa̱lkw) at the mouth of the Nimpkish River supplied the salmon cannery at Alert Bay.10 The economic impact of the salmon fishery was profound. In 1880, British Columbia shipped 61,000 cases of canned salmon; ten years later, 411,000 cases.11 Numaym stories using masks were one of several categories of Kwakwa­ ka’wakw performances. Since James’ ’Namxxelagayu mask related to the origins of the Nimpkish at the mouth of the river, it was important in spiritual terms; it also publicly asserted their proprietary rights to the river and its salmon. In addition, when they met with the McKenna–McBride Reserve Commission in 1912, the Nimpkish formally requested recognition of their claims to the Nimpkish watershed from the coast east and inland to Nimpkish Lake. Many Kwakwaka’wakw felt that the government allotment of reserve land was insufficient and contended that some locations had been allotted to the wrong tribes.12 The ownership of sites and resources thus had to be sorted out at several levels, including among the Kwakwaka’wakw themselves. Masks like ’Namxxelagayu were critical to this task.



Masks and Ceremonial Objects  75

It is at the intersection of spirituality and economy, of performance and form, that the meaning of ritual Kwakwaka’wakw art is expressed most directly. The ritual life of the Kwakwaka’wakw people as they fulfilled their responsibilities within their numaym was the source of patronage for James and the other artists. The most monumental forms were the masks and poles, including James’ ’Namxxelagayu mask; these visually manifested the system of inherited prerogatives that was at the heart of status and position in Kwakwaka’wakw society. Representations of numaym ancestors and their non-human helpers – the various wolves, grizzlies, sea lions, orcas, and Thunder­birds, as well as Kwankwanxwaliga or Tsuna and his younger brother Kulus, the double-headed serpent sisiyutl, the tribe of forest-­dwelling creatures called Dzunukwa, and the great lord of the sea, Komokwa or Kumugwe’13 – all of these were carved on house posts, house dishes, and other utensils. As the art was adjusted for new audiences – namely, the tourists and collectors landing in Kwakwaka’wakw territory with greater and greater frequency – these forms continued to be guided by the rich corpus of myths and myth figures. Even in the 1930s, when James’ career was winding down, and people like the curio dealer William L. Webber were commissioning a greater number of his works in Vancouver, James’ art remained rooted in his inherited world view. Even when his paintings and carvings were in new media or for new purposes, they reverberated with the formal language and mythic content of Kwakwaka’wakw ancestral histories, best exemplified in their ritual form by the wide array of masks James carved and painted. In conventional Kwakwaka’wakw life, rites of life passage – birth, coming of age, marriage, and death – were subject to individual ritual actions. These passages involved the assumption of related rights and privileges and thus were subject to ritual feasts and the distribution of gifts: the potlatch. There were varying levels of potlatches; early naming potlatches for children or for wiping away shame for an indiscretion or accident were relatively small in size. The potlatch grew in size with the relative status of the host. The largest were called mάxwa, or “doing a great thing,” and were held for the assumption of an important or chiefly name, a grease feast, the buying and selling of coppers, the erection of crest or memorial poles and houses, and marriages, at which time potlatches were alternately given by the father- and son-­ in-laws for bride purchase and repurchase.14 The presentation of James’ own Tsekame pole to his son-in-law Charlie Newman in 1925 would have had to

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have been legitimized with a mάxwa potlatch, something perhaps referred to in Newman’s own account that all “the people here were glad and proud of it and they danced around it when it was finished.”15 Anthropologist Helen Codere contends that the potlatch gained in intensity and scale after 1849, spurred by an increase in wealth that radiated out from Fort Rupert and the other European trading posts by then appearing on the coast. By the 1920s, inflated by the success of the commercial salmon fishery, a mάxwa potlatch took days to conduct and objects cumulatively worth thousands of dollars were exchanged.16 A famous list transcribed from Dan Cranmer’s memory of his 1921 potlatch included “gas boats, outdoor engines, pool tables, sewing machines, gramophones, furniture and musical instruments.”17 Codere further suggests that the confluence of depopulation, increased wealth, and empty potlatch seats reached its zenith around 1920, by which time every “adult had the opportunity to potlatch and to gain status, public recognition and glory.”18 The precarious period of the potlatch leading up to the 1922 prosecutions represented an intense period of artistic patronage as well, allowing artists like James to express their interpretations of the spiritual life of the Kwakwaka’wakw in its most monumental terms. The other, intersecting cycle of ritual that dominated Kwakwaka’wakw social life involved the ritual complex that featured dramatic representations of supernatural beings re-enacting ancestral encounters in which the lineage founders acquired spiritual powers. These were held traditionally during the cold, rainy winter months, beginning in November and again in the spring. The winter complex is known in Kwakwala as the ćέqa (also Tseka19 or Tsetseka),20 or Cedar Bark Dance. It was motivated by the ancestral interactions of certain families with two main spirits: Bakbakwalanooksiwae or bάx w bakwalanuxwsiwε?, the man-eating spirit; and Winalgilis, the warrior spirit. Other supernatural beings, monsters, and animals also possessed or were emulated by the ćέqa performers.21 The complex began with the distribution of shredded and dyed cedar bark and the temporary replacement of numaym affiliations and secular names with winter names and affiliation with the various levels of participation in the ćέqa: (1) Seals, or dancers; (2) Sparrows, or managers; and (3) the uninitiated.22 “All nature,” explains Boas, “the heavenly bodies, rocks and islands, waterfalls, animals, and plants are beings of supernatural power whom man can approach with prayer, whose help he can ask, and to whom he may express



Masks and Ceremonial Objects  77

his thanks.”23 Each being was approached with an honorific in the Kwakwala language, although all were addressed as “Supernatural One.” The sun was referred to as the Great-Chief or Father. Dangerous places were called Old Man or Great-Owner-of-the-Weather. Medicinal and edible plants carried the appellations Life-Owner or Long-Life-Maker. Prayers of thanks to hunted animals included requests that the slain tell his kin that he had been treated well and that they make themselves available to the hunter.24 Each being had power that an individual could obtain, perhaps in the form of a sacred song or a particular skill or characteristic. After successfully hunting a grizzly bear, the hunter might pray: “Listen to me, Supernatural-One, now I will take by war your power of not respecting anyone or anything, of being fearless, and your wildness, great, good Supernatural One.”25 No being was more powerful than Bakbakwalanooksiwae, the cannibal spirit that lived at the north end of the world and was celebrated and courted in the ćέqa. The underwater world featured strongly in James’ artistic interpretations of these mythologies. Halibut, known as Scenting-Woman or Born-to-beGiver-of-the-House, adorns the costume of Komokwa, the Chief-under-theSea. The loon, a diving bird, was one of the emissaries of Komokwa. The sandhill crane, a migratory bird that breeds on the central mainland coast of British Columbia, guarded the entrance to Komokwa’s home. Komokwa was the source of copper, a highly prestigious metal that was cold hammered into shield-like plaques and represented spiritual and political power. His diagnostic features are borrowed heavily from the octopus. From a secular perspective, the physical and behavioural characteristics inspired by the world around the Kwakwaka’wakw explained the role the supernatural beings played in the particular story. The exaggeration of these characteristics contributed to the wondrous nature of the story. The sculpin, a tiny and pervasive fish in the Pacific, is a bottom-feeder, but in the stories, the supernatural version of it is massive. From a sacred perspective, these ­beings were alive and present and took great personal power to interact with. Furthermore, the spirit world, present in specific places, was the source of powers and gifts that had intertwined religious, sacred, economic, and political values. In this world, an individual had to be watchful. What at first might seem to be from the everyday could instead be magical. Staging of the performances of stories of such great historic, spiritual, economic, and political importance was carefully arranged. This is where the

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artists played a key role. The production of the objects was informed by a deep knowledge of the performances, dances, songs, and informing stories, including how the various characters looked, moved, and changed in the narratives. Some specific roles within the performances were hereditary, passed from father to son; others were assigned according to the individual’s ability. Each society had a song master, who invented and memorized each song. Retired, senior members of the societies directed the proceedings, ensuring the proper observation of ritual and protocol. Messengers were sent out to invite visitors. People were assigned to hold and cut the coppers, which were highly prized. Some distributed tallow and paint for facial painting. Other served as attendants. Monitors kept order and elders kept score, calling out the day’s errors at the end of the proceedings.26 The Kwakwaka’wakw ritual cycle incorporated performances by four main groups of dancing societies: (1) the Hamatsa, “under the supernatural inspiration of Bakbakwalanooksiwae, a powerful man-eating spirit, represented in the dance by the cannibal dancer, or Hamatsa, in human form”;27 (2) the Winalgilis, under the inspiration of the “war spirit initiator,” in which dancers displayed magical gifts and powers, including “a quartz crystal that could cause death when it was thrown [or] the ability to fly, become invisible, to control fire, and to touch it without harm”;28 (3) the Atlakim, inspired by the reception and display of a forest treasure or gift;29 and (4) the Dluwalakha or Tlogwe, or non-sacred, in which dancers wore masks representing the family crest myth.30 The Dluwalakha, also titled Noontlem or Klasila, was a dancing series derived from spiritual encounters in which the spirits “come down and grant special supernatural privileges and treasures to their dancers.”31 Bill Holm transcribes the word into English as dlooqwala and translates it as “acquiring supernatural power,”32 or how Hunt and Boas define nawalak. The Kwakwala words for masks vary according to their ceremonial use. Yaxwami is a mask worn to a potlatch. Imas is an ancestor mask, and imasami is an ancestral spirit mask used in the Dluwalakha. Hamsami is a cannibal bird mask, or rather a mask used in the Hamatsa initiation ceremony during the ćέqa to impersonate the cannibal bird spirits.33 The demonstrations of chiefly prerogatives associated with the assumption of a ranked name, the physical manifestations of songs, stories, and rights brought with the bride in a marriage, the poles and house fronts, the masks of the ancestors and spiritual beings, the figures of the ćέqa dance cycles – all



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of these had to be carved and painted. When, for example, the right to use a certain mask was conferred on a new groom or his heirs through his bride, “the new custodian of the dance commissioned the best carver available to combine his knowledge, imagination, and skill to make that privilege visible in a mask.”34 Patrons, accompanied by a witness, approached an individual skilled in the production of these forms and sought a commission. If it was a monumental commission or a lot of work was involved, the artist might travel to the patron’s village – which is likely why Ellen Neel later referred to James’ “wanderings.” Willie Seaweed is said to have only asked for his expenses and some clothing, although in the 1930s, he made $150 for a Hamatsa mask for one of the ćέqa dances.35 For James, each commission “required a lengthy discussion … A small model or study was often produced to show the prospective client what he could expect in the finished article. In some cases, a number of models were made, all with the same figures, but each given a slightly different treatment in the carving or the painting.”36 James “himself would decide what would be most effective, having heard the owner’s crest stories related or having listened attentively to the details of the events to be recorded.”37 In some cases, large works were done in collaboration with other artists, or a complete set of masks had to be produced within two days, which required a number of artists to work together to meet the ritual deadline.38 Masks and costumes were first and foremost props for a performance. Their appreciation among Kwakwaka’wakw audiences depended on the skills of the performer, or on who owned the masks and when they had worn them, more than on the formal skills of the artist.39 Nonetheless, Kwakwaka’wakw masks and their performances are justifiably famous for their dynamic inventiveness: mouths opened and closed to make snapping noises, eyes rolled, and, with the pull of a hidden string, characters wondrously transformed from one creature into another. Because the language of form among the Kwakwaka’wakw demanded conformity to representational norms to ensure that the audience recognized the characters, stylistic differences between objects by different artists are subtle and sometimes difficult to pinpoint. Museum provenance is also notoriously patchy, rarely identifying the artist responsible for an individual work. Contained in this chapter are a number of masks attributed to James in museum collections and a limited selection of masks that bear a striking similarity to James’ style. This probably represents

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only a fraction of what he actually produced. Most of the masks attributable to James are associated with the Dluwalakha depictions of ancestral figures. The ceremonial objects James carved and painted also constructed authority and position within Kwakwaka’wakw society. From 1880 to 1922, the Kwakwaka’wakw celebration of the potlatch and all its associated rituals represented a very public defiance of Canadian law – not only the potlatch ban but also the attack on “life chiefs” that reflected the law’s underlying purpose. The ancestral histories that informed masked rituals were specific in their geographic references. Spiritual encounters resulting in the acquisition of prerogatives, including the use of resource sites, occurred at specific places. The recitation and re-enactment of these encounters with specific reference to those places asserted territorial rights as well as various levels of chiefly authority directly connected to the assumption of specific names and positions carried in the histories of the numayms and the lines of kin and descent. Because guardianship of resources, both spiritual and material, was granted through ancestral encounters with the spirit world and then organized through lineage descent, James’ ceremonial art synthesized spiritual, familial, and political meanings.

Hamatsa The Hamatsa, or cannibal dancer initiation of Bakbakwalanooksiwae, was the most prestigious of the winter ćέqa rituals. Ancestors of the initiates had encountered Bakbakwalanooksiwae and his attendants in the mountains and acquired his power, songs, and ritual procedures. The Hamatsa initiate was removed to the forest for as long as three to four months, occasionally crying “hap, hap, hap,” which signalled his possession by the cannibal spirit and his desire to consume human flesh. Returning to the village in hemlock branches, he might descend through the smoke hole, mad and frenzied, biting the audience. Attendants restrained him, tamed him with fire, and burned his hemlock branches, replacing them with red cedar bark. When the initiate again became frenzied, masked dancers impersonating Bakbakwalanooksi­ wae and his attendants, Kwakwakawalanooksiwae, Hokhokw, and Galok­ wud­zuwis, appeared, danced, and then retired. In the climax of the ritual, the initiate reappeared, dressed in a blanket and brought by a female attendant



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making taming gestures and male attendants shaking rattles. In his final appearance, the initiate danced calmly, representing the triumph of the ceremony over the madness brought on by the possession of the cannibal spirit.40 The Hamatsa masks are the most famous and elaborate of all Kwakwa­ ka’wakw ritual objects. Often large and unwieldy, they are difficult to perform, requiring great strength and dexterity to make the beaks – sometimes up to 2 metres in length – open and snap shut. Although the museum records for a Hamatsa mask at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology are confusing, its original attribution to James is significant, making it one of the few known masks by James for the most prestigious of the Winter Hamatsa dances. Around 1914, according to Hawthorn, he carved a multiple Hamatsa mask for Mungo Martin. This attribution must have come directly from Martin himself when he was carving at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (MOA). However, the provenance record is somewhat contradictory. According to a statement recorded by Charlie George in the MOA records, the original of this mask, which was sold earlier, had been made by Charlie James. George added small beaks when the mask was used in a movie made in Fort Rupert around 1950. The original ledger entry indicates that this mask was made by “Yakuglas Galsami” (Charlie James) for Mungo Martin. Galsami, in this case, is the Kwakwala word for painted mask. The suffix –ami is one of the variates used to indicate mask, and the prefix gals- comes from galsa, or painting.41 Subsequent entries attribute the mask to Ed Walkus for David Martin, to Joe Seaweed, and to Mungo Martin. A statement by Martin in the MOA records from 1966 also indicates that Martin had two the same, one from Mrs Martin’s great-grandfather and the other from her father’s mother, although this presumably refers to the privilege and not the actual object. The colour, shape, and use of cedar bark is consistent for most Hamatsa masks, and the variations between those carved by different artists are subtle. It’s difficult to argue definitively based on style that this mask is by James, although the fact that Martin seems to have confirmed that it was carved by James for Martin personally seems to trump the subsequent attributions. One would assume that given James’ wide repertoire, he would have carved objects for use in the highly ranked Hamatsa dance societies, although he was clearly nowhere near as prolific in this respect as his contemporary Willie Seaweed. To become a full member of the Hamatsa society, one had to dance a cycle of twelve years, four years through each of the three grades. The taming

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of the frenzied initiate allowed him to become human again and take his place among other fully fledged members of the society. This mask attrib­ uted to James belongs to a category of multiple bird masks commonly used in the Hamatsa cycle. The four beaks represent a combination of three birdmonsters: Kwakwakawalanooksiwae (Raven-at-the-Mouth-of-the-River), Hokhokw, and Galokwudzuwis (Crooked Beak). Together they symbolize the successive stages of spiritual possession and thus initiation into the dance society. Two small raven beaks project from the back of the mask, over a small Hokhokw and on top of a massive Galokwudzuwis.42 Masks like this were designed to be worn on the forehead, with the dancer obscured from view by the long cedar-bark manes. Strings concealed by James within the mask enabled the dancer to open and close the beaks, making a strong clacking noise, thereby enhancing the theatricality of the performance. There are two other Hamatsa masks attributed to James from the Axel Rasmussen collection purchased by the Portland Art Museum in 1948 (Fig­ ures 3.1–3.2). While the museum’s online catalogue does not explain the basis of the attribution, likely it was done recently and the MOA combination mask must have played a key role for comparative purposes. The first of the two masks is a Galokwudzuwis mask. The second is a Hokhokw mask. Both have two-dimensional decoration similar to James’ combination mask, although the Galokwudzuwis in the combination mask has a cedar bark fringe while its compatriot at the Portland Art Museum has a distinctive carved and cutout wooden fin mounted perpendicularly along the bridge of the nose. The stand-alone Hokhokw at the Portland Art Museum has a diagnostic nostril at the centre point of the elongated beak with repeated two-dimensional U-forms in red linking it to the rest of the beak. Since each represents one of the stages of initiation, there should be a third, likely unattributed mask to complete the series. A sun-like mask I attribute to James based on a combination of two- and three-dimensional elements (Figure  3.3) and collected by George Hunt in Fort Rupert for the American Museum of Natural History was associated with the ćέqa. The two-dimensional designs on the radiating rays are typical of James’ decoration, as are the cheek planes and the painted moustache and beard that frame the mouth. Hunt identified the mask as Tsegamis, likely a variation of Tsekame but using the Kwakwala suffix for mask. The root

Figure 3.1: A Galokwudzuwis (crooked beak) mask attributed to James at the Portland Art Museum. (Portland Art Museum 48.3.407)

Figure 3.2: A Hokhokw mask attributed to James at the Portland Art Museum. (Portland Art Museum 48.3.409)

Figure 3.3: Tsegamis mask, collected 1897. (Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, Identification Number: 16 I 2344. Type of Item: mask. Material: wood, pigment, plant fibre and modern metal. Overall Length: 64.0 cm, width 57.0 cm, height 21.0 cm)



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name translates into English as Head-Winter-Dancer, “an important player in a Kwikwesutinux [Kwiksootainuk] tradition”43 of Gilford Island.44 The wings of the mask represent the tails and fins of the killer whale.45 Jonaitis suggests that the mask arrived at Fort Rupert as part of a marriage transfer.46 James’ wife, Sara Nina, was married to Yax’nukwala, who was from the Kwikwesutinux from Gilford Island prior to her marriage with James. In Boas’ account of the Winter Ceremonial, Tsekame dances to purify the Can­ nibal dancer initiate.47 In addition, James passed the rights to the story of the ancestral founder of his wife’s numaym, Tsekame, to his own son-in-law, Charlie Newman, on the occasion of Newman’s marriage to James’ daughter, Lucy Lilac, which was celebrated in a totem pole James carved in 1925. In the U’mista Cultural Centre’s 2012 pamphlet explaining the pole, Tsekame is identified as “the Great Magician of the Red Cedar Bark,” descendant of Kulus, who battled the mystic character Kaniki’lakw of Mitap on Veiner Sound. Kaniki’lakw threw Tsekame into the sea, and he sank to the land of Komokwa (or Kumugwe), lord of the sea and giver of copper.48 In another Kwikwesutinux version of the Tsekame story, he wars against the Nimpkish and conquers many tribes along the coast. Descending from the sky as a Thunderbird, Kolus, he has four sons, who settle in four villages. Two of the sons found two of the Kwikwesutinux numayms. This story also ­occurs among the Nimpkish; in that version, he comes down from the sky with his wife, engages in a contest with the Transformer, and has three sons, for whom he establishes villages. A fourth son is washed in the blood of sisiutl and becomes a warrior. The exploits of all are characterized by interaction with ancestors and the acquisition of power.49 This mask has not previously been identified as carved by James; however, it bears the significant characteristics of the earlier style of carving most often associated with his ceremonial art: the unique beard motif around the mouth, planar cheeks, deep-hollowed sockets, repetitive linear decoration as fill in secondary or tertiary negative spaces, and projecting pieces from the main body of the carving. Many of James’ earlier works for the Kwakwaka’wakw ritual complexes have an eerie austerity and regality communicated in the studious bilateral symmetry of both the carving and the decoration. His linear decoration is tightly controlled in these early works; later in his career, his painting loosens up and feels more spontaneous and painterly.

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Winalgilis One object by James can be tentatively tied to the Winalgilis performances. Winalgilis, or Warrior-of-the-World, was another powerful spirit that possessed initiates as part of the transmission of power. Black, thin, and tall, Winalgilis had a small head and bat-like ears and travelled in an invisible canoe. He was responsible for three kinds of performances: tuxw’id or Tokwit, ‘ma’maka, and hawinalat. Tuxwi’d was performed by a woman and involved a fantastic and theatrical simulated death and restoration, during which a sisiutl, or double-headed serpent, might be raised out of the floor. The ‘ma’maka performance involved throwing a disease-causing worm into the air to be caught in the dancer’s mouth, causing bleeding from the mouth and the vomiting of the worm. The hawinalat included personal torment as a testimony to the dancer’s acquisition of Winalgilis’ power, thereby making the initiate impervious to pain.50 An unusual attribution to James and Martin by Macnair relating to the Winalgilis ceremony can be found at the Seattle Art Museum (Figure  3.4). Macnair’s attribution appears to be based on the facial features and secondary two-dimensional decoration. Artists often worked together, for the performance of the rituals required the production of a large number of objects in a short time. James and Martin, in particular, are thought to have commonly worked together. By this time, James was a mature artist, his reputation had spread among the different Kwakwaka’wakw groups, and he was travelling frequently, often with Martin. There is some question whether Macnair is hedging his bets on the attribution or whether through knowledge from the community he has been able to identify a collaborative work. James and Martin are commonly linked together. However, we don’t have a single object that is undoubtedly the work of both, so it is difficult to understand the dynamics of their collaboration. A rare photograph of the two together, likely taken in the 1920s in the Alert Bay cemetery, shows them holding a painting. It’s unclear whether or not they worked on the painting together, although the stylistic characteristics of the composition suggest it is James’ conception. There are a number of possibilities, given how artists work together today. Perhaps James took care of the design, sketching out the main composition or carving the end product using a piece of wood already roughed out by either Martin or whoever else was working with him. As a particular

Figures 3.4: Winalgilis prop. (Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum 83.241. Gift of John H. Hauberg)

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event approached and the number of tasks to be completed increased, the entire numaym may have pitched in to ensure the successful completion of all the elements necessary for the performance. In a situation like this, Martin and James may have even divided up the objects to be completed and worked on individual objects separately or supervised those working with them. The Seattle Art Museum object is a prop worn by dancers. Ghost or attendant dancers associated with the Winalgilis wore red-dyed cedar head and neck rings adorned with wooden skulls and sometimes a mask representing a skull. Some examples represent a corpse more than a skull per se, although the skull was a more common adornment.51 In the James and Martin version, the red cedar binding indicates the object’s association with the ćέqa. A carved wooden face and limbs hang from the red cedar, so that the audience would see the effect of the dancer carrying or even penetrating a loose, hanging body. The feeling of the object draws comparison with a number of objects associated with the tuxw’id or Towkid rituals, including a Dzunukwa dagger at the American Museum of Natural History collected by George Hunt in 1901, which was used to cut cedar bark at the beginning of the ćέqa or even in the “feigned decapitation and disembowelment of tuxw’id dancers”;52 a tuxw’id puppet from UBC’s Museum of Anthropology; and intricately cut boards from the National Museum of the American Indian that were theatrically raised from the floor during the tuxw’id demonstrations. While masks are arguably the most impressive ritual objects, these secondary paraphernalia were critical to the success of the performances. A similar, modern puppet was carved by Kwikwesutinux artist Barry Scow for his uncle, Justice Alfred Scow, in 1992 and is now in the collection of UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Museum records related to the object state that such an object was traditionally used in potlatches by a Towkwid dancer, a woman of high rank. At a present-day potlatch at Alert Bay, the Towkwid dancer emerged wearing a bearskin cloak with replicas of human skulls, carried a long copper dagger, and danced to the four corners of the big house, drawing the creatures of the spirit world towards her. The dagger was used to cut through to the spirit world. As tension builds and the drumbeats accelerate, the Towkwid spirits emerge and they can represent spirits of the sky, the earth (including humans), or the sea … There might be a puppet box



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buried in the floor, and the puppet box would emerge, manipulated by strings. The human beings might represent the family throwing the potlatch or perhaps one of their revered dead.53

Dluwalakha Other ritual Kwakwaka’wakw performances were derived from privileges acquired through intermarriage with non-Kwakwaka’wakw tribal groups. Such groups included the Oowekeeno for the Atlakim and the Heitlsuk, Oowekeeno, and Kwakwaka’wakw of the outer coast for the Dluwalakha. The Atlakim consisted of over forty masked dancers representing forest ­beings. James did several of representational sketches based on Atlakim themes, but so far, none have been securely attributed to him. However, a number of Dluwalakha masks and paraphernalia have been securely identified as James’ work. The Dluwalakha were enacted in the spring; the conventional numaym structure provided the governing organization for the community,54 firmly connecting the objects and the performances in which they were used to numaym histories. The Dluwalakha are the ritualized reenactments of these numaym histories. In specific reference to the Oowekeeno (Wuikinuxv), Philip Drucker explains that the Dluwalakha, which he transcribes as dluwulaxa, is “a term said to mean ‘Once more (come) down (from heaven).’ The name refers to the fact that most of these dancers are borne to the heavens by their spirits, and afterward descend to earth.”55 Drucker also notes that, as opposed to the winter ćέqa, the Dluwalakha were performed in the spring. He also suggests that “as regards to relative rank, the two series are very nearly equal. Certain of the Dluwa­lakha dances are quite expensive, requiring an even greater outlay of wealth than does the Cannibal dance. A noteworthy feature is the use of a dance of the Dluwalakha series to indicate the intention of becoming a hamatsa.”56 In turn, the Dluwalakha consists of not one, but a series of ranked dances.57 James’ masks were commissioned by specific families or individuals for specific purposes, usually as part of a Dluwalakha performance, and were therefore never general in intent. A mask of an ancestral figure carved by James (Figure 3.5) was part of Sam Charlie’s regalia, which his daughter Mary Beans requested be transferred from the Nuyumbalees Society, an organization



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established in 1975 to negotiate the return of seized potlatch objects from the 1922 Cranmer prosecutions, to the U’mista Cultural Society at Alert Bay. This mask, which was attributed to James in the museum provenance, exemplifies the kind of character the masks embodied and their relationship to the numaym histories. Among the Mamalilikulla of lower Knight Inlet, there is a story of an ancestor who was hard of hearing. According to museum accession notes and as told by Chief Wedlidi Speck, the ancestor did not adhere to the strict feast-giving obligations of his noble family. The man pretended not to hear his relatives’ admonitions. In their frustration and concern for their family’s social status, they were brought to the point of killing the man for his foolishness and neglect. This mask belonged to the late Chief Sam Charlie, and the right to the prerogative has been passed on to his great-nephew Dan Hanuse, who is the present-day keeper of the dance. As the dancer moves onto the sacred dance floor he leans to the side of his one ear and pretends to listen, but he does not really hear the people and what they are saying to him. The dance is an important one and has been performed for many generations. It is from this story that a “characteristic” of the Mamalilikulla people has been passed on from generation to generation: it is said that “the Mamalilikulla people are deaf.” While individual human ancestors might serve as the focal point around which the stories orbited, Hawthorn also notes that these illustrated legends involved “such characters as the sun, the moon, echo, and other elements of nature. A great number of them referred to the animals, birds, and local features of the landscape that played a role in the recounting and re-enactment of family myth.”58 James sculpted at least four sun masks. The sun was often portrayed with a bird beak and associated with copper in the art.59 Three sun masks attributed to James appear to have been completed for ritual use. George Hunt collected a sun mask at the Royal British Columbia Museum for C.F. Newcombe and the RBCM in 1922 (Figure  2.8). In the provenance notes, it is unclear who made the attribution and when, except to say that attributions were rarely made in the 1920s when objects were acquired for the

Figure 3.5 (opposite page): Ancestral figure mask. (UCC-95.03.010 (Deaf man) photographed by Christina Cook, Sabalxis for U’mista Cultural Society)

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museum. The privilege of using the mask was passed through marriage from Rivers Inlet to Quatsino.60 In a set of notes on drawings by Bob Harris from the 1904 St Louis Exhibition, Newcombe identified the sun as “KlesEla used as a crest by one Klaoitisis family.”61 However, the sun features as well in the origin myth of the Kwakiutl recited by Helen Knox.62 With objects like this, it is ultimately the owning family that can determine the exact association of the objects with the appropriate ancestral histories. Jonathan Meuli quotes extensively from a children’s book titled Yaxwatlan’s, published by the U‘mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay in 1981 and circulated “mostly within Kwakwaka’wakw communities.”63 In it, the writers describe in detail the different traditional dances and try to alleviate the children’s anxieties about how the same ceremony might be performed differently, noting differences in “almost every aspect of the hamat’sa ritual … Remember that these variations have to do with the rights of the family and the different mythic histories of the families.”64 Because Dluwalakha masks re-enact spiritual encounters often leading to transformation and spiritual empowerment, they are frequently the most theatrical. This sun mask by James is dynamic, with articulated pieces that open and close around the main face, simulating the physical transformation often associated with the numaym histories and specifically the interaction between human ancestors and the spirit world. One of the sun masks attributed to James according to museum provenance (Figure 3.6) is in the collection of the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay. Boas reports that the Kwakwaka’wakw “conceive of the sky as the country in which is located the house of the Sun. It may be reached through a hole above, through a small hole on the western horizon, or by flying across or diving under a high mountain.”65 The sky as the source of the ancestors is a common theme in the ancestral stories, with many stories reciting the descent of the numaym’s first ancestor from the sky in the form of a Thunderbird, or on occasion, the sun himself, as with ‘Namugwis, the ancestral founder of

Figure 3.6 (opposite page): Sun mask. (UCC-80.01.131, photographed by Christina Cook, Sabalxis for U’mista Cultural Society)

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the Kweeha/Kumoyoi tribe of the Kwakiutl, who lived at the mouth of the Cluxewe River on the east coast of Vancouver Island.66 The U’mista Cultural Centre contains objects seized as part of the Cran­mer potlatch prosecutions in 1922 and repatriated from the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Royal Ontario Museum in the 1980s. The Cranmer potlatch was part of the marriage ceremonial cycle and included the transfer of rights to Winter Ceremonial dances.67 The most fastidiously described Kwakwaka’wakw historic ceremonial event, this potlatch was Emma Cran­ mer’s “repurchase hosted by her husband, Nimpkish Dan Cranmer, and his family.”68 The initial Kwakwaka’wakw marriage was sealed by the distribution of gifts, which, according to Charles Nowell, “functioned as a payment to the members of the [groom]’s village who had accompanied him to witness the marriage.”69 In this scheme, “the parents of the bride ... sought to amass as much wealth as possible. The young couple also accumulated property with the assistance of the groom’s father and turned it over to the girl’s parents. Three or four years after the wedding, when the bride’s family had acquired enough wealth, they brought it in canoes to the groom’s family. An important part of this property was a copper, referred to as the ‘mast of the canoe,’ which was given to the groom.”70 The repayment was when the groom later distributed the property in a potlatch to those tribes that had witnessed the transaction.71 With at least three hundred guests, the festivities lasted five days.72 The records of the Royal British Columbia Museum attribute one sisiutl, or double-headed serpent, mask to James (Figure 3.7), likely via Macnair, who served as curator of ethnology at the RBCM from 1965 to 1996. Sisiutl appears in both ćέqa and Dluwalakha rituals. Hawthorn notes that the sisiutl, “the most frequently depicted supernatural character, was central to the themes of warrior power, strength and invulnerability; the ability to cause death; and the contrasting theme of revival. In the myths, the sisiutl guarded the house of the sky people. It was associated with the war dancer and with the Tokwit dancer, who performed magical tricks with figures that rose from the ground and flew from above.”73 In the Winalgilis legend, the sisiutl was the warrior’s assistant.74 George Hunt collected the mask for C.F. Newcombe at the Royal British Columbia Museum in 1922. It originally belonged to Spruce Alaitworse. In certain Dluwalakha stories, sisiutl is linked specifically with T’lisalagi’lakw, or Mink, the Kwikwesutinux and Kwakiutl ancestral figure, “Born-to-be-Sun,”



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Figure 3.7: Sisiutl mask, made before 1914. (Image RBCM CPN 1954, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

who wields it to defeat his enemy, Wolf, as well as with Tataxwus or “FoodGiver-Stone-Body,” sometimes called “Stone-Body-Man,”75 the son of Tsekame, or Head-Winter-Dancer, whose body is bathed in the blood of the sisiutl to make his skin impervious. When this particular mask was danced, the performer’s own hand would emerge from behind the mask, the arm obscured by a cape (RBCM CN 1948, now absent from the collection) acquired by Hunt at the same time.76 A second sisiutl mask for a Kwakiutl patron,77 collected for the American Museum of Natural History by George Hunt in 1899 (Figures 3.8–3.9), I believe bears many of the hallmarks of James’ early style, particularly the hatching and cross-hatching on the back of the mask and the planar cheeks and deep-inset eye sockets. Hunt recorded the ancestral history associated specifically with this mask. In this story, it is worn by the ancestral character Mink when he triumphs over his rival, Wolf.78 Mink, or Born-to-be-Sun, catches sisiutl in a salmon weir, decapitates and skins him, then later reveals him to his enemies, killing them on sight. Boas specifically related the story to the La’alaxadandayu,79 the sixth-ranked of the eight numayms of the Kwakiutl.80 James’ masks can often be related to depictions of numaym histories in other media. In the representational images done by artists like Mungo Martin and Bob Harris, the narrative is clearer to audiences unfamiliar with the original

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Figures 3.8–3.9: Mink’s sisiutl mask. (Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, Identification Number16 I 6788 Type of Item mask Material wood, pigment, string, bark, mica and metal. Overall length 64.0 cm, width 57.0 cm, height 35.0 cm)

story. A sea monster mask (Figure 2.27) was bought for the Heye Museum of the American Indian in 1922 and was part of a small collection of objects associated with the Cranmer potlatch sold by William Halliday to Heye in between the seizure of the paraphernalia, its exhibition at the church hall in Alert Bay, and the shipment of the bulk of the collection to the National Museum in Ottawa. Halliday was subsequently chastised in writing by Dep­ uty Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott for the sale. In museum notes for the National Museum of the American Indian, Peter



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Figure 3.10: Dzunukwa painting by Mungo Martin. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A9045)

Macnair identified this sea monster mask with an octopus on its head as possibly by Charlie James or Mungo Martin. It draws parallels to a 1951 painting by Martin (Figure 3.10), in which a Dzunukwa is shown leaning towards an octopus. Dzunukwa, also spelled “Dzonoqwa” or “Tsonokwa,” is usually defined in English as Wild-Woman-of-the-Woods, although a more accurate description may be “a tribe of inland dwelling wild beings.”81 In various stories, the character appears as a salmon-stealing giant who prevents people from fishing, or a war maker who seeks to enslave chiefs.82 The iconography was clarified by Martin and inscribed on the image itself for Audrey Hawthorn, who purchased the piece as part of a collection of paintings and drawings by Martin for the UBC Museum of Anthropology. The comparison illuminates the iconographic characteristics of the main face and relates the mask to Dzunukwa’s role as “wealth-giver,” the distributor of coppers, which are often retrieved in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology from the copper house of Komokwa, lord of the undersea realm. In this guise,

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writes Hawthorn, “Tsonokwa is depicted as a male. He carried a basket in which were stored coppers, which he handed to the chief who was selling or giving them away. At a moment of climax in the copper dispersal, the chief put on a family crest mask called a Geekumhl, representing a male Tsonokwa, cited by Boas and Hunt as ‘a warrior (attendant) to his brother Man Eater.’”83 Anthropologist Samuel Barrett explains the semantic differences, citing one translation of the word for such a mask, tsubkilkila, as “basket carrier on the back,” and noting that Tsonokwa was the term used for the same mask in the Fort Rupert dialect.84 Just as the Dzunukwa were sometimes thought of as a race or tribe of wild, forest-dwelling creatures, so some Kwakwaka’wakw thought of the Thunder­ birds as a race of sky-dwelling people. Thunderbirds feature often in James’ art and appear in at least one mask example attributed to him in museum provenance (Figures  3.11–3.12). As with all Dluwalakha, what appears on the outside as a generic figure is actually highly specific and individualized. Thunderbirds have particular identities and are associated with specific individual lineages. “No single family would dare to claim a Thunderbird image other than their very own, which has a site-specific place of origin, a unique name and details of form and visage that are not necessarily shared.”85 Barrett reports two Kwakwala terms in reference to Thunderbird masks as kwunkwun kwuliki or kwunu tsutsi, both meaning “come from Thunderbird,” with the term kwunkwa translated as “thunder,” kwuliki as “rolling of thunder,” and dzutsi as “derived” or “come from.”86 In some cases, these masks demonstrated that the wearer was descended from Thunderbirds but did not actually represent the ancestral bird itself.87 In the published Kwakwaka’wakw stories edited and published by Boas, Thunderbird appears in a Gwasila (Gwa’sa̱la) origin myth as Tatantsit, who descends from the upper world to land at the inlet of the Gwasela.88 James carved a pole for the current holder of the Tatantsit position in 1900. In a Kwiksootainuk story recited by Jim King, the Thunderbird is a qulos named Too Large, who descends with his wife first to a local mountain and then to the river, finally becoming Head Winter Dancer (Tsekame).89 Richard Hunt, who apprenticed with his father Henry Hunt and is thus a direct artistic descendant of James, associates the Thunderbird specifically with Fort Rupert and records that a Thunderbird headdress might also be worn after the Hamatsa initiate had been tamed.90 In this James mask, clearly, the transformation is from the form in which the

Figures 3.11–3.12: Transformation mask. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Cat. No. 1 1481)

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ancestor originally descended from the upper world, a Thunderbird, to the human form assumed by the ancestor as the mask was opened by the dancer. In addition to Thunderbirds and qulos, several other avian figures feature commonly in the Dluwalakha. The eagle was “recognized as the first among familiar birds.”91 Jonaitis records one incident in which an eagle headdress was worn by a chieftainess during the ćέqa.92 An eagle mask attributed to James in museum records at the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay and seized as part of the Cranmer potlatch has parallel hatching on the underside of the beak, as well as eye compositions similar to those of the Thomas Burke transformation mask. Typically with eagle masks, the beak projects farther than that of a Thunderbird. According to museum accession notes, for this James mask the head was first carved, then split vertically along its length to facilitate hollowing, then fastened back together. The articulated lower jaw was carved and fastened using seine twine. As with the Thomas Burke mask, it opens to reveal a humanoid inner face. Two sandhill crane93 masks attributed to James or Martin by Macnair in museum notes can be found at the Thomas Burke Museum in Seattle (Fig­ ure 3.13) and the Denver Art Museum (Figure 3.15) respectively. Both masks conform more to James’ style than they do to Martin’s. This is especially clear when we compare them with a third sandhill crane mask securely attributed to Martin in his employment at the Royal British Columbia Museum and dated to around 1953 (Figure  3.14). Martin’s work lacks the hatching and cross-hatching typical of James as well as the fuller moustache and beard so often used by James on his masks. Martin in his later work was influenced by Seaweed and the Blunden Harbor/Smith Inlet style with its tendency to obscure the wood with an opaque white ground. Macnair records the story associated with this as linked to an ancestral journey to the Undersea World of Komokwa (also spelled Kumugwe’ or Qomogwa), where the sandhill crane guarded the entrance to the undersea king’s house. Having been granted a name and the bird as treasures, the ancestral figure returned to the mortal world, and bequeathed to his descendants the right to use the sandhill crane mask.94 According to Newcombe, this was a crest used by “the Gwitila [the Gweetala referred to by Boas, who later joined with the Kwakiutl], a Fort Rupert family, by KwixE, [Kwikw] present Fort Rupert [one of the Kwakiutl numayms]; also by Mamalilikula.” He also notes that it “comes in stories” and was, by 1904, used “now only as [a] mask.”95

Figure 3.13: Sandhill crane mask. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Cat. No. 1 1446, attributed to either Mungo Martin or Charlie James ca. 1920)

Figure 3.14: Sandhill crane mask, Mungo Martin, ca. 1953. (Image RBCM 9250 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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The Denver Art Museum Sandhill Crane mask attributed to either James or Martin by Peter Macnair draws striking comparisons with a Komokwa mask from the Awaetlala tribe96 collected at Fort Rupert by George Hunt in 1897 (Figure 3.16), which I believe, based on both the carving and the painting on the accompanying cape, was done by James. The maritime properties of Komokwa are expressed through the octopus tentacles on the top of the head, the killer whale that mounts the head, the gill-like lines flanking the mouth, and the halibut,97 a bottom-dwelling fish, that hangs over the back of the head. The proportions of the face, the planar cheek forms, and the inset eye sockets are typical of Fort Rupert carvings, particularly those of James. In addition, the repetition of parallel lines in the empty spaces under the mouth and on the other side of the humanoid face sitting atop the forehead as well as the structural reinforcement of the projecting elements are characteristics of James’ earlier ceremonial work. The linear repetition shows up as well on the muslin wrap intended to hide the body of the dancer, with a carved and painted halibut hanging from the back of the head. However, Jonaitis reports that a “patent date of 1879 and the inscription ‘RLDS Columbia Exposition’ are stenciled on the mask.”98 If this is indeed an indication of the mask’s age, then it would have to have been carved when James was only twelve years old. Nonetheless, the stylistic similarities are intriguing, and if James didn’t do this, perhaps it was done by one of his teachers, and we thus have a rare glimpse into James’ historic and artistic inheritance. The mask corresponds to Drucker’s description of a “minor dance” of the Dluwalakha series among the Oowikeno: One example will serve to illustrate the dances below the rank of Hear­ing the Heavenly Spirits. The novices do not fly away, but are put into a room when inspired, to dance for four nights. One such dance comes from a sea being called Kumogwa. On the fourth night the dancer becomes frenzied in the midst of his dance. He dashes out the door before his

Figure 3.15 (opposite page): Sandhill crane mask attributed to either Mungo Martin or Charlie James. (Mask, 1900, Denver Museum Art Collection: Purchase from University of Washington, 1953. 402. Photographs © Denver Art Museum)

Figure 3.16: Q’o’mogoa mask with cloth drape. (Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, Identification No. 16/2370 AMNH 1897-43)



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attendants can intercept him. After a fruitless pursuit, they report to the master of ceremonies that the novice escaped – they saw him dive into the water. Spirit horns are heard four times. Each time the master of ceremonies sends the attendants to see what is happening. The first time they report that they can see nothing. The second time they say that every­thing looks strange, describing in detail miraculous phenomena. The third time they report that the water is rising far above high-tide line; and by the fourth time it has come nearly to the door of the house. The attendants pretend to be terrified. Now the master of ceremonies himself goes to the door. He cries, “Let your countenance be seen, O honorable chief!” The horns blow out over the water. The master of ceremonies repeats his call and the horns sound nearby … The final call is, “Be kind enough to enter, O honorable Kumogwa!”… The chief musician strikes up a kumogwa song; the attendants back in, screening the spirit with their robes, then step back revealing him. He is a dancer with a robe covered with mollusks, starfish, and such. He wears a hominoid mask, painted blue, and long loose hair. The spirit begins to dance … The master of ceremonies makes a speech, saying to the people, “This being you have just seen is the kumogwa, who was first seen by So-and-so, the ancestor of So-and-so (the present novice) at Such-and-such place (etc.).” Then the purification and potlatch take place.99

Whether the character of Komokwa played a minor role or was associated with a minor dance depended on the tribal group or numaym. George Hunt recorded a Gwasila version of an origin myth about an ancestor who stated that Komokwa was one of several of his names. The ancestor gave another ancestral figure a carved box filled with sea otter blankets, a marriage gift for nobility and a key element in the founding of both a numaym and the tribe as a whole. In the story, the four numayms of the Gwasila are bound together through the intertwined rituals of marriage, naming, dancing, and gifting.100 In Boas’ recitation of Hadaga from James himself, the Gwawaenuk sister of Omal marries the prince or son of Komokwa.101 Ultimately, there is a wide but not unlimited array of characters in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology. They serve as the inspiration for the art, but the individual importance of each character depends on the family histories, which trace the ancestral interactions with this mythological world.

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Figure 3.17: Swan headdress. (Image RBCM 15068 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Three swan headdresses attributed to Charlie James by Macnair in mu­ seum notes can be found in the collection of the Royal British Columbia Museum (Figure  3.17). These belong to a category of objects described by Hawthorn as “helmet”-type headdresses102 and identified by Charlie George as gigamlh,103 “usually wood carvings representing family crest birds and worn on top of the head, with the button blanket completing the costume. The helmet headdresses were held firmly in place by a ribbon or string tied under the chin and were worn by both men and women.”104 It is also possible that these headdresses do not represent the swan, but rather the loon,105 which was a crest figure frequently associated with the undersea king, Komokwa,106 and specifically with the Gwawaenuk (Gwawa̱’enux̱w) story of Se-wit, in which the loon gives Se-wit the power to transform into a sea otter.107 A similar headdress in the collection of UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (Fig­ ure 3.18) with strong stylistic similarities, particularly in the chest and head of the bird figure, was identified by Mungo Martin as galgyalis, an ancestral bird from myth time owned by Mamalilikulla Chief Harry Mountain of



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Figure 3.18: Galgyalis (ancestral bird) gigamlh (headdress). (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A4162)

Memkoomlish on Village Island.108 In these particular examples, the twodimensional design, especially the proportions and shapes of the eyes, the linear repetition in the secondary decorative areas including the U-forms creating an implied feather-like texture on the neck, and the framing moustache and beard around the mouth conform strongly to James’ style, especially later on when he appears to have relied more on his painting to articulate the character he was representing. There are strong parallels here with James’ tourist carvings from the 1930s.

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A similar painting can be found in a series of watercolours, which I believe are attributable to Bob Harris, at the Royal British Columbia Museum (Figure  3.19). In a story recorded by Nimpkish artist Don Svanik, the loon is “often displayed atop Kumugwe’ as a reference to his great size: the loon mistook him for an island and landed on his head.” In Svanik’s own representation of Komokwa and the loon, he places a face on the loon’s chest, explaining that this represents “the figure of a person who has been to the world of Kumugwe and returned with treasures.”109 James, too, added stylized human faces to the loons’ chests. Numaym histories are related to specific locales, the resources offered by those locales, and the historical presence of the numayms who claimed those locales. There are thus both spiritual and concrete economic rationales behind the ritual complexes. Of all the resources available to the Kwakwaka’wakw, the salmon was the most important. The five species of salmon that hatch in river gravels, migrate out to sea for their adult lives, and then return to their ancestral streams to spawn and die constituted the main source of food among the Kwakwaka’wakw. Each salmon looked and acted differently, offered a different kind of resource, and was available at a different time of year. The ancestral and spiritual stories, in their spoken and visual forms, were specific in their references to the natural world. The natural and mythological figures were individualized in their representation, and everyone in the audience easily recognized the characters based on their visual attributes. These specific details contributed to a believable sense of space and time within the enactment.110 So it is no surprise that the salmon reappears constantly in the numaym stories. It was the economic mainstay of Kwakwaka’wakw society both before and after contact, albeit in different organizational forms. Hawthorn writes that a salmon mask “was associated in the myths with twins, were always made in pairs, and these could be worn by any twin regardless of his inherited right.”111 Such masks refer to mythological events recorded by Boas and Hunt in which, by “donning masks, an entire tribe converts itself into salmon.”112 This may be the hame yala Luml, or salmon dancer mask, referred to by Barrett in his field notes.113 Another story related by Dan Cranmer and published by Boas records the origin story of the Gigilgam numaym of the Nimpkish in which a salmon named Xwaxwas (the name of another of the Nimpkish numaym) beaches at Otsawalas, an old fishing village on the



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Figure 3.19: Painting of a loon, attributed to Bob Harris. (Image RBCM 19578 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

borders of Nimpkish Lake,114 and becomes human and builds a house with the help of Kuno-sila, a Thunderbird.115 A monumental salmon mask with flapping fins and a snaking tale attributed to James by Macnair in the museum notes at the Glenbow Museum can be identified as supernatural by the horns on his head (Figure 3.20). The pronounced red around the gills and mouth and on the fins suggest the spawning sockeye salmon, which turns bright red, with a green head and a stripe along its body, as it journeys back from the ocean to lay eggs in the same fresh-water river in which it was hatched. A red cloth encircled the hole in the belly in which the dancer inserted his head. The tail moved in imitation of the salmon swimming upstream. The mask is actually a transformation mask and opens to reveal a sisiutl. In some stories, the sisiutl is seen as food, like salmon, for the Thunderbird, a salmon fisherman116 – a theme that appears in the Tatantsit pole from Fort

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Figure 3.20: Monumental mask. (Charlie James, Salmon Mask, early 1900s, wood, paint, cloth, string, Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada, R180.219)

Rupert, the painted cape of James’ ’Namxxelagayu mask, two grave tableaux from Alert Bay, and several of James’ curio objects. The mask may also have featured in one of the variations of the Mink story, particularly since Mink captured sisiutl in a salmon weir. William Scow made an association between sisiutl and salmon in reference to the Mink story and in particular Mink’s son, Tataxwus (or in Scow’s translation, Stonebody), in a 1967 interview: You’ve often seen this Indian design with two head and a figure in between with horns on it. And the two outside figures will have a great big tongue, you know, and horns on it as well. Well that, some people refer to it as a double-headed snake. But it isn’t a double-headed snake. A friend of mine … made anthropology his hobby. He said it was a



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­mistake for people to say it was a double-headed snake. He referred to it as spirit of the salmon. Because this double-headed creature that you see now is in a form of a salmon caught by a human being, as legend would have it … Not all species of salmon belong to this type of salmon. When you butcher it, if you’re an ordinary person your body is distorted. You’re all out of shape – then you know you got the real thing. And it becomes your servant, the [sisiutl]. So this historical background claim that they have got this salmon and it turn into [sisiutl] and they made a canoe out of it. Any time he wanted to travel he just touched the edges of this [sisiutl], you know, and then the thing would go.117

The mask was collected from the Scow family at Simoom Sound. Simoom Sound, also known as Kawages, was co-claimed by Chief John Scow, William Scow’s father, for the Kwikwesutinux and by Chief Cesaholis for the Tsawatainuk. Confusingly, the name Kawages referred to a number of sites in the vicinity, including a Kwikwesutinux winter village site and a fishing station. The sound was used for fishing, hunting, trapping, and logging. The reserve commission awarded Kawages to the Tsawatainuk (Dzawa̱da̱’enux̱w) in 1916.118 The mask has been attributed to Mungo Martin,119 but the linear patterning and facial features of the inner sisiutl are more consistent with James’ style. As with the ćέqa, James created additional objects that supported or enhanced Dluwalakha performances. A second salmon object by James, likely representing a king salmon with its characteristic speckled back, much smaller in size than James’ monumental salmon mask, can also be found in the Glenbow Museum (Figure 3.21). With a hole down through the back behind the dorsal fin, it appears to be a prop, perhaps appearing as part of the story in the Dluwalakha performance of a myth, although in some respects it recalls the flat salmon slats worn by twins on their headbands. Objects similar to this were worn as part of a shamanic costume among the Tsimshian. The object might therefore also be part of a costume. Feasting was a significant aspect of all ceremonial activities, including potlatches and dances. The distribution of food and goods was critical to the acceptance of the privileges asserted. Food was served in crest dishes by the members of the lineage or house group and distributed according to

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Figure 3.21: Salmon prop. (Salmon Charm, Kwakwaka’wakw, early 1900s, wood, paint, Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada, AA 1757)

the ranked order of the attendant guests.120 James made a sisiutl feast dish (Figures 3.22–3.23) for Peter Smith (Sewidanaquilla, also spelled Siwid’nak­ wala), a Tlawitsis (Ławitsis) chief from Kalugwis village, in 1907. A document in UBC’s Museum of Anthropology regarding a replica made of this dish states that the original was previously owned by Peter’s father, Sewid Smith. Peter insists that in his time, only sugar was ever served from it. Peter Smith remembered that the house feast dish was carved about the same time as a free-standing frontal pole in 1903, also by James. The pole was erected in front of the family house at Kalugwis. Dishes were significant household belongings, and important ones – like one of this scale – would have been named. In listing the transfer of prerogatives after the death of a high-ranking chief, Lalakotsia of the Ma’maleleqam numaym of the Mamalilikulla, Hunt identifies crests that were both material, such as feast dishes, and immaterial, such as positions. All, however, were indicative of high status and part of an integrated whole of identity, position, and social relations: “the office of giving away property, and this house and

Figures 3.22–3.23: Sisiutl feast dish. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC A4147)

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these house dishes, the Grizzly-Bear house dish and also the Double-head Serpent house dish, and the Beaver house dish and the Dzonoqwa dish and also his seat and the Dzonoqwa cry and also the cry of Driving-Away, and also the speaking with the speaker’s staff and also the secret song of the secular season and also the copper breaking of the coppers of other chiefs, and the Gatherer of the Winter Ceremonial and his secret songs, and also this great Leta and Beaver, the great coppers left behind by my past chief.”121 Hawthorn writes that such dishes “were also symbolic of the abundant resources of food indicated by their natural forms.”122 Dishes of this size contained the most generous portions of food, which were then ladled out into smaller portions. In this case, the sisiutl’s tongues doubled as large ladles for serving the food. Of the four sun masks attributable to James, one (Figure  3.24) from the Thomas Burke Museum at the University of Washington is dated to the 1920s in the museum catalogue and to the 1930s by Peter Macnair, who reports that it was made for sale directly to a dealer,123 likely Walter C. Waters, who owned the Bear Totem Store in Wrangell, Alaska, which operated from 1923 to 1950.124 Often in cases like this, the dating will be based on when the donator or owner of the object remembered obtaining the object. In this case, it came out of Waters’ shop, which he ran between 1923 and 1951. James died in 1937, so a closer approximation would be between 1923 and 1937, which might be rounded off to the 1920s. The use of varnish or shellac, which James adopted late in his career specifically for objects for sale to non-Native audiences, supports the later date applied to this piece by Macnair. The presence of an object carved by James in Waters’ collection bears testimony to the geographic span of the curio trade among professionals in the period of Waters’ operation, as well as to the value of James’ work all along the coast. The mask also bridges James’ work for internal consumption within Kwak­ waka’wakw society with the objects he made for sale outside the community. It conforms faithfully to the iconography of the other three sun masks he produced, suggesting that the circulation of objects relating to Dluwalakha performances, which embodied numaym histories, was acceptable. The inherent historicity of the objects is important to bear in mind as the majority of James’ curio objects were completed after the Cranmer potlatch. The Dluwalakha performances and the histories that explained them were critical to group and individual identities and status and were closely

Figure 3.24: Sun mask. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Cat. No. 25.0/440)

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associated with the numaym and the property it collectively owned. The potlatch ban was meant to overthrow this system of authority and to replace it with a government and sense of property informed by British tradition and law. At the same time, with the combination of depopulation, the increase in wealth, and the presence of empty potlatch seats, the potlatch was expanding between 1900 and 1920, with the consequence that a great era of patronage and production preceded the Great Depression and the public absence of potlatches brought on by the Cranmer prosecutions. In this era of ceremonial patronage, James created his most dramatic and finely executed masks.

chapter four

TOTEM POLES

Alert Bay, the cultural and economic hub of the central coast, had become well known for its totem poles by the 1920s. It was a steamer stop, so tourists could disembark there and walk along the boardwalk lining Cormorant Island’s central bay. Strolling through the village, they could photograph the monumental Thunderbird and Bear Mother house posts, first erected inside the house of L’arhotlas, the head chief of the Nimpkish tribe, and by 1907 standing outside a Victorian single-family residence with a sign above the door that read “Tlaho glass, Nimpkish Chief.” As they made their way south along the bay, they would eventually come to the cemetery, which was filled with totem poles and flat tableaux of writhing sisiutls, coppers, and Thunder­ birds. Many of these poles had been carved by Charlie James. The conglomeration of poles was so picturesque that, in 1925, members of a local cultural society in Vancouver suggested that the city purchase the remaining houses and poles of Alert Bay and relocate them to Stanley Park in the heart of Vancouver. When four poles, including three by James, were finally purchased and re-erected in the park, the Thunderbird began to be seen as a key tourist icon representing British Columbia as a whole. By 1900, poles had become an important part of James’ artistic repertoire. The earliest free-standing Kwakwaka’wakw pole can be seen in photographs from the early 1870s, but they don’t seem to have been widespread at that time. James, who raised his first pole in 1900, seems to have been at the advent of this monumental art form among the Kwakwaka’wakw. He carved free-standing crest poles, mortuary poles, and house posts. His free-standing

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Figure 4.1: The Kwakwaka’wakw house with its associated elements. (Illustration by author)

poles were placed in front of the houses whose residents had commissioned his work. His internal house posts supported carved beams. As with the various categories of masks and ritual paraphernalia, the numaym histories and the characters of the ancestral encounters informed the iconography of the poles. The poles themselves ritually expressed and celebrated the complex interactions between individuals and their kin groups. The poles were often closely associated with houses, but at the same time, a house was not simply a residence. As with so many aspects of Kwakwaka’wakw culture, a house was linked to marriage and the passing of privileges. A house was a gift of the bride’s father to the groom and was thought of as one of the treasures brought to the marriage by the bride. The house posts and the speaker’s post within the house were also viewed as major gifts. The house posts and occasionally the crossbeams were carved with crest figures. Both the house and the poles, including the posts, were more closely associated with the house than the residents themselves, since the house, while it belonged to a chief, served a special spiritual function as a residence of a numaym. Duff transcribed four Kwakwala names for carved poles: qiaxw, (any carving or carved pole); λa?s’ (outside pole); λam (inside post); and, finally, λάsςamalis (graveyard pole).1 As Hawthorn explains, standing “in front of the



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lineage house,”2 which itself was “bestowed on an ancestor who had an encounter with a supernatural being,”3 “the totem pole was the tallest and usually the most complex crest carving made by the Kwakiutl artist.”4 The pole’s meaning worked on three levels. First, it “was the chosen visible expression of family history – the descent from remembered ancestors and the possession of powers received from them.”5 Second, the pole had to be legitimized through the public recounting and witnessing of the histories embodied in the carvings. Third, the reception and recognition of the histories and the privileges the pole visually manifested had to be validated through appropriate ritual and the distribution of hospitality and gifts.6 If masks were the most potent Kwakwaka’wakw art, the totem poles were the most overtly public display of ancestral histories and of numaym prerogatives. Most Kwakwaka’wakw poles were associated with Fort Rupert and Alert Bay and appear to have been a relatively late introduction, linked with the Hunt family specifically and intermarriage with northern Northwest Coast groups generally, including the Heiltsuk, Tsimshian, and Tlingit. While certainly the Hunts’ Tlingit relations inspired the raising of a full-sized pole carved by James as early as 1900, photographer Richard Maynard recorded images of external free-standing poles at Tsawidi (Dzawadi) on Knight Inlet as early as 1873.7 Perhaps as with the Atlakim and the Dluwalakha, the imperative for the poles was introduced through multiple channels, including through intermarriage with the Heiltsuk, Oowekeeno, and Kwakwaka’wakw of the outer coast, particularly the Gwasilla and Nakwoktak, who had a longer and more sustained history of interaction with the northern language groups through their proximity to Fort McLoughlin. Even families farther south, like the Scows of the Kwikwesutinux, intermarried with the Heiltsuk. A Heiltsuk artist reportedly painted the famous Sea Monster house at Gwayasdums, photographed in 1880 and belonging to John Scow. In 1915, Scow married a Heiltsuk noblewoman from whom he inherited the right to use a representation of a raven as a house front, replacing the previous Nimpkish prerogative of the Sea Monster.8 The implied narratives of the totem poles are remarkable, as are their compositions, with their superimposed corridors of characters. The monumentality of the poles is certainly impressive, and their stories and characters have endlessly fascinated the outside world. Much of the earlier literature on totem poles in English focused on the latter. The purpose of the narrative

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in Kwakwaka’wakw society, however, is more complicated than these early translations revealed. The Kwakwala word for myth, nuyam, encompasses several subdivisions, including nuyamil, or “tradition of the house,”9 which describes how “a descent group ancestor acquired certain names, crests and other important privileges in the myth age. House stories are owned by the descent group,”10 and numaym, “(or by the chiefly lines within the descent group) in the same way that chiefly names and crests are.”11 Another subdivision includes stories associated with the nuxwnimis, or “story people”; this one does not typically name crests or descent groups, although it is sometimes specific about village sites. Yet another revolves around Qaniqalak, the Transformer, “whose actions bring an end to the myth age.”12 James’ poles, both monumental and model, draw exclusively, like the Dluwalakha, from the nuyamil. James’ Hunt pole has what was at the time among the most famous, or rather infamous, pole histories. It is a replica pole erected by David Hunt, son of George Hunt, “Franz Boas’ most valued Kwakiutl informant,”13 after the original had been raised by his maternal grandfather in Tongass, Alaska.14 David Hunt was the first husband of Sara Constance, who later married James’ stepson Mungo Martin. Mary Ebbets Hunt, David’s grandmother, was born in 1823 into the Tongass tribe of the Tlingit. According to the account of her daughter, Elizabeth (Hunt) Wilson, her name was Anain and she belonged to the Raven phratry of the Tongass. Her grandfather was Shaiks, the head chief at Wrangell, and her mother was from the Stikine. Her mother was the daughter of Shaiks’ older wife.15 In 1843, she married Robert Hunt, a factor at the Hudson’s Bay Company in Fort Simpson, and moved to Fort Rupert, where she gave birth to twelve children. Seen as responsible for introducing Chilkat weaving to the women at Fort Rupert, she maintained contact with her family in Tongass (Taantʼa Ḵwáan).16 She died in 1919 and was buried at Fort Rupert. The James pole was a copy of the one she had erected on her mother’s grave at Tongass. In 1893, a party from the Seattle Chamber of Commerce touring Alaska went ashore at Tongass, which was temporarily empty for the summer fishing season, and, assuming that the village had been permanently abandoned, made arrangements for the pole to be removed. The pole was relocated and re-erected on Pioneer Square in Seattle and named “Princess-Face-shining copper.” The family’s protests to Alaskan governor John G. Brady came to nothing, and it stood there until it collapsed



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from rot in 1938.17 As anthropologist Frederica de Laguna writes: “All clan and lineage property, including territories, songs, crests, or heirlooms, are alienable: by sale, as potlatch or marriage gifts, as indemnity for injuries or as part of a peace settlement, or as booty taken in war. If a crest were seized in a dispute between clans, the original owners would feel under an absolute obligation to redeem it.”18 After prolonged negotiations, the city of Seattle paid restitutions for their seizure.19 James was commissioned to complete the replica at Fort Rupert sometime around 1900. According to Barbeau, the figures are, from the top: “(1) Raven (rhwa’wina); (2) Man (pegwanem) carrying the Frog (wuq’aehl); (3) Grizzly-Bear (gyila) holding a seal (mi’gwet), which survives as an individual component at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum; (4) Raven (gwa’awin); (5) Killer-Whale (rhwawyem); (6) Sea-Eagle (kwigwis).”20 The crests may be Tlingit, but these names are Barbeau’s spellings of Kwakwala terms. The pole represents a link between the Hunt family and James. Objects by James show up in collections assembled by George Hunt at both the American Museum of Natural History and the Royal British Columbia Museum, which means that while Hunt was providing objects by artists that met the expectations of the collectors, his family was commissioning large-scale works from the same artists. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense in that Hunt’s collecting catchment area was relatively small and that any artist active at either Alert Bay or Fort Rupert would show up in his collections. On the other, Hunt was all the time negotiating a complex network of kin relations and there must have been a conscious or unconscious bias in his choices. It also should be pointed out that while the expectation of the museums was that they were acquiring old objects, Hunt was essentially a collector of objects by contemporary artists. James carved the red cedar Tatantsit pole (Figures  4.2–4.4) around 1900 for Chief Tatentsit on the occasion of a big potlatch at Fort Rupert, to which several tribes had been invited to help raise the pole. Barbeau reports that it was not intended as a memorial pole. The name corresponds to Tatensid, a numaym ancestor appearing in George Hunt’s transcription of the myth of the “Qomkutes of the Gwasela,” the companion to Yagis, a character who also bears the name Qomogwe. Together they build a house at Toxse,21 also known as Toksee or Wyclees Lagoon, a village contested by the Gwasilla and the Nakwoktak and subject to an extended claim at the 1912 McKenna– McBride Reserve Commission.22 The ancestral figure of Tatensid was also

Figure 4.2: The Tatantsit pole was photographed in situ in Fort Rupert in 1914. (Image RBCM H-07200, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 4.3: Detail of the Tatantsit pole. (Photograph by author)

Figure 4.4: James’ Tatantsit pole was collected by Marius Barbeau and Arthur Price and relocated to the University of British Columbia in 1947. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A50038)

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used by Mungo Martin to top his British Columbia Royal and Centenary poles carved in 1958, as well as to represent the Quawshelah (Gwasila) tribe of Smith Inlet.23 In Martin’s version, Tatantsit has an oversized hat in reference to his name, which translates as “Providing Shelter.” Created by Raven and transformed into human form, he is the founder of the “Won by Argument” numaym of the Gwasila.24 In the published Kwakwaka’wakw stories edited by Boas, Thunderbird ­appears in the Tatantsit myth of the founding of the Qomkxutes numaym of the Gwasila, descending from the upper world to land at the inlet of the Gwasila,25 presumably Toxse on Seymour Inlet. “I am Tatantsit,” he announced, “and my root is the Thunderbird which came from the upper world.”26 In essence, the story records the founding of the four Gwasila numayms and revolves around the interaction between Tatantsit and his brother Yagis, whom he meets first on his arrival, and Tatantsit’s marriage to Laqwaqilogwa, daughter of Laqwaqila, founder of the Lageleqela numaym. Along the way, Tatantsit encountered other numaym founders, including Sogulis of the Walas numaym of the Nakwoktak, who claim ownership of Toxse; Sisaxo’las, founder of the Gigelegam numaym; and Haialkin, founder of the Sisenle. In the end, the two brothers perform the dances received through Tatantsit’s marriage and Yagis assumes the name of Laqwaqila. “Now the hearts of Laqwaqila and T’at’entsid and Sesaxalas and Haialkin were really one after this and the four chiefs said that they would stay together and that the name of their tribe would be Gwasila. Immediately they build a house in a good country, which is called Gwekelis. That was their winter village after this.”27 Gwekelis, or Gwikalis, also known as Wyclese or Waitlas, was located on Quascilla Bay in Smith Inlet. The site was home to a salmon cannery in 1883–4, later moved to Knight Inlet. The original reserve allotment guaranteed fishing rights up the Sammo River, and Hunt and Boas’ published version of the Tatantsit myth refers in specific detail to the salmon fisheries of the area. The village was abandoned by 1890 when the Gwasela moved their winter village to Kigeh, or Indian Island, also on Smith Inlet.28 The specifics of the published Tatantsit myth reinforce the Gwasela claims to traditional territories despite their movement. The content of the pole is assembled as a vertical arrangement of multiple figures from the ancestral histories. From top to bottom, it includes the



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following: a mythical woman – an ancestor figure, probably Laqwagilogwa; qulos – the root of Tatensid in the upper world; sisiutl with a frog in its mouth; sisiutl changed into a man and now holding a copper – another ancestor figure, possibly Tatantsit with the copper symbolizing the crests and power received through marriage; and the raven29 (or, in Barbeau’s orthography, kwaw’win), who in Martin’s recitation of the story created Tatantsit. Barbeau purchased the pole for the University of British Columbia in 1947, at which time it was re-adzed and redecorated by Mungo Martin before being shipped to Vancouver.30 According to Barbeau, James’ Fort Rupert graveyard pole memorializes Tsawlarhlehlilaakwe, who died at Rivers Inlet but was buried at Fort Rupert. Her husband was Arhwarhalekyelis, “chief of the Fort Rupert Tribe,”31 presumably Walas Kwakiutl chief Owahagalese, who, at the McKenna–McBride Reserve Commission, along with Charlie Nowell, claimed on behalf of all four Kwakiutl tribes an expansion of the Kwakiutl reserve,32 and who implored the representative of the lieutenant governor of British Columbia to reconsider the banning of the potlatch at the opening of St George’s Hospital at Alert Bay in May 1925.33 The pole was carved by Charlie James around 1922 and includes the following figures from top to bottom: qulos (kolus – or, alternatively, a small Thunderbird of Deer Island); grizzly bear34 biting a copper; and small Dzunukwa woman with a copper.35 Originally, two wooden plaques representing coppers flanked the central pole. Among the additional territories that Owahagalese claimed at the McKenna–McBride Reserve Commission was Deer Island, located in Beaver Harbour and used by Curtis for the shooting of his film In the Land of the War Canoes.36 The pole was later relocated from the cemetery to the airport at Port Hardy. It is unclear where it is presently located. The recitation of the ritual accomplishments of the deceased, or gi’gagit, was an integral part of Kwakwaka’wakw funerals. In the potlatch recordings for Mungo Martin’s 1953 Wa’waditla potlatch at the museum in Victoria, Tom Ohmid, in explaining the truncated form of this particular potlatch, noted that when Helen Hunt’s father, a Kingcome chief, died, the recitation took all day and all night.37 For an especially high-status individual, many tribes would be invited. When Kwakiutl Charles Nowell succeeded his brother Tom for the senior Kwikw numaym name of Owadi upon Tom’s death, boats

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were sent to all the tribes to invite them to the funeral at Alert Bay. As Nowell put it, “we Fort Ruperts and Nimkis are not able to bury him by ourselves. A big chief is too heavy for two tribes to lift the coffin.”38 Mourning songs were sung by the deceased’s numaym. An assigned songmaker would sing of the intertribal potlatches the deceased had hosted, the distribution of property within his own tribe, the hosting of grease potlatches and Winter Ceremonials, his payment of marriage debts, and the coppers he gave when his daughter married. Afterwards, the heir might break a copper and distribute pieces as mementos. Guests sang a dirge, asking which way the deceased had gone – a question answered by the appearance of dancer adorned with an ancestral mask from the deceased’s maternal or paternal numaym indicating the form he had now assumed. Shortened versions of both the deceased’s ćέqa and Dluwalakha prerogatives to be passed on to the heir were performed. The evening finished with the distribution of property to the guests.39 According to museum provenance at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, Peter Smith (Sewidanaquilla, also spelled Siwid’nakwala) was a Tlawitsis chief and commissioned James to carve a pole (Figure 4.5) in 1907 at around the same time that a major feast dish attributed to James in the museum’s collection was created (Figures  3.19–20). Siwid’nakwala’s daughter was Sara Constance, better known as Abaya’a, and thus Siwid’nakwala was also Mungo Martin’s father-in-law.40 However, family descendants counter that Peter Smith would have been too young to hold this name or to commission the pole at that time. The pole did stand in front of Chief Siwidi’s house, the Smith family house, but it had been commissioned by Chief Tom SiwidSmith, Abaya’a’s father and Mungo Martin’s father-in-law, and was subsequently transferred to his son, Peter (also known as Adatsa).41 The location of the pole in Kalugwis between two flanking house posts indicates that it was erected in front of an old-style plank house, or gukwdzi,42 before the shingled Edwardian house for a nuclear family seen in the background was constructed. The Siwid’nakwala pole has seven figures: from top to bottom, a qulos, a humanoid with the tail of the mink figure below him in his mouth, a killer whale with his tail between the teeth of the mink figure above him and his face in his blowhole, a second qulos, a bear, and a humanoid.



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Figure 4.5: A photograph of James’ Kalugwis pole in situ. (AA00018 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

The mink43 appears as a hero living in Kalugwis in a Gwawaenuk story recorded by George Hunt.44 The Mamalilikulla people from Village Island have origin stories that connect to the sisiutl and an ancestral figure, the mink, T’lisalagi’lakw, translated as “Born to Be the Sun.” T’lisalagi’lakw used the power of the sisiutl to defeat his enemies, the wolves,45 during myth time.46 A similar story occurs among the Kwakiutl as well.47 Killer whale48 is a common emissary in the stories of Komokwa and features in ancestral stories in which the protagonist receives a treasure from the chief of the Under-the-Sea world.49 The qulos figure would have had a specific name associated with the founding of the numaym – possibly, in this case, Odzistales.50 The two humanoid figures are clearly ancestral figures. The public celebration of ancestral histories in poles like this, with their specific references to ancestors and their interactions with the spirit and animal worlds linked to names, potlatch seats, and resource sites owned by the patron through his numaym position, were important politically in the context of tribal movements and the definition and limitation of chiefly authority, land, and resources under the Indian Act.

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The commissioning of a crest pole and a monumental feast dish at the same time suggests that they were carved for a potlatch memorializing the erection of a new lineage house as part of a marriage ceremony, since the house and feast dishes were gifts brought by the bride and poles were sometimes inaugurated at a house opening.51 The year 1910 corresponds to the year given for Abaya’a’s first marriage, to David Hunt;52 this suggests that the pole might be linked to this event, although its meaning is obviously related to the specific time and therefore corresponding event for which it was commissioned. Archaeologist Frank Hibben eventually bought the pole for the University of New Mexico – reportedly for two cases of whisky in 1941. One case was for James Sewid, identified as the pole’s owner at that time, and the other was for his wife, “who, according to tribal custom, actually was the [real] owner.”53 James Sewid’s mother was married to Johnny Clark, a Tlawitis (Ławitsis) chief “at Turnour Island village” and Chief Tom Siwid-Smith’s brother. Sewid’s mother Muna was widowed when James Sewid was a small child, and they went to Johnny Clark’s home at Kalugwis, so James Sewid was raised, at least in part, in the Smith house.54 The pole was then removed from Kalugwis and towed to Ketchikan, Alaska, where it was put on a freighter for Seattle. In Seattle, Hibben sent it by rail to Albuquerque, where it lay in storage until its re-erection on the north side of the university’s Administration Build­ing in 1947. It was repainted in 1951 and relocated to the Maxwell Museum in 1971.55 An individual frequently owned numaym positions across tribal groups through intertribal marriage. Mungo Martin owned eight names and associated crests across several numayms,56 including those inherited through Siwid’nakwala used in a pole Martin carved for Queen Elizabeth in 1958. The ownership of positions in other numayms through intermarriage legitimized moving to a winter village of what ostensibly seemed like a different tribal group. The passing of names and potlatch positions through marriage was a complex matter and gave individuals rights across tribal groups. A look at the genealogy of James, Martin, or well-known Kwakwaka’wakw individuals like Charlie Nowell, James Sewid, and Agnes Alfred reveals a complicated net of relations that transcends multiple tribes and numayms. The raising of a lineage house with a monumental crest pole and the dedication of the building and its furniture might be interpreted as public assertions of belonging within the resident community through the institution of



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marriage. Furthermore, the recitation of the histories of a range of numaym positions performed over the ceremonial calendar reinforced the continuing ownership or transfer of traditional resource sites elsewhere. In this sense, the complex histories of the Kwakwaka’wakw people and their movements in the last half of the nineteenth century contributed to the expanding material and performative assertions of individual and group histories. As groups moved from one site to another for residential purposes, they continued to maintain that they owned rights to use resource and residential sites previously occupied by their ancestors. Totem poles helped assert this ownership, but the individual crests could easily be separated out and passed on to another individual in another numaym or even tribe through marriage at a later date. The poles and the rights they embodied were therefore often in flux. Qalogwis or Kalugwis (Turnour Island) was an old village site of the Kwa­ kiutl. The Tlawitisis moved there from Kaloitisis in 1850 after the departure of the Kwakiutl (Kwagu’ł) to Fort Rupert. In 1885, there were ten or eleven houses there. By 1914, there were twenty-one houses, making it the principal Tlawitsis village, although it was shared with the Maltipi, who had moved there from Etsekin in the early 1890s,57 possibly because of the influenza epidemic of 1892.58 The Tlawitsis originated in Beaver Harbour and Hardy Bay, although a few of their own narratives suggest origins in Beware Passage and Clio Channel. In the 1890s, they were joined at Kalugwis by the Matilpi, although some of the Tlawitsis moved to Alert Bay at the same time.59 The Matilpi originated from a split within the Maamtagila (Ma’a̱mtagila), a numaym of the Kwakiutl.60 The Tlawitsis moved frequently during the first half of the nineteenth century and were allotted only one reserve by 1880, resulting in a per capita allocation of less than half an acre. The Tlawitsis actively lobbied for additional allocations, lodging fifteen claims to the 1912 McKenna–McBride Reserve Commission.61 Poles like Siwid’nakwala’s, therefore, did not solely and simply meet the complex requirements of the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch system, including the etiquette of marriage and the passing of family treasures; they also had very real economic and political implications in sorting out status, position, and rights among the Kwakwaka’wakw in the context of the DIA’s allocation of territories as reserves. One of many problems with the DIA’s process for selecting and allocating reserve land was that the department either poorly understood or dismissed the complexities of how the Kwakwaka’wakw (and

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the other First Nations of Canada) constructed and then administered their own group identities and the resources associated with them. Since the government could not account for how numayms transcended the larger tribal group identities, mistakes, misallocations, and multiple claims were inevitable. The poles and masked performances addressed the ensuing confusion – at least within the Kwakwaka’wakw community. James’ most famous carvings, the house posts re-erected in Stanley Park, were used first as props in Edward Curtis’ fictionalized Kwakwaka’wakw romantic film In the Land of the Headhunters.62 Nuytten reports that they had previously stood in the house of Tsa-wee-nok of Kingcome Inlet.63 It is unclear whether Nuytten has mistaken the name of the tribe for the name of an individual (Tsawatainuk versus Tsa-wee-nok), or whether the posts were in the house of an individual named Tsa-wee-nok in Kingcome Inlet itself, likely in the winter village of Gwayi at the mouth of Kingcome River, the old winter village site of the Tsawatainuk,64 or in a house at either Alert Bay or Gwayasdums on Gilford Island. The Tsawatainuk had moved to Gwayasdums from Gwayi after the Bella Coola (Nuxalk) raid of 1856. James’ connection to the Kwikwesutinux at Gwayasdums through Sara Nin65 raises the possibility that the Tsa-wee-nok houses posts were originally carved by James in Gwayasdums for a Tsawatainuk client, removed to Fort Rupert for the making of Curtis’s film on Deer Island, and then later stored at Alert Bay, where they were bought by the Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver (AHSAV) in 1927. George Raley, who was a missionary, educator, collector, and active member of AHSAV, reported that the figures on James’ house posts consisted of Thunderbird, or qulos, and a grizzly bear holding a human being in his claws.66 The grizzly bear appears often in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology. Mungo Martin used the crest twice in his own carvings, as a house post figure and as an individual crest on a totem pole. Each time, the bear was identified at the time of carving as from the Wa’walibui (Wa’welibaye) clan of the Walas Kwakiutl, representing a grizzly bear who transforms into an ancestor67 – which explains the human figure in the grizzly’s paws on James’ house post. The relocation of objects like this from their original sites to a public park obscured their ritual significance within the Kwakwaka’wakw community. The carved posts were powerful symbols in situ, representing not only the functional structural supports of the house but also its spiritual and historical



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foundations. The old plank gukwdzi houses were lineage or numaym houses, often with specific ceremonial names as “the sacred container of the lineage.”68 As the numaym was transformed with the beginning of the Winter Ceremonial season, so too might be the space of the house, from secular residence to a place of ritual preparation and performance. The house posts embodied the spiritual encounters at the heart of the founding of the numaym and the history of spiritual acquisition and transformation that the numaym continued to enact. House posts – their forms, names, and meanings – were all recounted, explained, and legitimized through the distribution of property when the house was opened. The house of a lineage head was associated with marriage and was often one of the treasures brought to the groom by the bride. The house posts were considered major gifts.69 George Hunt described the building of a house by Lasotiwalis of the Yaexagame numaym of the Komoyoi to host visiting tribes for the repayment of the marriage debt. Payments were made periodically throughout, beginning with the hiring of young men to obtain and prepare the posts, and culminating in a great feast for the gathering tribes to witness and receive the final repayment within the finished house.70 One of the two original free-standing poles in Vancouver’s Stanley Park that accompanied the house posts was also carved by James and belonged to the Kingcome Inlet chief Sisaxo’las (also spelled Sisa-kaulas). That name appears in Hunt’s transcribed story of “Qomkutes of the Gwasela” as the ancestral chief of the Gigilgam, a numaym of the Tlawitsis, Gwawaenuk, Kwikwesutinux, Tsawatainuk, and Hahuamis.71 The pole originally stood in front of a large communal house at Alert Bay.72 It relates to the story of Sewid73 and contains six figures from top to bottom: Qolus, “with her folded wings, ... the sister of Thunderbird”;74 Chief Tla-Wunum-Qolus, an ancestral figure; Killer Whale; Sea-Otter,75 “shown eating a sea egg”76 or sea urchin,77 78 which Gunn writes “was the symbol of fertility and ... usually represented at nuptial ceremonies”;79 Sea Bear; and a human head, “the open mouth representing a rival who had spoken against ‘Sisaxo’las’ – and who had been ‘pushed down’ – to the bottom of the pole.”80 The story of Si’wit (Se-wid) was recorded and published by Boas as told by G-‘qalas of the Gigelgam numaym of the Gwa’waenox (Gwawaenuk or Gwawa̱’enux̱w),81 and by George Hunt.82 AHSAV temporarily erected the poles near Lumberman’s Arch in Stanley Park.

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In a guide to the totem poles of Stanley Park originally published in 1936 and republished in 1953, Reverend George Raley recounted the See-wid story memorialized in James’ pole.83 Boas versions document Se-wit’s descent into the ocean to receive supernatural gifts, and each of the carved figures (except the top qulos and the bottom rival) is mentioned in Hunt’s telling of the story. The ancestral figure, Tla-Wunum-Qolus, has octopus-like markings along his cheeks, drawing comparisons with the masks James carved related to Komokwa and the world under the sea, and suggesting that the ancestor had himself journeyed to Komokwa’s house and received supernatural gifts. A Kwikwesutinux origin narrative recited by Jim King explains the presence of the qulos, in which a qulos, Too Large, descends from the upper world to become Tsekame, or Head Winter Dancer.84 Raley’s version of the story omits all the specific places, ancestral names, and even songs referred to in the two versions published by Boas. Also, the relocation of the pole from Alert Bay to Vancouver obscured the ceremonial and familial references embedded in the pole, its features, and its physical and ritual contexts. The inclusion of a rival at the bottom of the pole may refer to an incident recorded by George Hunt in which the important position of Assembler in the Wi’womasgem numaym of the Mamalilikulla was left unoccupied until assumed by Sisaxo’las on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to a man who owned the position of Assembler in the Wa’welibaye numaym of the Walas Kwakiutl. “This a disgrace for the … Mamleleqala [Mamalilikulla] among the Kwagul [Kwakiutl] tribes,” writes Hunt, “for it is just as they had stolen the office of Assembler.”85 In its original context, the pole related to the transfer of names, positions, and property as part of a marriage ceremony. The pole flanking the door alongside the Sisaxo’las pole at Alert Bay is illustrated in James Sewid’s autobiography with a photograph dated approximately to 1918. The Sisaxo’las pole has not yet been raised in this image, but the house itself is identified as belonging to Sewid’s wife, Flora Alfred.86 Flora’s grandfather, Moses Alfred, thus likely built the house. The raising of a pole referencing the Sewid story suggests strongly that James’ Sisaxo’las pole was associated with the James Sewid–Flora Alfred marriage, which tentatively dates the pole to 1927, the year of their wedding. In a later image it appears alongside the pole illustrated in the 1918 photograph. The name Sewid was one of several that James Sewid owned throughout his life. “I received the name Sewid after my father



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and his father, which means, ‘paddling towards the chief that is giving a potlatch.”87 Sewid explained that his “relatives were looking at the wealth that Moses Alfred had against the wealth of [Sewid’s] family.”88 Through his father’s line, Sewid was Kwikwesutinux, although he grew up on Memkoolish or Village Island, where his maternal Mamalilikulla relatives lived, until he was seven,89 and where the majority of the Kwikwesutinux moved after the 1856 Nuxalk raid on their principal village of Gwayasdums.90 While he spent time moving around the district, living with relatives working at various resource sites, his base was at Alert Bay, where he attended school. Rather than having names only from his father’s numaym, he had a set of names from across the Kwikwesutinux and the four numayms of the Mamalilkulla:91 I understood that my grandfather gave some money to Flora Alfred’s relatives because the aim of my relatives was to get the masks and things like that for us. They wanted to see me uphold my name … because this would be the beginning of our name, which had been down and lost these past years when my grandfather died and my father died, and there was a gap between them. That’s why they were all pushing for me to uphold that name again. And that’s all they used to tell me when I was a little boy, “Never forget that name because some day you will use it.” There was an old chief up at Fort Rupert who was Flora’s great-uncle and he was putting in a lot of wealth for me when we got married. It was the custom of the Indians at the time a couple got married for the girl’s father and other relatives to transfer a lot of their positions and masks and dances to her new husband and then he could pass it on to his children … The day before I was to get married in the church there was a big do where Moses Alfred transferred all these things over to my grandfather, Jim Bell, to hold for me. Ed Whannack had a seine boat then so he went around and invited all people in the Kwakiutl nation … I wasn’t there and didn’t even know about it. I wasn’t old enough to go there and make a speech. My mother and grandparents and all my other relatives were there. All the chiefs and the prominent men of the respectable villages were there at Moses Alfred’s house and I was married in the Indian way. I heard about it later, that everything was given to me in a big chest that had all the masks and other regalia in it for the cedar bark dance. And all that stuff was given to my family.92

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Since the wedding was after the Cranmer potlatch, the family was unable to host a full potlatch. Instead, Sewid’s grandfather and mother distributed money and goods quietly the day after the wedding. Because the wedding was held five days before Christmas,93 the distribution of goods was not seen as untoward by the Euro-Canadian authorities. In 1953, Wilson Duff from the then Provincial Museum in Victoria surveyed the cemetery at Alert Bay, noting the locations of the poles and other objects still standing. He identified a large pole by Arthur Shaughnessy raised by Dan Cranmer’s family at the entrance to the cemetery. James copied this pole in at least one of his models. Immediately adjacent to this was a small, thin pole with a flat back, which Duff writes that “an American tried to steal.”94 Next, towards the back of the cemetery, was a house post–like pole by James. Towards the beach, Duff noted the remains of a tableau of flat-painted wooden coppers. In an earlier photograph, likely from the 1920s, a cluster of similar objects were located around a similar monument of a Thunderbird grasping a whale, possibly carved by James. This doesn’t appear in Duff’s survey notes. According to Duff, at one point the Nimpkish cleared the cemetery of undergrowth (although the graveyard was not exclusively Nimpkish), and perhaps any rotted wooden monuments were removed at that time.95 Or perhaps, since poles in the cemetery had been targeted for theft in other cases, a collector succeeded in removing the monument. James’ fame spread among the non-Native audiences in the 1920s when the Sisaxo’las pole and two Tsa-wee-nok house posts were bought and relocated from Alert Bay to Vancouver. In particular, he established a business relationship with the curio dealer William L. Webber, who in 1923 had opened a souvenir and curio shop called the Scenery Shop on Vancouver’s Hastings Street near the Canadian Pacific Railway terminus.96 James created a wide variety of objects for sale, including a set of trays painted with crest figures and then varnished. James’ models often represented in miniature the famous monuments particularly of Alert Bay, including a well-known and often photographed monument in the Alert Bay cemetery of a Thunderbird and whale. The crest on this monument related to a house at Alert Bay, which appears in photographs taken by Victoria-based photographer Richard Maynard in 1873, and which bore the imposing crest of its owner, Chief Tlah go glas, who Edward Malin records was an “important leader within this village and was considered a great man thanks to the many potlatches he hosted. His



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totem pole memorial stood in the village graveyard for many years and was, among others, a major tourist attraction.”97 With the introduction of singlefamily Victorian milled houses, the house front disappeared and the new holder of the name Tlah go glass lived in a smaller house with the monumental L’arhotlas house posts placed in front. A small sign was placed above the door, reading “Tlahgo glass, Nimpkish chief.” The crest on the previous house from the 1870s, the Thunderbird clutching a whale, became a subject often repeated in other contexts. What’s confusing is that it appears in ceremonial objects of great significance, in house front paintings and grave memorials, and in small objects of no apparent ritual significance, including James’ sketchbook and a hand-painted cover of a box of canned salmon for Libby’s food products from Chicago (Figures 4.6–4.7). James was not the only artist to use the same or similar crests for nonNative eyes. A set of paintings described in the RBCM catalogue as “watercolors in the style of Charlie James” contains a similar composition titled in pencil simply “thunderbird and whale.” These paintings were more likely by Bob Harris (Figure 4.8) and were related to a series of paintings he did at the St Louis Exposition in 1904, which are described by C.F. Newcombe in his research notes. In his notes, Newcombe recorded the crest and its family affiliation for each of the St Louis Exposition paintings.98 Newcombe states that “several families of different villages” used the Thunderbird as a crest but that only the “family of Chief Tlagoglus [Tlah go glas] of Ilis alone can use this carrying the whale.”99 Ilis is one of the English transcriptions of Yalis, the original Nimpkish site on Cormorant Island before the founding of Alert Bay.100 The story of Tlah go glas about the founding of Ilis, or Yalis, has clear historical resonance and explains why the representation of the Tlagoglus Thunderbird would transcend ceremonial boundaries so as to be used on James’ salmon can boxes, especially given that the designation of Cormorant Island as a reserve was complicated by white settlement. The founding of the cannery was based on a lease given to A.W. Huson in the 1860s. In 1879 the entire island was provisionally proposed as a reserve. The provincial government rejected this, and instead only two reserves were allotted: one for the village and one for the cemetery. In 1891, a third, the Alert Bay Industrial School reserve, was added for the construction of a school. Only those who had given up the potlatch were allowed to build in this area. In addition, the

Figures 4.6–4.7: A painted box for canned salmon by Charlie James. (RBCM 17539 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 4.8: Drawing attributable to Bob Harris. (RBCM 19577 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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reserves were assigned to specific tribal groups without concern for the complexities of intermarriage and numaym positions. The reserves on Cormorant Island were assigned to the Nimpkish. However, Alert Bay was a conglomerate village, with at least ten families from other tribes by 1914.101 The Tlah go glas crest was a reminder of the predominance of Nimpkish claims, or at least that of the individual who owned this crest, in the context of numaym history. The shift in house types, from the great communal plank houses of the nineteenth century to the late Victorian small shingle houses of the early twentieth century built for nuclear families according to the expectations of the Christian missionaries, reconstituted the space in which the traditional forms and privileges transferred in wedding rituals might be relocated. Because there was insufficient space in the new small houses, these symbolic forms were removed to the cemetery, where they could simultaneously memorialize the passing of privileges and operate as grave markers, a tradition comprehensible to European authority figures. A singular house post–like marker (Figure 4.9) embodies the same crest forms as the Tsa-wee-nok house posts relocated to Stanley Park – including the ancestral grizzly bear in animal and human forms from the Wa’walibui (Wa’welibaye) numaym of the Walas Kwakiutl. According to the U’mista Cultural Centre, James carved this pole for his daughter Mabel Salmon, the first wife of Jeff Salmon.102 Artist Lou-Ann Ika’wega Neel has traced the descent lines of her family more closely and notes that Emma James and Lucy James were Charlie James’ daughters, born in 1903 and 1905 respectively. Emma James’ potlatch name was Wadzidalaga. She married Caleb Jefferson Salmon. They had several children, and Emma died in 1928.103 The proliferation of poles in the Alert Bay cemetery as opposed to within the village itself suggests a date for any of James’ poles in the cemetery: post-1925. Probably, this partly reflected a response to government pressures on the potlatch following the Cranmer potlatch and the sale of four major poles from Alert Bay to the Vancouver Art, Historical and Scientific Association. Aboriginal peoples up and down the coast quickly understood that European people recognized the raising of memorial poles as appropriate, given their own custom of raising gravestones. A strategy of relocating the ceremonies associated with death and the passing of chiefly names to the cemetery and away from the village allowed numaym inheritance procedures to survive.104

Figure 4.9: James’ Tatantsit pole in the cemetery in Alert Bay, possibly for his own daughter, Emma. The original wings have been replaced and the spirit horns on the Thunderbird are now lost. (Photograph by author)



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Of the James poles that are still extant, one of the most impressive was raised in the Alert Bay cemetery (Figure 4.10). According to Hilary Stewart, this pole consists of, from top to bottom, Thunderbird, Bear holding a whale’s tail, Raven, Whale, and Dzunukwa, and was dedicated to Amos Dawson’s uncle.105 Free-standing totem poles such as this were usually memorial or commemorative poles erected in honour of a person who had died, usually by the successor to his name. The U’mista Cultural Centre’s pamphlet Totem Poles of Alert Bay identifies the pole as a memorial for Abraham, who traced his origins to Village Island and Fort Rupert.106 Duff in his 1953 field notes identifies the figures from top to bottom as follows: Thunderbird, “whale (?) down pole with separate side fins and man lying on back, sea otter with copper in mouth, long sculpin down pole, man holding it up.”107 The whale with an ancestral figure between the elongated fins shows similarities with other representations of kwi kwis, raven of the sea or sea eagle. In a kwi kwis or sea eagle painting by Mungo Martin (Figure 4.11), perhaps of the sea eagle and the raven of the sea together, the top of the double-figure – likely the raven of the sea – bears resemblance to what Duff calls a whale here. The diagnostic features of the raven of the sea include a whale-like face and pronounced, elongated wing-like fins. According to Duff’s measurements, the pole was twenty-six feet high and set in concrete. Originally painted “in white, black, red, brown, green, orange,” the repetitive patterning of the sculpin draws immediate comparison with James’ sketches and watercolour paintings (Figure 4.12). The sculpin with a man in his mouth in the Vancouver Museum sketchbook is similar in composition to the pole’s man holding a sculpin above his head. This sort of composition is typical of narratives in which an ancestral figure is brought to the Komokwa’s world under the sea to receive a supernatural gift. In one version of the Se-wit story, for example, Se-wit is transformed into a sculpin, or bullhead, and then reveals himself to his younger brother.108 The idea is visually explained in a typical Kwakwaka’wakw composition by including either a representation of the character in human form alongside the character in its animal form, or by having the human figure emerge from the mouth of the figure in animal form, in imitation of the transformation masks used in the Dluwalakha performances (Figure 4.13). Both these strategies are used here by James. This is the tallest of James’ cemetery poles and recalls his more monumental works, such as the Tatantsit, Sisaxo’las,

Figure 4.10: Charlie James’ pole in Alert Bay cemetery, July 2012. (Photograph by author)

Figure 4.11: Kwi kwis or sea eagle painting by Mungo Martin. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA 14428)

Figure 4.12: Sculpin painting by James. (Courtesy of the Vancouver Museum AA 2779.02)

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Figure 4.13: Sculpin transformation mask. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Cat. No. I-1667)

and Siwid’nakwala poles, which were raised in front of houses in the main villages rather than in a burial ground. Flat, two-dimensional tableaux, often decorated with sisiutl and copper forms, were common in the Alert Bay cemetery. Two examples attributable to James (Figures 4.14–4.15) combine two- and three-dimensional forms. Another example of the same composition in two-dimensional form can be found in James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook. As Holm explains, wooden replicas of important privileges, mainly coppers, were set around Kwakwaka’wakw graves. “In the mourning songs sung at the memorial potlatch for a deceased chief,” writes Holm, “the coppers which he owned, sold, broke, or destroyed are named. They are part of his prestigious history attesting to the honorable way in which he upheld his ancestral names.”109 Graves are often adorned by crests associated with the Winter Ceremonials. Such crests are typically passed through marriage; they are, after all, the highest-status crests owned by the deceased. Memorial potlatches were sometimes performed as part of a marriage potlatch. Rohner and Bettauer describe such an occasion on Gilford Island between 1962 and 1963. In this case, the deceased’s son wore

Figure 4.14: Grave tableau by James located in the cemetery at Alert Bay. (PABC 00693 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 4.15: Grave tableau with main qulos and sisiutl attributable to James. (PABC H-03985 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

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his father’s Hamatsa regalia, passing from behind the curtained dance area into the public space of the great house and out the main entrance. He later danced, at which point his mother passed on some names belonging to his deceased father.110 In panels such as these, the mechanism and frame for the qulos and sisiutl, besides acting as references to membership in the Winter Ceremonials or as manifestations of Dluwalakha privileges, operated as supports for the wooden replicas of the coppers. In 1953, Duff noted that in addition to one tableau still standing, “at least 3 or 4 board figures, the pieces of which are in the graveyard” were still restorable.111 The distinctive structure and form of these tableaux suggests a different perception of them as well as their role in the ceremonial lives of Kwakwaka’wakw audiences. The larger free-standing poles are often linked to marriage ceremonies. Perhaps these represent the passing of the prerogatives from deceased to heir solely in the context of the funerary ritual, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, when it would have been dangerous to perform the Winter Ceremonials publicly at Alert Bay. A photograph taken by Nelson Smith inside Ed Whannack’s house in 1937 (Figure  4.16), when Smith was called to repair a radio,112 shows an unusual and important pole by James. The pole is a superb example of how the ritual cycles of the Kwakwaka’wakw, besides being shifted towards the funerary rituals, which were better understood by Euro-Canadians, continued behind closed doors. James also did several models of the Whannack pole (Figure  4.17), which allows us to see his composition behind the box and chilkat blanket. The pole consists of, from top to bottom, sisitiul, qulos, qwe.wis or kwi kwis, alternatively identified as sea eagle or raven of the sea, a figure carved and identified several times by Mungo Martin and characterized by its whale-like face and a sculpin on its back with elongated, extended fins. In James’ Whannack pole, the representation is of the sculpin alone, seen from the front. It is followed by Nannis, the great monster ocean grizzly bear, with a sea otter under him, and two humanoid figures, almost certainly representing ancestors – possibly Tsekame, or Head-Winter-Dancer, and his son FoodGiver-Stone-Body, given the presence of sisiutl and three denizens of the sea that appear in the Tsekame myth. The dynamic overlay of characters is implicitly narrative. The relative scale of the figures and the bleeding of three-dimensional forms over one another suggest transformation both of the figures from one to another (i.e., back



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Figure 4.16: Ed Whannack pole by James, 1937. (RBCM PN 11838, AA-00768 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

and forth between human and animal forms) and of episodes, like a series of linked chapters from the story. The hallmark of Kwakwaka’wakw art has always been its dramatic flair. The energetic nature of the masked performances has been translated into a static monument here through James’ innovative and sophisticated composition. Ed Whannack, James’ patron, is mentioned several times in the autobiography of James Sewid, Guests Never Leave Hungry. Whannack was married to Sewid’s mother’s sister, and his description of the seasonal economy of the Kwakwaka’wakw is quoted extensively.113 Whannack, whom Sewid identifies as Nimpkish, ran a seine boat in the 1920s and employed Sewid as a young boy.114 He was also a senior attendant in Sewid’s Hamatsa initiation and clearly served an important role in Alert Bay’s Winter Ceremonials.115 Sewid,

Figure 4.17: Model of the Whannack pole. The University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology records state that this was given to a visitor to the Alert Bay canneries in 1932. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA 14428)



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who emerged as a leader in the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia after the Second World War, arranged for a traditional performance in 1950 to raise money for the hospital at Alert Bay. Whannack was among the audience at Sewid’s call for participation and is quoted as saying: “Well, Jimmy [addressing James Sewid], put me on your list. I’ve got quite a few masks and I’m going to perform tomorrow night. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve been showing all my masks for many, many years and I’ve given away a lot of money and I will do it for nothing so that I can help this worthy cause of saving people.”116 James also carved a model of the pole, which maintained the same proportions as the monumental original. It was collected in 1932,117 which if accurate, pushes the possible date for the original back at least five years prior to Smith’s photograph. Charlie Newman commissioned the best documented of James’ poles in 1925 (Figure 4.18). Newman, known as Nulis in Kwakwala, was the son of James Newman, an American sailor, and Gauthilas, a Kwakiutl woman. He married James’ daughter, Lucy Lilac, or Lalaxs’a. Their daughter was the carver Ellen Neel.118 “I told the old man – Charlie James, ” Nuytten records Newman as saying, “let’s do something for the girls, the girls in Victoria, the Women’s Auxiliary to the Church – Church of England. They were always sending gifts to my children … He [James] carved the thunderbird on top, the bear with a whale, and a Tsonoqua (wild person of the woods) and a frog … All the people here were glad and proud of it and they danced around it when it was finished. We gave it as a gift from our whole family to the girls in Victoria.”119 According to the archives of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, the pole was commissioned by James’ daughter and Newman’s wife, Lucy, “and was presented by the Indians to the St. Paul’s Church, Es­ quimalt, Girl’s Branch of the W.A. as a symbol of gratitude for the blessings of Christianity taught by the Church of England missionaries” in September 1925.120 Confusion over ownership of the crests passed in marriage may explain the differences here in who commissioned the pole. Newcombe described poles as “only” representing “the crests or stories belonging to the husband of a married pair. What were the wife’s before, became the husband’s at the marriage and remain so unless the equivalent of divorce or separation takes place.”121 Goldman explains that in “all the many records of marriages the talk is of spiritual acquisitions, the father-in-law appears as the guardian of great treasures.”122 This pole, then, is James’ most personal, containing his crests, the “treasures of marriage,” to be passed on to his son-in-law.

Figure 4.18: The Memorial Hall pole by James, carved for his son-in-law James Newman in 1925. (Photograph by author)



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The pole stood in the Anglican Church’s Memorial Hall, newly constructed in Victoria in 1925, because the smaller St Paul’s Parish in Esquimalt did not have sufficient room to properly display it.123 In 1997, it was exhibited at the Royal British Columbia Museum; after that, following family wishes, it was repatriated to the U’mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay. Since it was never installed outside, it gives us the clearest insight into James’ carving techniques in a monumental work. Close-up photographs reveal the precise, rhythmic adze marks that characterize James’ carving. One can see as well how James used different-size adzes to articulate the shapes of the differentsized figures and features. The crests and related stories were spelled out in detail and published in an Anglican church circular: Tsikumayi was the great magician of the Red Cedar Bark when Khanekelaq, a great mystic character, came to visit Metap on Viner Sound. At that time Khanekelaq cut off Tsikumayi’s head, but the head and body came together again. Tsikumayi was then pushed into a box and thrown into the fire. Again he came to life. At last a heavy weight was fastened to his feet and he was thrown into the sea. He sank down, down to the domain of Konigwis the great lord of the wealth of the deep [spelled elsewhere as Komokwa or Qomogwa], where he saw all about him the people and things of the ocean’s depths. The earthly visitor was recognized as Tsikumayi and was shown the great mystic cradle dance and was given the choice of all things for himself and his heirs. Tsikumayi was also told to take the totem pole he saw there and commemorate his great future Yawkwas with it. On this pole were the denizens of the deep – Nannis the great monster ocean grizzly bear; Maukinuk, a powerful man; Waakees the frog; Kuuma the bull head. When Tsikimayi came to the surface again with outstretched arm – as is done in the Red Cedar dances – Khanekelaq was there waiting for him. The great mystic one recognized Tsikumayi as immortal and presented him with the frog and its power for his dance. This Tsikumayi cast out from him at Metap in order to show his supernatural attainments. There a monster stone shaped in the form of a frog marks the spot. Kolus, the great spiritual thunder bird which was the ancestor of Tsikumayi adorns the top of the totem pole.124

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The main character of the numaym story, Tsikumayi (Tseakami, Tsekame), or Cedar Man, also known as Head-Winter-Dancer, was used as well in Mungo Martin’s 1957 Wa’waditla pole and in Martin’s own memorial pole after his death in 1962 and is a Kwikwesutinux ancestral figure “who emerged from the red cedar tree, in which form he had been created.”125 The tsonoqua, or dzonokwa, figure is Tsekame’s son, Food-Giver-Stone-Body, transformed after being bathed in the clotted blood from sisiutl’s spine. Metap, which plays a key role in the story, was a Kwikwesutinux site mis-allotted to other tribes as a salmon fishery in the 1880s – an error recognized by Andrew Paull of the Allied Tribes in 1922.126 Charlie Newman provided cords of wood to the Christ Church parish at Alert Bay in the late 1920s;127 other than that, the family doesn’t appear to have been too involved with the church. Certainly, none of them participated on any of the executive committees. Although the Women’s Auxiliary at St Paul’s in Esquimalt actively supported church and other social activities at the Christ Church parish, providing beds, furniture, and curtains for the hospital at Alert Bay (opened in 1924), and paying the expenses of the Alert Bay women’s auxiliary to attend the annual meeting in Victoria in February 1925,128 the pole represented a substantial gift. In 1908, Charlie Nowell had priced a pole from Mamalilikulla at $80 plus $15 for towing costs;129 in 1921, he quoted C.F. Newcombe prices between $600 and $750 each for five poles from Alert Bay.130 The relationship between the Kwakwaka’wakw and the Anglican Church transcended simple missionary activity. Non-Native individuals involved in the Anglican Church were often active in championing Native rights, especially as the Indian Act reform movement accelerated through the 1920s and 1930s in the wake of the Cranmer prosecutions and other overtly hostile actions by the DIA. Arthur O’Meara, who was both an Anglican missionary and a lawyer, acted as the sole legal adviser to Native Canadian leaders until 1927. He also founded the Society of the Friends of the Indians of British Columbia, “composed mainly … of Anglican church goers.”131 Furthermore, the pole needs to be viewed in the context of the Cranmer potlatch and the pressures exerted by the Indian Act during the 1920s. The presentation of the Anglican Hall pole came close on the heels of the Walas Kwakiutl chief Owahagalese’s supplication to the representative of the lieutenant governor to reconsider the potlatch ban at the official opening of



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St George’s Hospital in May 1925 – an event that garnered considerable attention in the Vancouver press.132 The ritual accompanying the raising of the free-standing totem pole seem to have been reorganized, with memorial poles moved from the fronts of houses to the cemetery, and with a funerary feast acceptable to non-Native authorities masking a legitimizing feast as well as the distribution of property associated with the passing of hereditary ceremonial names and now banned under the Indian Act. The detailed recitation of the crest story implies that James’ Anglican Memorial Hall pole continued to serve the purpose of materially memorializing the passing of names, crests, and prerogatives through marriage, especially with the specific references to geography embedded in that story. Interestingly, this enshrined the event within the sanctuary of church space, away from the long arm of the DIA. Besides all this, the story, if viewed as a history, detailed the legitimacy of Kwikewesutinux claims to Metap, an important fishing and logging site. This subtle way of using Euro-Canadian institutions to enshrine or assert Kwakwaka’wakw world views paved the way for higher-profile and more public endeavours by James’ colleagues and descendants. In 1936, a pole carved by Willie Seaweed, Herbert Johnson, and Tom Patch Wamiss was raised in memory of King George V in the churchyard at Gwayi, itself a centre for underground potlatching throughout the 1930s owing to its inaccessibility.133 The pole’s crests included Thunderbird, wolf, raven and Tsekame, as well as a plaque that dedicated the pole to the late king.134 The high-status crests, including at least one associated with the Winter Ceremonial, were dedicated at event in which the people of the community wore their ceremonial regalia. Similarly, Kwakwaka’wakw wearing ceremonial regalia, including masks, and bearing signs identifying their tribal affiliation, celebrated an event marking the coronation of King George VI at Alert Bay in 1937. Royalty were often referred to in ceremonial events, which were at the heart of First Nations land claims in British Columbia. The Proclamation of 1763 had stated that people encountered by the British west of Hudson Bay should be dealt with as nations through the Crown. From the perspective of First Nations peoples, this meant that negotiations over land and resources had to be carried out at a level higher than that of the provincial or federal government; in effect, this negated the Indian Act and all its settlement, reserve, and assimilation policies. A number of themes emerge in James’ crest pole carvings. This can be clarified by comparing the crests to those of his stepson, Mungo Martin. First, his

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art is tightly linked to group and individual identities through the numaym system. The figures and the stories behind those figures are the property of specific individuals through their position in the numayms. It is a complex task to trace the individuals who owned the various prerogatives and relate them to the numayms, given the transfer of the right to use these names and their related expressions across numaym and even tribal lines. The more monumental (typically earlier) examples connect to the raising of houses and the associated rituals of property transfer related to Kwakwaka’wakw marriages. The poles contain crest figures; thus, they are linked through the crest stories to specific locales where the narratives are thought to have been set. The public demonstration of crest privileges is therefore associated with public claims over specific resource sites. Pressure from the Indian Act and the assignment of reserves must have motivated, at least in part, the flowering of crest poles during James’ career. Many of James’ poles are mortuary poles or monuments, demonstrating the continuity of the acquisition and the transfer of ritual prerogatives despite the potlatch ban and its enforcement. Notably, the shape and location of important ritual forms, such as the house post, were adapted to Euro-Canadian funerary customs. They served Kwakwaka’wakw ritual and symbolic needs while functioning as memorials in the Euro-Canadian understanding of grave art. This was one way in which the Kwakwaka’wakw could circumvent the restrictions of the Indian Act and the consequences of their continued potlatching in the wake of the Cranmer potlatch prosecutions. At times, as with the Ed Whannack pole, the scale of the pole is reduced and its physical location moved from the public outside to the private inside. James’ own Anglican Hall pole set an important precedent: the transfer of property as part of the marriage ritual was ironically embedded safely within a Euro-Canadian institution through the presentation of the pole to the Anglican church. With the resurfacing of organized opposition to the Indian Act through the Native Brotherhood under the leadership of William Scow, this idea became part of more overt political demonstrations in the work of Mungo Martin. The ongoing strict adherence to traditional form in James’ art throughout these changes in context was a necessity, given the continuing symbolic role of the objects in the Kwakwaka’wakw ritual complex.

chapter five

MODEL POLES AND CURIO ITEMS

A model pole carved and painted by James and now in the collection of the Royal British Columbia Museum (Figure 5.1) demonstrates the artist’s technical virtuosity. Each figure is precisely carved. The combination of hatching, spotting, and cross-hatching in conjunction with James’ expanded colour palette of oranges, light greens, blues, and turquoise creates a unified compositional field that pushes one’s eye down the column and back up again. In this particular example, James carved in deep relief and took special pains in the painting. His juxtaposition of complementary colours – green against red, orange against blue – enhances the dynamic compositon of each individual being, down to the smallest face halfway down the pole. The way in which he has compressed the figures on top of one another and then carved small details in which each character extends beyond the boundary of his own geometry and into the next implies a formal interconnection and therefore a narrative unity. For example, the second figure from the bottom extends his hands into the air to support the killer whale above him. The figures are not simply piled on top of one another. They interact. They break free of their compression onto the columnar form of the pole. They come alive. Of all James’ carvings, this genre is perhaps the most captivating to the outside world. At their best, James’ miniature poles are playful, beautifully carved and painted, evocative, and creatively ambitious. Some poles, like the RBCM pole, have no apparent precedent in the body of monumental or ritual works that James completed. But many of his model poles are clearly based on his larger monuments, and he often

Figure 5.1: A model pole by James. (RBCM PN 18697, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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Figure 5.2: Single Thunderbird figure (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada. UBC MOA A5328)

included Thunderbird figures in the models and sometimes carved single-­ figure Thunderbirds separately. Some poles seem to be for James’ own enjoy­ ment and experimentation. Others are clearly for a specific market demand. The Thunderbird figures represent one category for the market. The Thunder­ bird, due in large part to the popularity of James’ Stanley Park poles, gained considerable recognition as an iconic symbol of British Columbia throughout the 1930s (Figure 5.2). By the 1940s, UBC had chosen the Thunderbird as a moniker for its sports teams, something partly legitimized by the presentation of a totem pole by Ellen Neel to the university by William Scow, president of the Native Brotherhood in 1947.1 In their recent book, The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History, Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass note the importance of the L’arhotlas Thunderbird and Bear Mother house posts carved by Joseph Harris at Alert Bay and of James’

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Figure 5.3: The famous Thunderbird and Bear Mother house posts in Alert Bay, first erected inside the house of L’arhotlas, the head chief of the Nimpkish tribe, photographed here in 1907 outside a Victorian single-family residence. The sign above the door reads “Tlaho glass, Nimpkish Chief.” (Image PABC HP020238 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Tsa-wee-nok house posts placed in Stanley Park in the 1920s (Figure 5.3). The outstretched wings of the Thunderbird or qulos on each of these pairs of house posts captured the imagination of thousands of tourists as they entered the mysterious “Indian” lands of British Columbia through the port of Vancouver before following the “totem pole route” of the Inside Passage up to Alert Bay, which was deep in the heart of totem pole culture. By the 1930s, the travel brochures published by the steamship companies, railways, and curio shops all featured variations of these two sets of house posts.2 They became the vividly memorable gateways to Totemland, a nickname for British



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Columbia that gained more official currency in the 1950s. As Jonaitis and Glass explain: James … profited financially by producing numerous model poles, many of which depicted the topmost thunderbird or eagle with its wings outstretched. This dynamic motif, now almost synonymous with the totem pole itself, was perhaps James’s invention; if not, his multiple models con­ tributed significantly to the public’s familiarity with it, as did those of his granddaughter, Ellen Neel. This pole design – often a conflation of the two James poles in Stanley Park and the two in Alert Bay – was soon to become the quintessential image for all totem poles, appearing in innumerable tourist publications, postcards, travel advertisements, and souvenir spin-offs.3

Photographed countless times, and circulated and transformed in popular Euro-American culture, the Thunderbird house posts gained a life of their own and exercised enormous power and influence over the imagination of those who viewed them. However, the privilege of representing the Thunderbird as manifested both in the L’arhotlas Thunderbird and Bear Mother house posts and in James’ Tsa-wee-nok house posts (Figures 4.6–4.7) obviously predates the Thunderbird carvings that flooded the curio market in the 1930s, given that the Thunderbird is often equated with the “first ones down,” or rather the ancestors of Kwakwaka’wakw people. As accessible as the miniatures were to foreign audiences, they were still rooted in the Kwakwaka’wakw world view. Charlotte Townsend-Gault raises questions about the meanings generated through the T-shirts, greeting cards, and calendars that eventually followed James’ and his contemporaries’ decision to carve miniatures for sale outside their community: The idea of circulation along ever-expanding social networks might seem to suggest further vulnerability to assimilation, to further trans­ cultur­al “entanglement,” while the ciruclation of “cheap” or “degraded” or “commercialized” versions of objects or signs once higly valued might be take as proof. Such material is often characterized as having been secularized, deomcratized, normalized – with the implication that something has been reduced.4

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Townsend-Gault notes that the West’s “conventional classification systems” have been “troubled because the material”5 circulating through tourist networks is encountered and valued differently. Key here is that for James and his friends and family, the objects maintained the values and associations constructed within Kwakwaka’wakw epistemology. The embrace of the new – new materials, new visions, new gifts, new resources – characterizes Kwakwaka’wakw cultural history. The ability to confront and control power through a complex combination of individual talent and inherited knowledge is central to conventional Kwakwaka’wakw social structure. In the context of the shrinking Indigenous population and the acceleration of colonialism and immigration during James’ lifetime, the circulation of objects and images drawn from the most famous and most powerful potlatch events anticipated Townsend-Gault’s quote of Robert Duncan, the economic development officer for the Wei Wai Kum Band in 1998: “We want the visitor to see something of our culture. That’s how they will know we are here.”6 The curio market evolved out of the confluence of several developments. It did not replace the potlatch market for artists like James; rather, it coincided with internal demand. In fact, it had emerged with the earliest arrivals of Europeans, long before James was born. Early in the history of contact, the Haida were carving argillite objects specifically for sale to visiting European ships and their crews.7 The expansion of settlement and transportation after the American Civil War spurred museum collectors – such as Boas and Heye, among many others – to acquire as much material as they could before Native Americans were fully assimilated.8 Access to remote sites was critically important for them, but that access was often organized out of more urbanized sites like Port Townsend and Victoria and the more accessible villages of Fort Rupert and Alert Bay. These same sites served as official and sometimes unofficial stops for the steamships plying the Inside Passage route from San Francisco, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, and Port Townsend through Victoria and Nanaimo to Wrangell, Sitka, Juneau, and Douglas. In 1884, the steamship lines plying the Inside Passage between San Francisco and Douglas had reported 1,650 passengers; by 1890, the count had grown to 5,007.9 Between 1880 and 1912, there were five stores in Victoria, run by Andrew Alfred Aaronson, John J. Hart, Jacob Issac, Henri Stadthagen, and Samuel Kirschberg and his partner Frederick Landsberg, that specialized in the sale of Native curios. Colourful and sometimes shady, these shops pandered to



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the tourist trade with inaccurate and often ridiculous supporting printed material, but they also sold serious objects in large volume to museums, including the Field Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institute, the Milwaukee Public Museum, and the Royal British Columbia Museum.10 In the context of the curio trade in the American South­ west, Jonathan Batkin argues that the curio dealers, through catalogues and advertising, reached a far wider audience than simply the tourists visiting their stores, and thus they wielded a powerful influence over the market as it developed.11 A real estate collapse just before the First World War led to an economic slump in British Columbia, pushing many of the Victoria dealers out of the curio business. However, Alaskan dealers like Albert Berry (the Alaskan Artisans Shop), John Feusi (in Douglas), the Knox Brothers (in Ketchikan), Walter C. Walter (the Bear Totem Store in Wrangell), and the Simpsons (the Nugget Shop in Juneau)12 continued through the 1920s and 1930s. To feed the hunger for souvenirs among the tourists following the “totem pole route,” a small handicraft industry emerged probably as early as the 1880s in which thousands of miniature poles were produced. In the 1920s, Joseph Standley, who founded Ye Olde Curiousity Shoppe in Seattle in 1899,13 contacted the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce to find a supplier of ivory carvings; this led to a commercial partnership with the Takenoya Brothers Company for the production of ivory totem pole pendants and painted walrus ivory totem poles. Standley’s in-house carvers, Nuu-chah-nulth Sam Williams and his sons, could not keep up with the required volume of carvings.14 One dealer, Walter C. Waters of Wrangell, who ran the Bear Totem Store from 1923 to 1950, accumulated a significant collection of some six hundred pieces, which went to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Denver Art Museum after his widow passed away in 1976.15 A number of objects signed by James or attributable to him show up in the Waters Collection, including two ceremonial masks, a signed curio mask, and two signed curio bowls. That James’ work shows up in a collection accumulated in Wrangell shows his importance as an individual artist on the commodity market and the geographic extent of the network of artists and dealers that had developed by the middle third of the twentieth century. James and Martin used Alert Bay and its radiating maritime transportation network to move closer to their clients – “wandering,” Ellen Neel would later call it. They lived for a time in Victoria, then returned to Fort Rupert

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before going off again to Vancouver.16 With the relocation of the Tsa-wee-nok house posts and the Sisaxo’las pole to Vancouver, James’ fame spread among the non-Native audiences of the newly booming metropolis. In particular, his business relationship with the curio dealer William L. Webber, who in 1923 opened a souvenir and curio shop called the Scenery Shop on Vancouver’s Hastings Street near the Canadian Pacific Railway terminus,17 created a sales outlet for a wide variety of objects. Many of these items were models based on larger, well-known monuments that James had carved at Alert Bay. Others were created specifically for the outside market. Webber used one of James’ Thunderbird drawings as a registered trademark and published a small booklet called The Thunderbird Tatoosh, which he distributed through his store. Webber himself retired in 1952, bequeathing his collection to the Vancouver City Museum except for a single pole that he kept for himself.18 The tourist carvings required a rescaling of James’ compositions, and he adapted his carving style. He continued to work in his shed on the beach at Alert Bay, cutting pieces of yellow cedar to length with a saw and then rounding them on three sides. The backs were usually left flat, and he soaked the pieces in rainwater to soften the wood and make them easier to carve. He placed the back in a metal vise and made deep saw cuts to block out the main shapes. To define the main figures, he used an elbow adze, a tool normally reserved for larger carvings, which suggests James’ skill and control. He completed the finishing work with a knife, normally made from an old file. Anecdotes recall that James kept a mortar and pestle in his beachside shed to grind charcoal and combine it with dried salmon eggs to create black. Ellen Neel recalls that James “went to sleep in the graveyard … over where the Old Indians died years before. He picked up an ordinary brick before he went to sleep … When he woke up he put orange into his yellow color until it resembled a brick. His idea of using the orange had never been done before … It was original. From then on he always used it.”19 A variant of this account told by his descendants is that he was the first to use orange, based on his love of Japanese oranges. Closer inspection of most of his objects suggests that he normally preferred commercial paints, “filched,” notes Nuytten, “from the residential school.”20 A number of his model poles in museum collections are varnished. Nuytten argues that this was done not by James himself but rather by the pole owners to protect the fragile watercolours he used, which would fade with age.21



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After a long career of carving monumental works, James had a corpus of established compositions to call on; from his location at Alert Bay, he enjoyed ready access to the passenger boats of the Inside Passage. His best work was precise, well proportioned and executed, finely carved, and delicately painted. His success as a tourist carver eclipsed his reputation as a monumental artist, and over the years he developed a commercial relationship with curio dealer Webber that stimulated a prolific output of miniature and tourist objects in the last two decades of his life. However, James’ commercial relationship with Webber seems to have encouraged a number of oddities for the curio market. In one example from the Vancouver Museum (Figure 5.4), James carved a model totem pole from whalebone. He does not appear to have taken the experiment very seriously. The figures are poorly articulated, and the painting is abbreviated at best. Conceptually, however, his experiment with composition, in which the figures project in full three-dimensional form from an axis at the back of the pole, shows up in at least one other model pole from the Royal British Columbia Museum (Figure 5.5). This is an unusual composition, in that James’ carved poles, even the models, tend to be flatter and broader, stretching across the width of the object. This one seems to have been carved to be viewed solely in profile. Other oddities attributed to James include a series of single-figure Thun­ derbirds, a pair of deer antlers mounted on a red cedar shield with a stylized fish fixed between them, (Figure 5.6), and a silver Thunderbird brooch (Figure 5.7) – the only jewellery example associated with James. The silver pendant, although unique, is not unconventional or bizarre. Silver jewellery has a long history in Kwakwaka’wakw arts. Photographs from the turn of the century show dozens of thick silver bracelets hung on sticks and displayed prominently during the great potlatches at Alert Bay. Deer antler and whalebone, on the other hand, were strange choices of material, and pieces carved from them seem to have been aimed specifically at the tourist trade. As Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner note, “both art historians and anthropologists have resoundingly rejected most commoditized objects as spurious on two grounds: (1) stylistic hybridity, which conflicts with essential notions of the relationship between style and culture, and (2) their production for an external market, which conflicts with widespread ideas of authenticity.”22

Figure 5.4: A rare pole in Northwest Coast art history,­ carved from whalebone. (Vancouver Museum AA_1783)

Figure 5.5: One of a series deeply carved model poles in cedar by James. (Image RBCM 6788 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 5.6: An unusual model pole with a carved and painted James model mounted between a set of deer horns. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA_693)

Figure 5.7: The only piece of silver jewellery attributed to James. (Image RBCM 14145, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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In my opinion, these kinds of curios are part of the reason why James was not taken as seriously as contemporaries like Willie Seaweed and even Mungo Martin. It’s a curious situation. Charles Edenshaw also produced items for the curio trade and is noted for the high quality of his argillite carving no matter their final destination. Perhaps because his oeuvre was almost singular with regard to his choice of materials or because he was never affiliated as directly with a curio trader as James was, Edenshaw’s work has been allotted greater respect. Edenshaw’s recognition by Boas, and his stylistic explorations (see the later work of Holm), as well as frequent references to Edenshaw’s museum pieces in the jewellery and carvings of Bill Reid, whom Maria Tippett quotes as saying “I blatantly copied Edenshaw’s design,”23 contributed to the use of Edenshaw’s work as a standard for Haida art. The emphasis on museum collecting programs has always been on items that conform to strict definitions of formal and functional authenticity. None of the artists at the time seem to have been reluctant to participate in the production of objects for sale. Even Kwakwaka’wakw artists like Seaweed, isolated in Ba’as and working almost exclusively for the ceremonial market, carved model poles. When Duff met Seaweed in August 1953 as he was surveying for a museum-sponsored restoration project in the Alert Bay cemetery, Seaweed pitched a proposal to carve six- to eight-foot poles for the museum and boasted that “he is the best carver and painter on this coast, better than Mungo, and,” wrote Duff, “he may be right.”24 Neither project ever materialized, though. The Vancouver Museum’s list of acquisitions from Webber’s store includes several carvings by Martin, who is better known, however, for his totem pole restoration work at UBC and later at the Royal British Columbia Museum after the Second World War. Anthropologist Wilson Duff in particular hinged funding for his salvage and restoration programs in the mid-1950s on Martin’s mythological status as the last of the old-time totem pole carvers. That he chose Martin over Seaweed may have been partly due to luck (i.e., Martin was in the right place at the right time) and partly due to Duff’s perceptions of who would be a more reliable employee. Besides meeting with Seaweed, Duff made notes about several other Kwakwaka’wakw artists, recording their drinking habits in addition to their artistic skills and residence location.25 Duff and the anthropologists and writers who grew as scholars with the growth of museums and universities in Canada and the United States in the

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1960s based their promotional ideas on the campaigns of Reverend George Raley, Alice Ravenhill, and the British Columbia Indian Arts and Welfare Society in the 1930s and 1940s. All of them stressed adherence to “authentic” form as the key to the nascent Native art market. By the 1950s, Duff had built his programs at the provincial museum around Martin, and the museums’ literature constantly referred to him as the last of the old-time totem pole carvers. What was essentially a public relations campaign highlighting the existence of knowlegeable artists to maintain creative continuity with the past, despite the oppressive policies of the Canadian government, became artistic dogma. Expectations of authenticity became a pivotal factor in the valuation of Northwest Coast art. However, the commercial success of later generations – notably, that of Martin’s apprentices Henry and Tony Hunt – was based on the foundation laid by artists like James in the 1920s and 1930s, even with their idiosyncratic products for the tourist market. James, Martin, Harris, Sewid, and the others also adhered to conventional form and content in their art, but for very different reasons than what the museums expected. James’ models often represented in miniature the famous monuments particularly of Alert Bay. Besides the whale and Thunderbird crest discussed in the previous chapter, he frequently copied or created variations of a number of monumental works, including the Thunderbird and Bear Mother house posts at Alert Bay, first erected inside the house of L’arhotlas, who according to Marius Barbeau was the head chief of the Nimpkish tribe. The posts “stood as supports of beams in a house that was never finished, as the chief died before the roof and the walls were put on. Joseph Harris, the oldest chief still living, may have been responsible for the construction, may even have carved the posts, as he succeeded the first owner.”26 The posts were landmarks at Alert Bay both for visiting tourists and for the residents, albeit for different reasons. While the tourists may have seen them as Romantic markers of earlier times, the crests they represented were still in play for the residents. Curiously, while none of James’ two-figured Thunderbird model poles faithfully imitate the form and composition of his famous Tsa-wee-nok house posts of Stanley Park, another carver, Arthur Shaughnessy (Hemasilakw, 1884–1945),27 was clearly looking closely at James’ work (Figure 5.8). This model pole from UBC’s Museum of Anthropology replicates the two- and

Figure 5.8: Model pole by Arthur Shaughnessy. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A6577)

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three-­dimensional form of the Tsa-wee-nok posts. Shaughnessy was originally Tsawatainuk from Kingcome Inlet,28 likely from the winter village of Gwayasdums, which was occupied up until the 1920s,29 but he lived in Alert Bay as well. Although not as well known as his contemporaries James, Martin, and Seaweed, he carved a number of important monumental works, including a set of house posts for William Scow’s house in Gwayasdums and a cemetery monument at Alert Bay. In addition, several large carvings by Shaughnessy are in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History and the Seattle Art Museum. Arthur Shaughnessy was known to copy James’ work in his models; in this example (Figure 5.9), however, it was James who copied a monumental pole carved by Shaughnessy, which was erected by Dan Cranmer in memory of his uncle around 1933 at the gate of the Alert Bay cemetery. Twenty feet high, Shaughnessy’s original consisted of, from top to bottom, a Thunderbird, a seated dzonoqua (Dzunukwa), a sea bear with a copper in his mouth, a raven with his beak down and wings folded, and a sisiutl projecting six to seven feet on either side of the base. Shaughnessy’s larger monument was painted with a white undercoat,30 whereas James, in his characteristic model style, allowed the colour of the wood to dominate, accentuating the carving with black, green, and red. Also, Shaughnessy’s carving style is broader, with the features of each figure stretched across the surface of the pole. James, in contrast, compressed his figures, which emphasized the length rather than the breadth of the carving. The model is an interesting example of how artists looked at one another’s work. In this case, a more senior artist was looking towards the art of someone he might consider his junior. Why Shaughnessy felt comfortable replicating a pole by James, and James a monument by Shaughnessy, may be due to the identity of the original patron. A Tsawatainuk individual commissioned James’ original house posts. The Thunderbird and bear-mother house posts and the Cranmer cemetery memorial were both commissioned by Nimpkish patrons. The figures from the Shaughnessy pole seem to relate to the story of Food-Giver-Stone-Body (Tsekame’s son) and therefore may have been crests usable by James according to his own position, status, and kin relations. Another pole that James carved several copies (Figures  5.10) of was the 1925 Tsekame pole for the Anglican diocese of St Paul in Esquimalt. In the

Figure 5.9: James’ model pole of a grave monument in the Alert Bay cemetery originally carved by Arthur Shaughnessy. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A17139 a-e)

Figure 5.10: Model of the Anglican Hall pole. (Image RBCM 17525 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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lacquered version pictured here, he gave a different treatment to the bottom, adding a rectangular, box-like shape at the base. He then decorated the flat surface of the box with an abstracted fish form, perhaps in reference to Kuuma, the bullhead or sculpin of James’ ancestral Tsekame myth, or perhaps simply to reinforce the setting of the story of Tsekame and his descent into the deep ocean to receive privileges from Komokwa. Unfortunately, the exact provenance of each pole is unavailable. In a series of poles from the Vancouver Museum, the Royal British Colum­ bia Museum, and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Figure 5.11), James assembled a set of compositions that are not copies of any of the monumental poles he carved. These are exquisitely executed and represent a maturity in the Kwakwaka’wakw style that James himself helped develop. He utilizes a wide colour palette with oranges, bright blues, and sea greens, and develops sophisticated and dynamic compositions within fine, tight carving. The iconography is consistent, and when we compare the individual figures with poles that have been documented for James and Martin and with paintings that Martin completed at the Museum of Anthropology and the Royal British Columbia Museum, a recognizable cast of characters from the numaym stories begins to emerge: Kwi kwis or sea eagle and the various emissaries of Komokwa – sea otter, Nannis the sea grizzly bear, Kuuma the sculpin, ’Namx­xelagayu the supernatural halibut of the Nimpkish, qulos and Tsoona, sisiutl, ancestral grizzly bear in animal form, Gwawina the raven, Tsawi the beaver,31 and various ancestors in human form holding the animals they’ve transformed into or from and the coppers they received through their supernatural encounters. Some poles appear to be reworkings of the Tsekame myth, which Boas called “the most complex story of the Kwakiutl.”32 Others introduce what are for James new sets of characters, although they seem to correspond to Martin’s later poles. Perhaps the two were in conversation with each other about these compositions. It is entirely possible that these compositions even represent specific individuals with their kin circles, referencing specific crests owned by them, and therefore recognizable to anyone in the community. James generally did not make different choices for how he structured his miniatures than he did for his monumental works. He conformed faithfully to Kwakwaka’wakw rules of representation and followed set patterns of narrative. This is important, because the art was for sale outside the

Figure 5.11: Carved model pole by James. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA_598)



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Kwak­waka’wakw community and did not have to adhere to any iconographic rules. Jonaitis and Glass record an anecdote from Phil Nuytten about Ellen Neel’s Totemland totem poles, a series of poles intended to represent British Columbia given out to visiting dignitaries in the 1950s: “Neel’s artist uncle, Mungo Martin, half-seriously, half-jestingly referred to it as a ‘White man’s pole,’ but then agreed with his niece that ‘a White person wouldn’t know the difference [between a pole based on tradition and one made for non-Natives] anyway,’ over which they shared a good laugh.”33 More than just a quaint aside, this comment indicates the enduring importance of tradition and what it meant for the artists. In addition, James’ models open up the question of the legitimacy of selling physical manifestations of crests to an uninitiated audience. Codere reported that the Kwakwaka’wakw continued to trade in coppers after they had been sold and sent to the museums. What mattered was the ownership of the crest, not its representation. The Kwakwaka’wakw also took great pleasure in potlatching despite the ban. Perhaps this was a kind of elaborate and sadly ironic joke – the people who had banned the ceremonies were buying the stories that represented the essence of those ceremonies. Or perhaps this was a way of cultivating an understanding of Kwakwa­ ka’wakw culture among outsiders. Certainly the social reform community – the educators, museum officials, missionaries and ministers, and other interested parties – would later come to acknowledge the role that art played in sustaining sympathy for the socio-economic conditions endured by Native peoples during the Great Depression and in contributing to the reform of the Indian Act after the Second World War. Edward Malin cites a conversation between Mungo Martin and Tony Hunt from 1965 that encapsulates the approach taken by James and later by Martin and Neel, in which Martin remarked: “If we Kwakiutl keep the art only for ourselves it will die. If we share it with the White Men it will live forever!”34 While this implies an open sharing, the ways in which James and Martin shared Kwakwaka’wakw art were subtle and politically complex. Enshrining crests and transferring prerogatives through the church, and later through government patrons and museums, was a clever way of circumventing the anti-potlatch laws. Transferring prerogatives, raising poles at funerals, and distributing potlatch property at Christmas were all ways to adapt ceremonial rituals to events understood in Euro-Canada. Doing these things also

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Figure 5.12: Thunderbird and sisiutl painting from the Vancouver Museum sketchbook. (Courtesy Vancouver Museum AA 2779.03)

raised public awareness of important social issues, such as the need to reform the Indian Act. James’ rigid adherence to conventional iconography suggests a diligence in maintaining the meaning of the art and the phenomena it represented. To share this diligence with an otherwise ignorant outside audience was partly educational in intent. The gap between the monumental and the curio in the art of James’ generation is thus less than previously recognized. A model and one painting (Figure 5.12) depict a Thunderbird grasping a sisiutl. A second model represents a raven grasping a sisiutl. All three recall James’ grave tableaux in the Alert Bay cemetery. While they seem somehow to represent independent icons for sale, they are, in fact, related to the numaym stories. For example, Boas records the story of the Squirrel and the Thunderbird – a story from the Gapenox numaym of the Giopino at the entrance to Quatsino Sound on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island  – in which the main hero, Yayagextsa, sees a Thunderbird try to grasp sisiutl only to have the double-headed serpent transform itself into a squirrel and hide in a hole in the ground. Yayagextsa finds one of sisiutl’s scales, which he uses to make a magical, death-bringing arrow.35 Once again, James seems not to hesitate to use the powerful spiritual vocabulary of Kwakwaka’wakw art



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for works clearly intended purely for sale to outsiders. Less clear, though, is which histories he used, and why. A.E. Pickford signed the back of a model sisiutl from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. It is unclear why the collector’s name is on the work; however, Pickford was an ethnobotanist with the Provincial Museum of British Columbia and the author of Food Plants Used by the Natives of British Columbia. Pickford had an ongoing interest in Northwest Coast art and joined the executive committee of the British Columbia Indian Arts and Welfare Society in 1941.36 A similar, rounded version with projecting tongues is in the collection of UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Similar to the sisiutl carvings with avian figures, these models are designed as plaques and indicate James’ willingness to change a carving’s form to suit new purposes. The reduced scale and the change in medium are not, however, matched by a compromise in the iconography and formal vocabulary. While James did a series of model carvings that appear to be fantastic imaginings, apparently unrelated to any of his monumental carvings, or anyone else’s, there is an icongraphic and therefore narrative consistency in his use of figures. Individual figures are often repeated: Thunderbird, sisiutl, killer whale, the great monster ocean grizzly bear, and frog. Even a single figure (Figure 5.13), the man with a frog on his head (Is it Tsikumayi “the great magician of the Red Cedar Bark” 37 removing the spell of Khanekelaq?), has icongraphic references that identify him to a knowledgeable audience. Museum records describe the object as “showing a shaman performing the ceremony to cast off a spell from someone – probably holding a bundle of some of that person’s personal belongings. The face on the bundle would represent the person having the spell removed.”38 A series of three small tourist bowls from three separate museums relate to a Charlie James sketch of a wolf that bears an inscription in the lower left-hand corner, “feast dish” (Figure 5.14). A bowl from the UBC Museum of Anthropology is reputed to have been collected in 1900 and is therefore another of James’ very early curio carvings (Figure 5.15). While this sort of tourist art has been dismissed in the past as “inauthentic,” a close reading of James’ work reveals a historical consciousness. In his work for sale outside the community, he repeatedly referenced famous objects, important object types within Kwakwaka’wakw ritual cycles, and significant mythological figures. These wolf dishes recall a ten-foot-long example (Figure  5.16) from Fort

Figure 5.13: A single figure, likely representing a shaman­ removing a spell, collected in 1900. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA Nb3.1305)

Figure 5.14: A two-dimensional representation of a feast dish in James’ sketchbook. (Courtesy of the Vancouver Museum AA2781.06)

Figure 5.15: In 1951, Mungo Martin painted a two-dimensional representation of the famous Dzunukwa feast dish. (Image RBCM 14495, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 5.16: A monumental wolf dish collected in 1947 by Barbeau and Price. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A6557)

Figure 5.17: A model of a Dzunukwa feast dish, with multiple parts, by James. (Vancouver Museum AA_706abc)

Figure 5.18: Dzunukwa painting by Mungo Martin. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A9045)



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Figure 5.19: A general view and a detail of a Dzunukwa feast dish (Portland Art Museum 48.3.526A,B)

Rupert collected in 1947 by Marius Barbeau and Arthur Price.39 It is difficult to say whether the monumental bowl was originally carved by James. The decorative painting has been redone due to wear and tear from use. Hawthorn explains that feast dishes “were part of the household crest belongings and important ones were named. They were among the treasures brought by a bride, and in sets of four they represented the divisions of the supernatural beings of the undersea, sky, land and forest.”40 Among some families, wolves were the founders of the Winter Ceremonial41 and were generally ranked first among animals,42 hence the use of the wolf as the body of the bowl. In a similar case of James modelling his curio art on larger, often wellknown objects used for ceremonial purposes, James’ small Dzunukwa feast dish (Figures 5.16–5.17) from the Vancouver Museum apparently served as the model for one of Martin’s 1951 paintings (Figure 5.18). Jonaitis cites two additional full-sized dishes that these models might refer to, one of which is at the Portland Art Museum (Figure 5.19). David Neel has sent me images of the Portland Art Museum bowl and suggests that James was responsible

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for these as well. Given the linear detailing on the sides of the main bowl figure and its repetition in other works by both James and Martin, I concur. The other, at the American Museum of Natural History, is almost 3 metres in length. Such dishes were used in competitive feasts, with each removable component of the dish assigned “according to the rank of the guests, starting with the head for the chief of the highest-ranking guest tribe, the right breast for the chief of the second-ranking tribe, the left breast for the third, the navel for the fourth, the right kneecap for the fifth, and the left kneecap for the sixth. Other men ate from the cavity of the dzunukwa’s torso.”43 James adapted the shape and composition of the body to serve as a small storage box for sale to outsiders. What’s interesting about the Dzunukwa and wolf dishes – as well as the poles, posts, and even house fronts modelled after larger, monumental examples – is the sense of history they represent. James and the others of his generation made models for circulation among non-Native audiences based on existing objects, well known within the communities of origin, that were emblematic of the great potlatch events and achievements of the Kwakwaka’wakw elite. Given the anti-potlatch laws of the latter part of James’ career, these objects were subversive. The models were more than curio items, hastily knocked off to earn a few dollars in the tourist trade. They kept alive the memory of things and activities repressed by the government, introducing them to a wider audience that more often than not was unaware of the complex politics behind them.

chapter six

TWO-DIMENSIONAL ART

Somewhere on the shelves of the Vancouver Museum, behind closed doors, lies a remarkable object – James’ sketchbook from the 1930s, which at some point came into the hands of Webber and was then passed on to the museum. James filled its pages with mythological characters and scenes, ritual events, representational visualizations of the ćέqa, memories of old house front compositions, and mythological beings. These coloured drawings and paintings, like James’ best miniature poles, are unique in Kwakwaka’wakw art with their expanded palette of blues, greens, purples, and pinks. A supernatural cod1 (Figure 6.1), the ancestral being that he will transform into tucked into his mouth, has a carefully repeated pattern of scalloped scales and gill slits. The sketch presents an opportunity for a certain freedom of expression facilitated by the use of commercial colours and not available in the commissioned and therefore more rigorously defined ceremonial objects. The iconographic descriptors are all there: the supernatural horns on the codfish’s head, the gills and spiny fins, even the First Ancestor figure in the mouth, implying encounter and transformation. The juxtaposition of complementary colours, especially red and green, along with the more intense pink along the underbelly of the cod, adds both vibrancy and depth. Two-dimensional painting was traditionally “used by Kwakiutl artists,” explains Hawthorn, “to enhance and embellish carvings and to decorate house fronts and other flat surfaces with crest designs.”2 One great development in twentieth-century Kwakwaka’wakw art was the emergence of serigraphy, or screen printing, beginning in the early 1960s. Art historian

Figure 6.1: A codfish painting by James from his Vancouver Museum sketchbook. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA 2779.14)

Figure 6.2: Mungo Martin untitled painting of a sea otter with a sea urchin from 1951. (Image RBCM 14498 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)



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Leslie Dawn characterizes that development as “a separate, modern tradition” that “has … led to an expansion of the boundaries of traditional art forms.”3 Serigraphy utilizes stencils to precisely replicate multiples of a single image. One of the first Northwest Coast artists to utilize this technique was Tony Hunt. The genesis of this “tradition,” however, lies in the transfer of form from traditional media – such as the house fronts and other flat surfaces referred to by Hawthorn – to paper. The utilization of a mechanical method for reproduction seems, as Dawn suggests, “at odds with the unique pieces found in older approaches.”4 On the other hand, “born in the world of the commercial gallery” and with its “initial and primary function, then, not social or religious in the traditional sense of native art,” it represents what Dawn eloquently describes as “a rapprochement with modern western art”5 – a development that I would argue reflects the fuller integration of First Nations people into mainstream Canadian society in the second half of the twentieth century and is linked to the widening of the audience for the house tradition myths, the nuyamil. That widening serves a long-standing political agenda of disseminating the historical basis of Kwakwaka’wakw spirituality, authority, social status, and resource guardianship. Hawthorn suggests that the first to draw using paper and coloured pencil and then tempera paints was Mungo Martin, who in 1951 found himself hospitalized, and bored, in Vancouver (Figure  6.2).6 Dawn cites the prints of Ellen Neel during the 1940s – which clearly preceded Hunt’s serigraphs of the early 1960s and even Martin’s drawings – and connects Neel’s prints (Figure 6.3) to the paintings of Gitxsan Judith Morgan and Nuu-chah-nulth George Clutesi, who were entering public consciousness at around the same time.7 There were other precedents as well. James’ sketchbook is a product of the commercial partnership with the Vancouver curio dealer William Webber between 1923 and 1938. Drawings by Charlie George, Jr, can be precisely dated even earlier, to 1910. Also, Bob Harris (Xa’niyus) of Tsawidi on Knight Inlet illustrated myths for C.F. Newcombe in a set of drawings on paper now in the collection of the RBCM, dating to around 1914. James’ granddaughter, Ellen Neel, was among the first Northwest Coast artists to experiment with serigraphy in the late 1940s. The screen print followed the adaptation of several new media in which Kwak­ waka’wakw painting on house fronts and ceremonial screens was reconfigured on new

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Figure 6.3: An early serigraph by Ellen Neel. (Image RBCM 14393-A courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

surfaces and with newly introduced tools, as exemplified by James’ work. Neel’s designs also followed the vocabulary laid out for her by James around the kitchen table (Figure 6.4). She reminisced that she learned to draw at the knee of her grandfather. “He used to draw out a design and then make me copy it over and over again. When my lines wavered, he would draw over them. He said I had to learn to do it this way. Sometimes I would cry. There was so much to learn.”8 The Vancouver Museum sketchbook contains  a drawing with the inscription “Charlie James and Ellen Newman Alert Bay BC.” This is the only identified surviving drawing co-produced by the two. Neel also studied at St Michael’s Residential School at Alert Bay, where James taught handicrafts from 1931 up until his death in 1937. Another St Michael’s alumnus, Henry Speck, went on to achieve considerable public recognition. Dawn suggests that Speck deserves just as much attention as



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Figure 6.4: A painting from James’ sketchbook with a notation identifying both James and Ellen Newman as the responsible artists. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA 2779.01)

Henry and Tony Hunt in taking the first steps towards popularizing serigraphy in the early 1960s. Of the two images that Dawn included in his important catalogue The Northwest Coast Native Print: A Contemporary Tradition Comes of Age for an exhibition of the same name held at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1985, one was an undated painting by Speck (Figure 6.5). Dawn argues that when “working privately, in watercolors, Speck, like Mungo Martin, felt comfortable experimenting with western pictorial conventions. He would, on occasion, situate his mythological and animal figures in deep space, within a landscape setting.”9 This occurred in several of James’ paintings as well. Indeed, Speck’s and therefore James’ paintings recall the same use of Western conventions as seen in the art of Morgan and Clutesi, as well as paintings from farther afield, such as the early Native American modernism of

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the American Southwest, exemplified by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie and the Kiowa Six of the Southern Plains. The founding of the Santa Fe Indian School as a training centre for Indian arts and crafts supported by Washington institutionalized the styles and concepts pioneered by artists like Kabotie from 1932.10 By the late 1920s, works by Kiowa artists like Jack Hokeah were being produced as stencilled prints for the portfolio Kiowa Indian Art – Watercolour Paintings in Colour by the Indians of Oklahoma, published by C. Szwedzicki in Nice, France. Brody notes the stencilled quality of the flat colours and sinuous lines and relates this style to “the popular 1920­–40 American art modern style as seen in magazine advertisements and movie palace and other murals.”11 It is important to see the work of the Kwakwaka’wakw artists as part of a larger movement in Native American art generally. Groups from around the country were struggling with similar issues – how, for example, can one make the art more relevant to a larger audience and therefore foreground the social issues at the heart of their experiences within public discourse? The early Native American modernists – Kabotie, Hokeah, and many others – have been misread as nostalgically representing a quaint, mythological past. An alternative view is that they were asserting the ongoing vitality of Native American spiritual (and political) institutions using a medium acceptable to a dominating and otherwise hostile non-Native audience. Social reformers concerned about the economic status of Native people then championed their work, particularly after the onslaught of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, following the so-called Indian New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there was a confluence of social reform interests in the course of which the role of education and the arts in the economic development of reserves was re-evaluated. This led to the establishment of training programs for artists, especially in the American Southwest, as well as federal funding for public murals throughout the United States, in which both Kabotie and Hokeah participated. In Canada, as the campaign for the re­ form of the Indian Act accelerated, non-Native people’s interest in Aboriginal arts was used by Aboriginal people to assert notions of historicity, citizenship, and land and other resource rights.12 Clearly, some of the ideas pioneered at places like the University of Oklahoma and the Santa Fe Indian School resonated to the north, and a similar program was in development at the St Michael’s Residential School. James was encouraged by F. Earl Anfield to teach crafts at St Michael’s.



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Figure 6.5: Henry Speck painting. (Image RBCM 17710, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Dorothy Lucas was a teacher at the school from 1931 to 1937, at the same time as James, and assembled a collection of objects now at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. This collection includes an early pencil drawing by Speck, which he completed while attending St Michael’s (Figure 6.6) under James’ tutelage, and which would serve as a model for the later painting illustrated in Dawn’s Northwest Coast Native Print. The RBCM provenance identifies the subject as “depicting a bird-like creature in profile with a sculpin on its back.” The pencil drawing clearly anticipates Speck’s later painting, and both are uncannily similar to three of Martin’s watercolour paintings completed in 1951 (Figures 4.4 and 6.7). James, then, was not the only or earliest artist to work in new media. That said, his work represents an important link between the revolution in serigraphy that brought Northwest Coast art to new audiences in the 1960s and 1970s and the conventional ceremonial art predating the Great Depression.

Figure 6.6: Henry Speck, drawing ca. 1930. (Image RBCM 15489, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 6.7: A Mungo Martin Pugwis painting. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Antropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A9050)



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James is a key part of what curators Peter Macnair, Alan Hoover, and Kevin Neary call the only “unbroken and viable tradition of carving and painting”13 of the Northwest Coast. The existence of James’ paintings thus adds a new layer of meaning to Hawthorn’s assertion regarding Martin’s ten paintings from 1951 that “this small collection of paintings sets forth a characteristic presentation of crest beings in their simplest form, depicted in a medium that was new to the artist, who was a master in the major traditional one,”14 particularly since James is generally acknowledged not only as Martin’s senior but also as his mentor. Besides a sketchbook and a set of painted wooden panels, a wooden tray, and two wooden boxes in the collection of the Vancouver Museum, Nuytten published images from a second set of James’ drawings in his personal collection. This makes the identified corpus of James’ paintings more extensive than any other from the first half of the twentieth century. A painted screen that survives only in a photograph showing James and Martin holding it in the Alert Bay cemetery sometime in the 1920s is the only documented example of a James painting for ceremonial circumstances. The screen shows a sisiutl draped over a copper (i.e., a ceremonial shield) of great value in Kwakwaka’wakw society. The object and its materials draw obvious comparisons with the muslin curtains that replaced cedar plank screens known as mawihl, which traditionally were adorned “with the design of the house and brought into ceremonial performance.”15 The mawihl, continues Hawthorn, “was ceremonially burned at the end of each winter dance season. Several informants reported, however, that because of the expense of commissioning a new curtain every year the mawhil was often saved and used in the following season.”16 As Jonaitis notes in regard to sisiutl imagery, such paintings “may be displayed either as a crest privilege or as the theatrical prop of a tuxw’id dancer.”17 Given the location of the photograph and the scale of the object, it is most likely the former – that is, it was part of a funerary display of the deceased’s crests. Of course, many types of ceremonial paraphernalia were decorated with two-dimensional designs. However, the penultimate form of Kwakwa­ ka’wakw graphic art was the house front. It was certainly the most imposing. Edward Malin explains the significance of Kwakwaka’wakw two-­dimensional design in the context of Northwest Coast art generally, noting the greater numbers of monumental examples recoverable through photographic evidence.

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“The paucity of examples of house front paintings that survived into the 20th century changes dramatically within Southern Kwakiutl territory. The numerous examples suggest a people’s exuberant involvement in displays of not only house front painting, but other forms of flat painting as well … A heyday of painting, the likes of which has not been documented for any of the more northerly tribes, developed in the mid- to late-19th century.”18 As Victorian houses for nuclear families were introduced, few examples of this scale were further executed. Yet James adapted the form in miniature in his sketches, much as he did with his model poles. He completed several drawings based on house fronts in the Vancouver Museum sketchbook. A few of these were labelled with textual references to the characters they were meant to represent (bullhead or raven, for example), either by James himself, by Webber, or later on by curators at the Vancouver Museum. There is a mix of beings from the different dimensions of the Kwakwaka’wakw universe here, sky, forest, and ocean. The house front compositions (Figures  6.8–6.9), like those of the crest poles, were highly significant, representing high-status crest forms associated with specific individuals and numaym positions. The numaym histories are filled with accounts of the ancestors building the first numaym houses with the help of the supernatural beings they encountered. In other stories, the house posts emerge as supernatural characters from the earth, frozen in place as numaym crests. As the various characters enter and exit the supernatural houses of myth, they are transformed or receive gifts of power. A house of a supernatural being might be described in great detail, delineating the various crests, including not only house posts but also feast dishes, as with Hunt’s account of a Koskimo (Quatsino) version of Night-Hunter’s visit to the house of Komokwa, translated as Copper-Maker, at the post that holds up the upper world. Night-Hunter then dreams of his own house, with the painting of a sea monster on its front.19 Sometimes, the specific form of a house front is spelled out. Copper-Maker’s house has a sea monster on the front, with its mouth a snapping door.20 The house of Komokwa emerges from the watery depths in one of the stories of Si-wit, adorned with a design of a killer whale and two whales standing on either side of the central door.21 In this way, the current house of the descendant of the first ancestor is a reconstitution of the source of the numaym treasures, with the house decorated carefully according to its mythological descriptions.

Figure 6.8: A view of New Vancouver showing two monumental house front paintings. (Image PABC AA-00122, PN 242 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 6.9: The painted Chief John Scow house at Gwayasdums on Gilford Island. (Image PABC AA 00099, PN 235 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

Figure 6.10: Mungo Martin’s Wa’waditla house opened in Thunderbird Park in 1953 on the grounds of the provincial museum with the first potlatch since the repeal of the ban in 1951. (Photograph by the author)

Figure 6.11: Bullhead house front painting by James, ca. 1935. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA2781.13)



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Perhaps unsurprisingly given their kin relations, many of the crests used by Martin in his public art in the 1950s show up in James’ work even earlier. One example is the house front painting for Martin’s 1953 Wa’waditla house. It represents “Tsee’akis, a supernatural sea-monster shaped like a bullhead (sculpin)22 (Figure 6.10). This design was formerly painted on the front of the house of a chief called Kwaksistala at the village of Kalokwis (Ḵalug̱wis). This man was a distant “uncle” of Mungo Martin.23 James did a similar drawing, contained in the Vancouver Museum sketchbook, inscribed with the notation, “Bull Head” (Figure 6.11). The colour scheme and diagnostic features are similar, although Martin’s version is more abstracted; in particular, the fins in the lower part of the composition are sharper and more angular. Also, James included a human ancestral figure as a face in the centre of the monster’s mouth, similar to the image of Si-wit emerging from the sculpin’s mouth included elsewhere in the sketchbook. The composition was also common to several monumental house front paintings. Two examples, one in New Vancouver (t̕ sa̱dzis'nukwa̱me) on Harbledown Island (Figure  6.8) and the other in Chief John Scow’s house at Gwayasdums (Figure 6.9), are dominated by representations of sculpins.24 In this sense, James did not simply influence subsequent generations; he also conformed to the artistic expectations of his peer generation and likely of those that came before him. On several occasions, James used his sketchbook to work out the composition for a larger project. One example is a house front painting with two ravens in profile flanking and therefore constructing a third frontal face in the middle of the composition. This particular house front design was used in two boxes surviving from the Webber collection at the Vancouver Museum (Figures 6.12–6.13). The images on the boxes are tighter in execution and more complete in form and utilize a wider range of colour, introducing both blue and green in the secondary and tertiary spaces. The box is further trimmed in green, an unusual touch by conventional standards and clearly aimed at the tourist market. A dresser by James bears a complex and sophisticated composition based on the ambiguity of profile and frontal faces, with the profile figures serving as elements of the frontal figure’s anatomy (Figure 6.13). James’ creation of a dresser for sale to outsiders as a European-like dresser presents an interesting reconfiguring of old techniques to new objects. Boxes of similar shape, proportion, and decoration, called kawatsi (boxes of treasure),25 “were among the

Figure 6.12: A box for sale by James, ca. 1930. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum 915ab)

Figure 6.13: A second box for sale by James. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA 265 abcde)



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treasures brought by a bride as part of the marriage arrangement … Carved by specialists and their assistants, they were commissioned by a lineage head and his family to mark milestones of family affirmation at events that publicly recognized their claims.”26 The kawatsi were seen to have the same character as ritual beings, and in the narratives of the Winter Ceremonial, they were represented as alive.27 However, each box, destined for the tourist trade, has what would be considered unusual design touches for traditional examples. One has varnish and green edging. The other, rather than containing a typical single hollow accessible only through the top, has a set of drawers with metal handles obscured by the avian figure painted on the front. In a rare example, James drew a copper design in his sketchbook (Fig­ ure  6.14). Coppers were “decorated sheets of beaten copper, a symbol of prestige and surplus wealth,”28 each with its own name “that boasted of its value.”29 Both Wilson Duff30 and Aldona Jonaitis recite histories of individual coppers, and Jonaitis notes that “the particular history of a copper, if it could be recalled by living people, might serve to document some of the most important events and transactions engaged in during the life of its owner and perhaps his or her descendants as well.”31 No real copper attributable to James has yet been identified. They were, however, objects of great value, “worth far more in prestige than the total of its monetary value. In ceremonial transfers of wealth – in a marriage, for example – the copper is mandatory. Its equivalent value in money would not do.”32 Two-dimensional representations of coppers have been identified elsewhere – namely, in grave monuments – although James’ is the first graphic representation that is neither part of a larger monument or replica nor displayed in a ritual context. As Holm explains, “Kwakwaka’wakw graves were a common setting for the display of coppers, or more often, wooden replicas of them.”33 Formally, they are virtually identical to this two-­dimensional representation by James from the Vancouver Museum sketchbook; they reflect the typical composition for a copper, which follows human anatomical terms: “unutlami, the face, for the upper, flaring part; unutsaxsti, the hips for the lower end; baxws’u, the torso or ‘part of a man,’ for the lower half; and ga’las, rib place for the ‘T’.” Such “replicas,” continues Holm in reference to the wooden grave panels, “represented actual coppers which had been owned and used by the deceased.”34 This particular drawing by James

Figure 6.14: A painting of a copper from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook. (Courtesy Vancouver Museum AA 2779.07)



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Figure 6.15: A Hamatsa bird painting by James. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum 915ab)

recalls an actual copper attributed to Willie Seaweed, especially in the decorative patterning of double diagonal stripes and simple pluses, or crosses, between each set on the baxws’u. James representation of the face on the top is precise and decisive in its execution, likely representing a creature “seen on the original coppers.”35 In a number of James’ sketches, the compositions are overtly narrative, or documentary, and similar to early modern Native American paintings in Oklahoma or Santa Fe in which artists like Fred Kabotie or Jack Hokeah recorded specific dances or categories of dancers. What is unusual about the painting for James is that he includes elements of Western narrative space, such as a horizon line and background objects. This category of imagery by James anticipates Judith Morgan and George Clutesi, who became popular in British Columbia between 1946 and 1950. In one image (Figure 6.15), James

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records an Atlakim dancer, one of forty potential Atlakim characters representing spirits of the woods enacted by members of this dance society during the Winter Ceremonial, alongside a stylized totem pole with layers of horizontal green and blue washes suggesting the water’s edge. Typical Atlakim figures included Grouse, Spruce, Stump, Laugher, Cannibal, Woman Giving Birth, Midwife, Salmon Woman, Listener, and Ground Preparer.36 Chief Robert Joseph notes that because the ceremony requires so many dancers to perform, “there is considerable pressure for collective representations of them, even if the right properly belongs to an individual or a numaym.”37 In one of the Atlakim stories recorded by Holm, the protagonist, shamed by his father, retreats to the woods to commit suicide. Once there, he decides to purify himself instead and seek supernatural powers; this leads to an encounter with a forest spirit, who grants him the privileges of the dance, its accompanying songs, and the house in which they are performed. The relationship between the pole and the dancer is unclear in James’ composition. It is difficult to assign the pole as a forest gift since the characters on it are Qolus, sculpin, and an ancestor, suggesting a First Ancestor and a gift from Komokwa. More likely, this is an image of the performance rather than of the original mythic event, and the pole is part of the backdrop rather than a privilege passed on within the narrative of the image. Another illusionary painting in the Vancouver Museum sketchbook shows a chief, replete with frontlet and cape, standing in a canoe adorned with a sisiutl (Figure 6.16). The silhouette of the chief is surprisingly descriptive and compares favourably with contemporary photographs of Kwakwaka’wakw chiefs. The canoe with its sisiutl design follows a tradition of association between the mythical creature and chiefly prerogatives. Boas recorded a story from the Wi’womasgem numaym of the Mamalilikulla (although the story appears to have come from the Kwikwesutinux) of the sisiutl and Head-WinterDancer, Tsekame, whose son, through his father’s interaction with sisiutl, receives a “special, death-bringing canoe. At each end of the canoe were ‘large double-headed serpents putting out their tongues, and in the middle there was a head of a man.’ This canoe was self-propelled and would follow all navigational directions obediently … With this vehicle Food-Giver-StoneBody [Head-Winter-Dancer’s son] made war around the world and brought back wealth, prerogatives, and slaves for his family.”38 Mungo Martin completed a similar composition in 1951, although his sisiutl canoe contains



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Figure 6.16: Chief in a sisiutl-adorned canoe from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook. (Courtesy Vancouver Museum AA 2781.17)

numerous figures. Martin’s composition is also organized hierarchically, with presumably the chief, the largest figure, located in the middle of the canoe. The chief, Food-Giver-Stone-Body, is also shown with the pursed lips of a Dzunukwa, as in the story he transforms into a full-grown Dzunukwa after being rubbed with the clotted blood of the sisiutl’s spine as a child.39 James also completed sketches of Hamatsa characters, although only the masks completed for Martin and the two Portland Art Museum masks have been tentatively assigned to his hand (Figures 3.2 and 3.4). The two painted sketches are titled “Hohhok Raven” (Figure  6.17) and “The Hoghuk” (Figure 6.18). Although they appear to be simply different treatments of the same character, the fact that they are labelled differently with inconsistent spellings suggests that these were not attributions assigned by James himself. The Hoxhoq or Hokhokw, often translated as a “giant crane,” is one of the attendants of Bakbakwalanooksiwae in the Hamatsa cycle of the Winter Ceremonial. Martin also did a two-dimensional representation of the ga­ gamt, or raven (gawima) mask of the Hamatsa, seen in profile and following

Figure 6.17: “Hohhok Raven” from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook. (Courtesy Vancouver Museum AA 2779.12)

Figure 6.18: A second Hokhokw mask from James’ sketchbook. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum AA 2279.13)

Figure 6.19: A painted wooden panel with an avian figure design by James. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum VM AA 1019)

the colour profiles and restrained patterning based on U-forms more typically found in Willie Seaweed’s famous series of Hamatsa masks. Martin also completed a Hokhokw figure on the Kwekwelis pole at the University of British Columbia. Earlier work, like the Hokhokw on the Kwekwelis pole, and two carved and painted masks, including a Hokhokw for the Atlakim and a raven mask by Martin, used in the Hamatsa, have a more ornate sense of linear pattern that links Martin’s artistic style more closely with that of James. Of the nine panels in the collection of the Vancouver Museum, this avian sun, its red halo denoting copper, is the most impressive and ambitious (Figure 6.19) in composition and execution. Here, the composition is carefully balanced. The classic symmetrical composition and framing was clearly influential. Similar imagery appeared among the paintings of the next generation of Kwakwaka’wakw artists, including Doug Cranmer, who completed an untitled acrylic painting referred to as Sun Man by Kramer on mahogany

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plywood in 1974.40 The secondary and tertiary forms float at equal distances on all sides within the primary and secondary lines. All the lines are carefully drawn, with no bleeding from the application of paint. James achieved equal proportions for each individual element repeated on either side of the central axis of the figure, and he relieved the heaviest parts of the primary formline, at the legs and along the upper edges of the wings, with repetitive negative spaces. The image represents the ancestral sun figure, or Tsekame once again,41 memorialized at least four times in James’ mask carvings and in the Anglican Hall totem pole. Another example in which one of James’ sketches served as the basis for one of the wooden panels sold through Webber’s store depicts a scene from a crest story (Figures 6.20–6.21). A frog hovers over or holds a copper. Frog42 was associated with Komokwa, and the “concentric circles”43 along the spine of the frog and on the forearm, especially in the original sketch, recall the “octopus sucker”44 and “are forms abstracted from sea life”45 to reinforce the association. Even from these brief characteristics and associations, the frog as a granter or carrier of copper and his connection to this larger being within the Kwakwaka’wakw spiritual pantheon are clearly delineated in the image. Close readings of James’ curio work reveal consistent adherence to the iconography of Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial art. The frog itself comes from James’ ancestral story. When Tsikumayi, or Tsekame, returns to his home from the Undersea Realm, “Khanekelaq was there waiting for him. The great mystic one recognized Tsikumayi as immortal and presented him with the frog and its power for his dance. This Tsikumayi cast out from him at Metap in order to show his supernatural attainments. There a monster stone shaped in the form of a frog marks the spot.”46 In one of the house fronts on Harbledown Island, similar compositions of grizzly bear figures with coppers flank a central figure of the first man of the Dzawadi.47 More recently, the exact same composition adorned the banners held by members of the Kwakiutl nation during a protest at the Western Forest Products log-sorting plant against clear-cutting in Port Macneill, which they argue is against the principles of the Douglas treaties signed between 1850 and 1854.48 Kwakwaka’wakw/Nuu-chah-nulth artist George Hunt, Jr, identifies the image as the “‘Supernatural Frog Who Produces Coppers’ which was part of the Copper-Maker legend.”49 Drawing on this story, Audrey Hawthorn explains that when “the frog looked down

Figure 6.20: A painted wooden panel by James of a frog holding a copper. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum VM AA_1016)

Figure 6.21: The same frog and copper composition from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook. (Courtesy Vancouver Museum AA 2779.11)

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Figure 6.22–6.23: Two sides of a painted paddle by James. (Image RBCM 17540, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)

into the water and saw the wealthy house of Komokwa and wife, he was given the privilege of cutting the copper.”50 Similar compositions and similar sea-oriented creatures adorn another page from the Vancouver Museum sketchbook and souvenir paddles by James in the collections of first, the RBCM (Figures 6.22–6.23), and second, the Glenbow Museum (Figure  6.24). The supernatural qualities of the represented creatures are conveyed in “horns curving atop the head, like those of Thunderbird.”51 The RBCM paddle creature represents an abbreviated sea lion on one side and a seal on the other. Sea lions52 figured “prominently mainly as the living house posts of the treasure house of Komokwa, the guardian of the world of the sea.”53 Seals,54 in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology, were invited to a Winter Ceremonial, where they put on eagle down and

Figure 6.24: Two sides of a second painted paddle by James. (Charlie James, Model Paddle, cedar wood, paint, Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada, AA 17AA 17)

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become Sparrows of the Winter Ceremonial. Sea lions often appear as humans and seals as their dogs.55 In contrast, the Glenbow paddle depicts on one side a fish without horns, likely a salmon, and on the other a humanoid figure in profile with a gilllike double-slash on his cheek and a series of small, repetitive, scale-like forms and projecting lines suggesting hair around his body, similar to the radiating parallel lines encircling the characters from the RBCM paddle. The iconography for both is associated with the sea, and the humanoid figure represents Pugwis, a merman or undersea spirit in human form, also transcribed by Macnair as Bagwis, a “benign and harmless … creature of the Undersea World … characterized by prominent incisor teeth … Bagwis likes to play around kelp beds and is curious but shy in the presence of humans.”56 Mungo Martin included a depiction of Pugwis in his 1951 series of paintings (Figure 6.10) and carved at least one Pugwis mask (Figure 6.25).57 Martin’s two-dimensional representation is similar to a sea eagle, although Pugwis differs in his fish-like face, “two rounded brows above the rounded eyes and two prominent front incisors between his lips.”58 A tray from the Vancouver Museum is adorned with images associated with the sea and with Komokwa (Figure 6.26). James painted a loon, an emissary of Komokwa, on the flat inner surface and then two fish figures on either long side panel and then varnished the finished piece. The paintings are all carefully executed, with consistent rhythmic repetition of lines and U-forms. James even added graphic dashes of colour and line at either end of the side fish paintings, along the edges of the handles and sides, and in a single, ladder-like double-line containing a series of dashes in the middle of the blank inside of the long side panels. James’ interest in the Undersea Realm constitutes a consistent theme in his work. A large number of masks, carvings, and paintings represent various supernatural fish and aquatic characters – more so than the forest or sky beings of the other realms, although characters from the Winter Ceremonials and other stories feature as well. Overall, his paintings present a panorama of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology, still represented in small, focused episodes with a few tentative attempts to create an illusionary space for the creatures to inhabit. His two-dimensional work is, perhaps more than any other medium, a transition between the representational techniques of conventional Kwakwaka’wakw art and the more modernist traditions emerging elsewhere

Figure 6.25: A Pugwis mask attributed to Martin. (Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada: UBC MOA A3659)

Figure 6.26: A painted tray by James. (Courtesy of Vancouver Museum VM AA 741)

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in Native American artistic communities. His sketches are the most exper­ imental, although ironically closer in spirit to the serigraphs of the 1960s, but the curio decoration is, like the model poles and dishes, nonetheless still rooted in Kwakwaka’wakw conventions. As with the model poles, he changes the scale of the objects and sometimes uses more functional items within Euro-America, such as boxes with handled drawers, as the surface for his vision. The images themselves are powerful. Unfortunately, because they were done on support surfaces that were often unacceptable in modernist art galleries or have been somehow overlooked, they have never achieved the attention they arguably deserve.

CONCLUSION: YAKUGLAS’ LEGACY

Charlie James was one of the key artists of the great fluorescence of Kwak­ waka’wakw art between 1880 and 1922. He was the most prolific of the Kwakwaka’wakw totem pole carvers, responsible for five free-standing poles from Fort Rupert, Alert Bay, and Kalugwis on Turnour Island. In addition, he carved at least two house posts, five grave monuments, and two unconventional poles, one for inside a house and one as a gift to the Anglican Church. He is known to have executed over seventeen monumental masks, two gigantic feast dishes, and a number of secondary ritual props. He was without a doubt the most productive Kwakwaka’wakw curio carver of the 1920s and 1930s. He also painted a range of two-dimensional works for both ritual use and for sale. His carving and painting together exemplify the Fort Rupert– Alert Bay style of Kwakwaka’wakw art. A pattern emerges in the museum collections, which James’ ceremonial art relates specifically to the tribes in the Kwakwaka’wakw villages of Alert Bay, Fort Rupert, Gwayasdums, Kalugwis, and Memkoomlish. James’ patrons thus seem to have been associated primarily with the Kwakiutl, Nimpkish, Kwikwesutinux, Gwawaenuk, Tlawitsis, and Mamalilikulla – all groups that Duff records as part of James’ network of kin. Individuals from other groups, such as the Gwasela, also served as James’ clients, but more because they relocated to Alert Bay than because he travelled to their villages. Through the Memorial Hall pole for the Anglican Church, James revealed some of his own crests, relating specifically to his Kwikwesutinux family. This ties some of his masks to the Kwikwesutinux Winter Ceremonials and

210  Yakuglas’ Legacy

explains the iconography of many of his model poles. Indeed, a key feature of James’ art is its adherence to iconographic convention inspired by the corpus of ancestral myths circulating in Kwakwaka’wakw society, especially the nuyamil, or house traditions. This has political implications, given the general oppression of the conventional Kwakwaka’wakw system of authority and related cultural expression during his lifetime. Meuli, again drawing on the children’s book Yaxwatlan’s, defines myth as a “special kind of story that tells how people met supernatural beings at the beginning of the world. As a result of these meetings, the world around us was transformed into the shape it is in today.”1 Implicit in this definition is that Kwakwaka’wakw social structure, including claims to land and other resources, was part of this transformation. The reassertion of the nuyamil then reaffirms Kwakwaka’wakw histories, claims, resources, hierarchy, and system of governance. The expectation of authenticity in form and function that has followed Northwest Coast art since the great museum collecting expeditions of the nineteenth century has contributed to the separation of art for consumption of Kwakwaka’wakw people from art for those from the outside. While scholars repeatedly acknowledged James’ participation in the production of ceremonial art preceding the Cranmer potlatch and the putative collapse of Kwakwaka’wakw ritual, museums are cluttered with the great number of model poles that he carved from the 1920s on. As Bill Holm writes, “the famous carver Charley James probably made more models than all the rest together.”2 Because James was more easily associated with these, the scope of his ceremonial art, and therefore his influence, has been underestimated. When we combine the monumental poles and memorials with the still limited identification of masks likely carved by James, it becomes clear that James was a prolific artist whose early career paralleled the climactic arch of Kwakwaka’wakw potlatching between 1890 and 1922. A close reading of objects created by James after 1922 reveals two phenomena. First, James continued to carve significant monumental works within Kwakwaka’wakw society. Memorial poles in the Alert Bay cemetery, the Ed Whannack pole, and James’ pole for his son-in-law, Charlie Newman, reveal the consistent and sometimes innovative ways in which the transfer of ceremonial prerogatives continued without raising the ire of the Canadian judiciary. Second, James’ models are often faithful copies of existing monuments, or relate faithfully to the corpus of Kwakwaka’wakw crest stories. In this



Conclusion  211

sense, James has to be seen in the context of his contemporaries who were carving and painting at the same time, notably Willie Seaweed, Bob Harris, Arthur Shaughnessy, Mungo Martin, George Walkus, and Charlie George, both senior and junior. When we compare the ceremonial work with the smaller, touristic items among all these artists, we find a steadfast commitment to the intertwining formal and iconographic rules of Kwakwaka’wakw art, no matter the scale or function. All the artists showed a willingness to use new tools and materials and to create in new media and contexts. These artists did not display a slavish conformity to form, but rather a respectful adherence to iconographic rules as a means of continuity in the communication of concepts. This had significant implications for the parallel world of dealers, teachers, social reformers, and missionaries in the emergent commercial market for Northwest Coast art. The non-Native participants often believed that Native culture was dying out and sometimes participated directly in its oppression, yet at the same time, they equated adherence to form with authenticity. The historical associations suggested by this use of authentic forms constructed commercial value. For their part, the artists and their patrons within Kwakwaka’wakw society followed iconographic rules but were willing to bend the context and medium as long as the stories to which the images and carvings referred and thus the social order they signified survived in the new era of immigration and industrialization. Many scholars have puzzled over the willingness of the Kwakwaka’wakw to sell their paraphernalia. This puzzlement only increased with the realization that ritual continued despite the Cranmer prosecutions. How was it that items of so much social significance, and of so much value in terms of personal identity and public status, could be sold so easily? Phillips and Steiner explain the attraction of art sold cross-culturally from the perspective of the buyer: The materiality and physical presence of the object makes it a uniquely persuasive witness to the existence of realities outside the compass of an individual’s or a community’s experience. The possession of an exotic ­object offers, too, an imagined access to a world of difference, often constitute[d] as an enhancement of the new owner’s knowledge, power, and wealth. Depending on the circumstances of their acquisition, such

212  Yakuglas’ Legacy

objects evoke curiosity, awe, fear, admiration, contempt, or a combination of these responses. The exotic object may variously be labeled trophy or talisman, relic or specimen, rarity or trade example, souvenir or kitsch, art or craft.3

What, however, is the motivation for the producer or the seller? The combination of political and economic factors and Kwakwaka’wakw world view in part explains the willingness to sell the poles and masks. After the Cranmer potlatch, it was clear that the Canadian government would imprison potlatch participants and seize their ceremonial regalia. And the value of the poles and ritual objects skyrocketed with the expectation among anthropologists and museum personnel that the potlatch was about to die out. Why not take advantage of these circumstances, make a substantial profit, and then retreat behind closed doors to continue the practice on a reduced scale? This was a pragmatic solution to difficult conditions. Macnair argues that “what is important is not the objects but what the objects represent: they are metaphors for ritual power or chiefly authority … The debate on whether or not such works are ‘art’ obscures their meaning and intent. For anyone outside the culture, it is impossible to fully understand the relationship between mythic history as manifest in the mask and its animated presence on the stage of a ceremonial house when a skilled dancer brings life to the mask.”4 In reference to James’ contemporary, Willie Seaweed, art historian Bill Holm writes that selling masks, which represent noble prerogatives, outsiders might seem to be a strange act for a conservative chief steeped in the traditions of his people. Yet it seems never to have been really troublesome for the Kwakwaka’wakw. A fine mask was and is prized, especially if it is an heirloom, but it is the right to display it, derived from ancient tradition, that is jealously guarded. Outsiders will not claim that privilege, and new masks can be made.5

As tourists sought out reminders of this unique and threatened culture with the expansion of the non-Native population, the urbanization and industrialization of the province, and the concomitant expansion of the transportation and shipping infrastructures, James led the way in creating for this market. Once again, it is difficult to get past the sale of the material manifestations



Conclusion  213

of these stories “derived from ancient tradition” in such numbers. There has been this overwhelming sense in the discourse of Northwest Coast art, that the sale of these items somehow cheapened the system that inspired them. Martine Reid argues, for example, that “contemporary Northwest Coast arts rest upon a contradiction. Past objects belong to a long tradition that inspired their creation and gave them their form. Present objects belong to a somewhat different tradition but imitate the form without the creative content.”6 But if one acknowledges the object as a “persuasive witness to the existence of other realities,” as defined by Phillips and Steiner, then conversely the object also holds out hope that through offering the “imagined access to a world of difference,” it may also play an educational role – that it may serve as a portal that opens the buyer to a spiritual world that he or she cannot possibly fathom, but that is nonetheless both a testimony and an underpinning to the historical presence of Aboriginal peoples predating settler society. I keep seeing the famous photograph of Mungo Martin as a young man in one of the old longhouses with all the house’s heirlooms carefully laid out, like courtroom evidence, for the visiting McKenna–McBride Commission in 1914 (Figure 1.2). The stories embodied in all of these objects confirmed the house’s rights and prerogatives, many of which were materially valuable. The objects proffered proof in the face of a new system of administering and governing. This is why James conformed so rigorously to conventional form and often carved models of existing ceremonial objects. “What is it that makes people chance their property, treasures, their most valued possessions to the vast heaving mass of ephemeral and disposable forms?” asks Townsend-Gault. “Well, yes, they imagine that they will be an effective advertisement for some good or service or cause.”7 Judith Ostrowitz explains further: The strategy for making art ... [among the Kwakwaka’wakw] is clearly inconsistent with the non-native view that characterizes the history of modern art as a history of the avant-garde. Although recognized artist-personalities [like James] have emerged on the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century, the tradition is not first and foremost a striving toward novel expression … in relation to western art history … The break with the past that was supposed to underlie the modernist project cannot be reconciled with the inherited subject matter and conventionalized stylistic devices still used on the Northwest Coast. Yet new works of

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Northwest Coast art that refer to the past proliferate, and their makers strongly assert the vitality and relevance of their practices.8

James was a transitional figure, who led the way in expanding the tradition to include the sale of objects to outsiders. It is clear that the creative content, at least in James’ work, was the same in both ritual and commercial forms. It was the enactment of this creative content within the performative ritual space of the potlatch before a knowledgeable audience that empowered the objects’ owners, not the stories’ static representations in visual forms that circulated outside the community. Even so, the objects embodied different and still powerful meanings in the wider public space of Canada at large. There, they were touchstones of cultural identity, reminders of a history that stretched back before the colonial presence and that therefore might implicitly assert Aboriginal rights. James and his colleagues and descendants proved repeatedly that they understood this. In 1925, James carved a pole for the Anglican Church at the same time leaders in his community were actively seeking a repeal of the potlatch ban from a representative of the lieutenant governor at the opening of a Anglican Church–sponsored hospital. Just over twenty years later, Mungo Martin carved a pole presented by the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia to the Governor General of Canada, Viscount Alexander, the King’s representative, at a time when the Indian Act was under revision. The choice of the King’s representative was significant, since the argument for land claims in British Columbia rests on the Proclamation of 1763, which directed British colonists to treat Indigenous groups west of Hudson Bay as sovereign nations.9 Aboriginal people have argued ever since that Canada’s federal and provincial governments have never had the authority to create the Indian Act and assign reserves. When they solicited the participation of Lieutenant Governor Pearkes in the opening of the community house at Alert Bay and when they gifted Governor General Viscount Alexander a pole, they were making the subtle suggestion that the “Indian Problem” would be solved at their level, not at that of the Government of Canada, and that it would include the recognition of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples as sovereign nations. For many Native people, art was also an avenue for success and achievement beyond the confines of reserves. To restrict the art to its traditional uses would have been, arguably, to close down this avenue and impose a social



Conclusion  215

restriction mirroring the spatial limits of the reserve system. To put it in the words of Mungo Martin speaking to Tony Hunt in 1965: “If we Kwakiutl keep the art only for ourselves it will die. If we share it with the White Men it will live forever!”10 Was this an echo of an earlier conversation between Martin and James? Certainly, the idea of sharing must have dictated the need to adhere to the rules of representation and to choose inspiration from the corpus of nuyamil myths. Understanding the art entails understanding the complexities of the culture of which it is a part. And in this culture the art, the ritual, the individual and group status, the economic and spiritual gifts, the histories of their acquisition, and the laws of marriage, inheritance, and exchange are all part of an integrated whole. While the culture changed, absorbing new technologies and ideas as demonstrated in the art of James and his family, this concept of an integrated whole remains vibrant. The art, even James’ odd curio items, has asserted this continuity.

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NOTES

Preface



1 Pettipas, Severing the Ties That Bind, 40–1. 2 Titley, A Narrow Vision, 1986, 11–15. 3 Dale Stover, “Sun Dance,” in Wishart, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, 757. 4 Gloria Cranmer Webster, “The Dark Years,” in Townsend-Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, eds., Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 266. 5 The earliest form of the legislated ban was not clear enough in its definition of the potlatch. The first successful prosecution was not until 1896. (Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand Upon the People, 36–44.) 6 Ibid., 63. 7 Ibid., 92. 8 The most important of these, tabled in the House of Commons by interior minister Arthur Meighen in 1918, made potlatching a summary offence, which allowed the Indian Agent to act simultaneously as prosecutor and judge (Ibid., 102).

Introduction 1 Quoted in Kramer, Kesu’, 45. Chapter One: James’ World 1 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 13. 2 Creasy, “Yakuglas’ Legacy.” 3 Codere cites twenty-five in Fighting with Property, 2, and thirty later in “Kwakiutl: Traditional Culture,” in Suttles, ed., Handbook, vol. 7, 359. 4 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 197. 5 Codere, “Kwakiutl,” 361.

218  Notes to pages 10–17

6 Ibid., 359. 7 Wadsen, “Kwikw (Eagle) Positions,” 7. 8 Codere, “Kwakiutl,” 365. 9 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, xiii. 10 Drucker and Heizer, To Make My Name Good, 10. 11 Coppers were symbolic shield-like plaques of cold-hammered copper. “Breaking coppers” was an important and costly ceremonial act that demonstrated the collective wealth and political and spiritual power of the numaym. 12 Creasy, “Yakuglas’ Legacy.” 13 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 16, 27. 14 Anonymous, “Yakudlas,” n.p. 15 Wadsen, “Kwikw (Eagle) Positions,” 6. 16 Ibid. 17 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 74, p.111–13, 139–43, 168. 18 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 285. 19 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 16. 20 Ibid., 27. 21 Ibid. 22 Reid and Sewid-Smith, eds., Paddling to Where I Stand, 77. 23 Wilson Duff field notes, file 132, PABC B06047. 24 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 132. 25 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 205. 26 Wilson Duff field notes, file 132, PABC B06047. 27 Plant, “Hank Snow and Moving On,” 55. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 36. 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Ibid. 33 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 75. 34 Ibid. 35 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 256. 36 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 113. 37 Maureen Milburn, “Mungo Martin,” unpublished manuscript, 1990, in author’s possession. 15. 38 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 113. 39 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 257. 40 Barbeau, “The Potlatch among the B.C. Indians,” 59. 41 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 15. 42 Healey, History of Alert Bay and District, 6. 43 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report, 1910, 268. 44 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report, 1911, 247. 45 Drucker and Heizer, To Make My Name Good, 44. 46 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 51. 47 Ibid., 51.



Notes to pages 19–31  219

48 Ibid., 92. 49 Ibid., 102. 50 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 121. 51 Ibid., 119. 52 Quoted in Sewid-Smith, Persecution or Prosecution, 47. 53 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 108–18. 54 Cole, Captured Heritage, 71. 55 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 119. 56 Ibid., 139. 57 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 94–5. 58 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 135. 59 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 111. 60 Ibid., 114–19. 61 The term curio is derived from curiosity – thus, curios were souvenirs that illustrated the cultural differences evident in the newly opened spaces in the world, including the Pacific Northwest. Art historian Marvin Cohodas suggests that the mythic position imagined for Native Americans in nineteenth-century European theories of cultural evolution contributed to a sense of “nostalgia for the pure and noble Indian past [which] fueled the curio trade … at its height in 1880–1930.” Cohodas, “Louisa Keyser and the Cohns,” 89. The term curio is used in reference to this era and the specific ideologies that informed this genre of artistic production and consumption. 62 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report 1927, 13, 61. 63 Dawn, The Northwest Coast Native Print, 11. Chapter Two: Style 1 Orchard was the author of Beads and Beadwork of the American Indian and The Technique of Porcupine-Quill Decoration among the North American Indians. 2 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 129. 3 Reid and Sewid-Smith, eds., Paddling to Where I Stand, 5. 4 Ibid., 5–6. 5 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 305. 6 NAMI provenance history. 7 Jacknis, The Storage Box of Tradition, 20–2. 8 Jonaitis, From the Land of the Totem Poles, 135–72. 9 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 44. 10 Barrett, Barrett Notebook. 11 Ibid., card 17299 (144). 12 Ibid., card 17369 (780). 13 Ibid., card 17312 (orig. 206). 14 Boas, Primitive Art; and “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast.” 15 Boas, Primitive Art, 12. 16 Aldona Jonaitis, “Traders of Tradition: The History of Haida Art,” in Thom, ed., Robert Davidson, 10–11.

220  Notes to pages 31–45

17 Jonaitis, ed., A Wealth of Thought. 18 Boas, Primitive Art, 10. 19 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 20. 20 Ibid. 21 Raley, “Important Considerations Involved,’” 50. 22 Ibid. 23 Raley, “Important Considerations.’” 24 Glass, “From Cultural Salvage to Brokerage,” 21. 25 Ibid., 22. 26 Meuli, Shadow House, 16. 27 Doug Cranmer, “‘The Other-Side’ Man,” in Duffek and Townsend-Gault, eds., Bill Reid and Beyond, 176. 28 Crosby, “Haidas, Human Beings, and Other Myths,” in Duffek and Townsend-Gault, eds., Bill Reid and Beyond, 113. 29 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 20. 30 Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art. 31 Holm, “Art,” in Suttles, ed., Handbook, vol. 7, 606. 32 Holm, “Will the Real Charles Edenshaw.” 33 Holm, Smoky-Top. 34 Wright, Northern Haida Master Carvers. 35 Kramer, Kesu’. 36 Ibid. 37 Boas, “The Kwakiutl,” 323. 38 Ibid., 320. 39 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 14. 40 Ibid., 19. 41 Boas, “The Kwakiutl,” 327. 42 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 14. 43 Boas, “The Kwakiutl,” 403–4. 44 Ibid., 402–3 45 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 48. 46 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 16. 47 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 258. 48 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 20. 49 Ibid., 610. 50 Ibid., 62. 51 Macnair, Hoover, and Neary, The Legacy, 184. 52 Holm, Smoky-Top, 29n. 53 Online biography, Seattle Art Museum. 54 PABC Newcombe family files, A01769, vol. 59, file 7. 55 Holm, Smoky-Top, 29n. There is some confusion here. Jonaitis, in Chiefly Feasts, at 165, identifies his ceremonial name as Xa’niyus, which is simply a different spelling of Xixanius. However, Harris’ brother was a known carver, with a house with a protruding canoe in New Vancouver, copied from a previous house in Dsawidi, attributed to him. RBCM Photo Archives, PN 243.



Notes to pages 45–78  221

56 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 2, 673. 57 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 331–43. 58 Ibid., 305–9. 59 Oolichan (Thaleichthys pacificus), also known as eulachon or candle fish, was extensively fished and processed for their oil by Northwest Coast peoples. 60 Reid and Sewid-Smith, Paddling to Where I Stand, 72. 61 Ibid., 72–4. 62 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 87–97. 63 Codere, “Kwakiutl,” in Suttles, ed., Handbook, vol. 7, 363. 64 Holm, Smoky-Top, 35. 65 Ibid., 48. 66 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 17–18. 67 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 181. 68 Ibid. Chapter Three: Masks and Ceremonial Objects

1 Reid and Sewid-Smith, eds., Paddling to Where I Stand, 5. 2 BCPM, Report of the Provincial Museum for the Year 1957, C24. 3 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 305. 4 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 25. 5 http://www.emilycarr.org/totems/exhibit/kwak/gwintro.htm 6 Wayne Suttles, “Streams of Property, Armor of Wealth: The Traditional Kwakiutl Potlatch,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 90. 7 Robert Joseph, “Behind the Mask,” in Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 28. 8 Ibid. 9 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 63. 10 Ibid., 318. 11 Codere, Fighting with Property, 28. 12 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 32–3, 311. 13 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 90. 14 Ibid., 368. 15 Ibid., 20. 16 Codere, “Kwakiutl,” in Suttles, ed., Handbook, vol. 7, 368–72. 17 Ibid., 369. 18 Ibid., 371–2. 19 Holm, Smoky-Top. 20 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians. 21 Holm, “Kwakiutl: Winter Ceremonies,” in Suttles, Handbook, 379. 22 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 95. 23 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 155. 24 Ibid., 155–69. 25 Ibid., 157. 26 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 41.

222  Notes to pages 78–94

27 Ibid., 43. 28 Ibid., 47. 29 Ibid., 48. 30 Ibid., 43–9. 31 Ibid., 263. 32 Holm and Reid, Indian Art of the Northwest Coast, 251. 33 Shonna Walsh, RRN translation column. 34 Holm, Smoky-Top, 28. 35 Ibid., 28–9. 36 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 20. 37 Ibid., 20. 38 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 255. 39 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 50. 40 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 98–100. 41 Shonna Walsh, RRN translation column. 42 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 106. 43 Jonaitis, From the Land of the Totem Poles, 168. 44 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 256. 45 Boas, The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, 521. 46 Cole, “The History of the Kwakiutl Potlatch,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 168. 47 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 271. 48 Anonymous, “Yakudlas,” n.p. 49 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 312, 315–16. 50 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 100. 51 Ibid., 120. 52 Cole, “The History,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 141. 53 UBC MOA museum records. 54 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 113. 55 Drucker, Kwakiutl Dancing Societies, 205. 56 Ibid., 205. 57 Ibid. 58 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 49. 59 Ibid., 27. 60 PABC, Newcombe family files, MS 1762, add. mss., vol. 40, file 16. 61 Newcombe Family Papers, PABC MS-1077, box 59, file 7, reel A1769. 62 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 203. 63 Meuli, Shadow House, 324. 64 Ibid., 325. 65 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 306. 66 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 203. 67 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 80. 68 Ford, Smoke from Their Fires, 37–8. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid.



Notes to pages 94–103  223

72 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 119. 73 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 29. 74 Ibid., 124. 75 Reid and Sewid-Smith, eds., Paddling to Where I Stand, 80. 76 PABC, Newcombe family files, MS 1762, add. mss. vol. 40, file 16. 77 Boas, The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, 521. 78 Jacknis, “George Hunt, Collector of Indian Specimens,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 182. 79 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 103, 182. 80 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 207. 81 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 235. 82 Ibid., 235. 83 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 143. 84 University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 86/172C, card 17347 (638). 85 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 100. 86 Barrett, Barett Notebook, University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 86/172C, card 17337 (469). 87 Ibid. 88 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 85. 89 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 114. 90 Wyatt, Mythic Beings, 40–2. 91 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 27. 92 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 78. 93 Sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) are large, grey birds with dull red skin on the crown and lores, a whitish chin, cheek, and upper throat, and black primaries. There are three subspecies prevalent in British Columbia. All breed beginning in the spring, usually May. Like the salmon, they return each year to the same breeding grounds, arriving on the coast in April and departing in October, as the winter rains begin. Martin Greuber, “Sandhill Crane,” Accounts and Measures for Managing Identified Wildlife, V.2004, 1: http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wld/frpa/iwms/documents/Birds/ b_sandhillcrane.pdf. Migrating birds, including the sandhill crane, were greeted with prayers when they first reappeared each season in Kwakwaka’wakw territories. Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 156. 94 Ibid., 141. 95 Newcombe Family Papers, PABC MS-1077, box 59, file 7, reel A1769. 96 Boas, “The Kwakiutl,” 520. 97 Halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) is a large, meaty bottom-feeding fish, averaging 15 kilograms in size, with some catches reportedly in the hundreds of kilograms. It is still the target of large, industrialized fishing in the Pacific Northwest. Halibut have a distinctive diamond-like body shape and a crescent-shaped tail. They spawn from November to March on the continental shelf at depths of up to 400 metres and then migrate to shallower feeding waters in the summer. In Kwakwala, the halibut had a number of names: Born-to-Be-Giver-of-the-House (which seemingly refers to ’Namxxelagayu and its role in the founding myth of the Nimpkish), Scenting-Woman,

224  Notes to pages 103–8

Flabby-Skin-in-the-Mouth, and Squint-Eye. The ritual rules for catching halibut were prodigious. Halibut hooks were referred to as “Younger Brother,” and prayers were said before the fishing expedition began, when the hooks first touched the ocean floor, when the halibut bit at the hooks, and when the fisherman killed the halibut with a club as its head emerged from the surface of the water. The fisherman then sent the halibut soul away to “tell the news that place to which he came where he lay dead in the fishing canoe was good” Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 159–61. 98 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” 119. 99 Drucker, Kwakiutl Dancing Societies, 207–8. 100 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 85–93. 101 Ibid., 16. 102 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 170. 103 UBC MOA accession records. 104 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 170. 105 The Pacific loon (Gavia pacifica), also called the Pacific diver, has a smoothly rounded head and neck and a straight bill. In breeding plumage, the top of the head and back of the neck are pale gray, lighter than the face. The body is black with white markings. It resides on the Pacific coast in the winter and then migrates north to breed in the summer. It can be found in enormous flocks where food is prevalent and repeatedly dips its head under water when feeding. Andrew Birch and Cin-ty Lee, “Arctic and Pacific Loons: Field Identification,” Birding (April 1997): 107–15. 106 Ibid., 27. 107 BCPM, Report of the Provincial Museum for the Year 1957, C24. 108 UBC MOA accession notes. 109 Wyatt, Mythic Beings, 102. 110 Chinook salmon, weighing between 5 and 23 kilograms and sometimes referred to as spring, king, tyee, or quinnat, feed in the deeper waters of the Pacific and then spawn in larger streams. Sometimes two or more populations spawn in the same river, but in different seasons. This was important because certain rivers had both spring and fall runs and were therefore extremely important resource locations. The surface-feeding sockeye, blue and black with a deep-red flesh, follows a fouryear cycle and spawns in all the main west coast rivers; its size varies from river to river. It also runs mainly in river systems with lakes, giving rise to the kokanee, a landlocked freshwater sockeye. The pink or humpback salmon has a two-year cycle and does not travel far upstream to spawn. The coho lives in the upper layers of the ocean, where it feeds on pelagic shrimp and herring, and migrates up the coastal rivers to spawn far from the sea. Both coho and chinook can be taken by trolling in open salt water. Each species follows a slightly different schedule. The last to spawn in the late fall is the chum, or dog salmon, which was sought after because it is lean and can be dried to last the winter. The salmon was then, depending on the variety, smoked, thus providing enough surplus food to support a family for several months. Traditionally, dip nets, harpoons, and traps were used to capture salmon. The industrial canneries targeted sockeye salmon and introduced work opportunities among women and children, and gill netting began to replace traditional fishing methods, creating work opportunities for men and women. The regulation of the



Notes to pages 108–21  225

fishing industry after 1878 introduced a licensing system that challenged the traditional, socially integrated system of resource ownership (Newell, Tangled Webs, 46–50). Ritually, the salmon were called Swimmers; like the migrating birds, they were greeted with prayers on their seasonal return to the spawning rivers. Salmon spawning rivers were the most important resource property for the numaym and were fiercely protected from others. Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 155. 111 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 190. 112 Ibid., 234. 113 Barrett, Barrett Notebook, University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 86/172C, card 17362 (773). 114 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 316–17. 115 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 33. 116 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 234–6. 117 Imbert Orchard and Heather Yaworski, CBC interview with William Scow, Alert Bay, 1967, Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, IH-BC.60. 118 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 119. 119 Codere, “Kwakiutl,” in Suttles, ed., Handbook, vol. 7, 374–5. 120 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 178. 121 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 71. 122 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 178. 123 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 97. 124 “Mabel E. Waters Dies; Ran Bear Totem,” Wrangell Sentinel, 7 April 1976, 6. Chapter Four: Totem Poles 1 PABC, Duff files, B06047, file 129. 2 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 70. 3 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 230. 4 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 70. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Savard, Images from the Likeness House, 4. 8 http://www.emilycarr.org/totems/exhibit/kwak/gwintro.htm 9 Reid and Sewid-Smith, eds., Paddling to Where I Stand, 5. 10 Ibid, 5–6. 11 Ibid, 6. 12 Ibid. 13 Jonaitis, From the Land of the Totem Poles, 171. 14 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 2, 657. 15 Ibid, 651. 16 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 259. 17 Cole, Captured Heritage, 311. 18 Federica De Laguna, “Tlingit,” Suttles, ed., Handbook, vol. 7, 213. 19 Cole, Captured Heritage, 311. 20 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 2, 657.

226  Notes to pages 121–6

21 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 85–90. 22 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 331–2. 23 Gunn, Kwakiutl House and Totem Poles, 23. 24 BCPM, Report of the Provincial Museum for the Year 1957, C23. 25 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 85. 26 Ibid., 86. 27 Ibid, 90. 28 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 329–34. 29 The raven, well known throughout the coast as a trickster, is actually the omnivorous common raven (Corvus corax). It is a large, heavy, perching bird that typically travels in pairs and is frequently successful in defending its nests against larger predators through a combination of size, stubbornness, and cunning; for example, it is known to drop stones on raiding birds. 30 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 1, 374. 31 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 2, 663. 32 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 211. 33 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 136. 34 The grizzly bear (Ursus arctos), the second largest of all bear species, is common to the coast but was not historically found on Vancouver Island. The powerful grizzly has front claws that can be as long as 10 centimetres. An omnivore, it changes its eating habits according to the seasons. In the spring, they feed on new vegetation; they then follow the salmon in the spawning channels until the fall. They are also known to eat crustaceans in the intertidal zones. They tend to return to the same feeding spots throughout their seasonal movements, never straying more than 30 kilometres from the territories where they were raised as cubs. During the winter season, they den in higher elevations. See Les Gyug, Tony Hamilton, and Matt Austin, “Grizzly Bear,” Accounts and Measures for Managing Identified Wildlife, http://www .env.gov.bc.ca/wld/frpa/iwms/documents/Mammals/m_grizzlybear.pdf. The bear’s reputation for fierceness and power transcends cultures, but the Kwakwa­ ka’wakw also recognized its fishing and hunting prowess and sought to acquire its skills. Boas quotes a prayer of gratitude accompanied by a set of ritual actions, in which the hunter thanks the slain bear: “Now you have come to take pity on me so that I may obtain game, that I may inherit your power of getting easily with your hands the salmon that you catch. Now I shall press my right against your left hand. O friend! Now we press together our working hands that you may give over to me your power of getting everything with your hands, friend.” Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 161. Two grizzly bear figures appear in Kwakwaka’wakw culture, according to Hawthorn, one associated with the Hamatsa and the other with the Dluwalakha. Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 194. 35 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 2, 663. 36 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 211, 216. 37 “Potlatch Transcript: Mungo Martin’s Thunderbird Park Potlatch, December 12–15, 1953,” RBCM Duff Papers, 3. 38 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 117. 39 Suttles, “Streams of Property,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 105–14.



Notes to pages 126–8  227

40 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 76. 41 Carrie Mortimer, personal communication, 24 July 2014. 42 Jacknis, The Storage Box of Tradition, 324. 43 The American mink (Neovison vison) is a semi-aquatic carnivore and therefore another animal prevalent in Kwakwaka’wakw mythologies that has the ability to move from one environmental zone to another. It was a profoundly important resource in the fur trade. It moves rapidly and erratically and is an extremely intelligent animal and skilful hunter, known to track and kill more than it can eat. Perhaps because of this, it has a reputation among the Kwakwaka’wakw as something of a prankster. Typically, it resides in wetlands along woody or brushy shores and maintains separate territories. 44 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 26. 45 The grey wolf (Canis lupus) is the most common and largest of its species on the Pacific coast. A natural predator of the mink, the wolf is also an apex predator, meaning only humans represent a threat to it in its Pacific range. It travels in nuclear families. The performances of groups of dancers wearing wolf frontlets imitated how these wolves might have been seen in the wild. In his description of a Winter Ceremonial among the Koskimo, Boas describes the origins of Wolf Dance: an ancestor, Ya’xstal, was carried away to the wolf village, where he gained the water of life and the death-bringer as gifts from the wolf chief. The wolves tore Ya’xstal apart and ate him, later vomiting up all the pieces, which were then sprinkled with the water of life. Ya’xstal was reformed and carried back to his village, riding on the back of the largest wolf. Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 203–5. 46 UBC MOA museum records. 47 Cole, “The History of the Kwakiutl Potlatch,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 182. 48 Arguably the most iconic of the animals common to the Kwakwaka’wakw stories, the killer whale or orca (Orcinus orca) is a famously social animal that travels in packs, or pods, based on matrilineal affiliation. Female orcas have recognizably unique rounded dorsal fins, whereas the fins of the males tend to be larger and more triangular. The most common residential pattern for orcas in Kwakwaka’wakw territory was as a resident pod (they can also be transient and move beyond a specific territory). As resident pods, they, like the bear, return to specific resource areas through seasonal movements. Understanding the behaviour of these different animals – that the bear and the orca return to feed at specific sites, and that loon congregate in large flocks when food is present – obviously helped people locate valuable resource harvest areas and signalled when the resources were most plentiful. Killer whale, wolf, and frog also had shamanic associations. For example, when a killer whale appeared at the beach, the sick from the village would go to the water’s edge, take a mouthful of saltwater, and blow it towards the whale, crying “Carry away everything that is bad in me, supernatural one, Long-Life-Maker!” Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 377. 49 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 28. 50 This is a Kwiksutainak name associated with Aul Sewid and later James Sewid, who later inherited the Kalugwis pole. Spradley, ed., Guests Never Leave Hungry, 17. 51 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 55.

228  Notes to pages 128–31

52 Ibid., 258. 53 Hooker, Only In New Mexico, 93. 54 Carrie Mortimer, personal communication, 24 July 2014. 55 Hooker, Only In New Mexico, 93. 56 Milburn, “Mungo Martin,” 16. 57 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 184–5. 58 Ibid., 171. 59 Ibid., 178. 60 Ibid., 169. 61 Ibid., 178. 62 Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis. 63 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 29. 64 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 129. 65 Ibid., 117–18. 66 Raley, Our Totem Poles, 23. 67 Report of the Provincial Museum for the Year 1953, B21. 68 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 55. 69 Ibid., 55. 70 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 3. 71 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 89. 72 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 30. 73 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 30. 74 Gunn, A Complete Guide, 19. 75 Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), like the mink, is part of the weasel family. The most common subspecies in Kwakwaka’wakw territories would have been E. l. kenyoni, commonly known as the northern sea otter. The sea otter, in contrast to the mink, lives offshore and feeds more specifically on sea urchins, mollusks, crustaceans, and some fish. This puts it in direct rivalry with humans over food sources. It is one of the few mammals to use tools, often hammering shellfish with a rock to dislodge them or to open their shells. Like the mink, they were hunted extensively during the fur trade and used as blankets prior to the introduction of foreign textiles. Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 8. 76 Gunn, A Complete Guide, 19. 77 The sea urchin is an echinoderm, a small spiny globular animal that feeds off algae and kelp and is related to sea cucumbers and sand dollars. There are over 950 species over the world, with Trongylocentrotus franciscanus, the red sea urchin, most common on the Pacific coast, especially on rocky shorelines sheltered from heavy wave action. Greater densities of the animal are found in shallow areas, making it an accessible food source for the Kwakwaka’wakw. The sea urchin, referred to by Boas as the “sea egg,” was a favoured food of spirits in Kwakwaka’wakw thought, especially those who have the power to protect or harm people. Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 168. 78 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 30. 79 Gunn, A Complete Guide, 19. 80 Ibid., 30. 81 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 175. 82 Ibid., 182.



Notes to pages 132–49  229

83 Raley, Our Totem Poles, 18–19. 84 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 114. 85 Boas, Contributions, 63. 86 Spradley, ed., Guests Never Leave Hungry, see the illustrations between 146 and 147. 87 Ibid, 16. 88 Ibid, 69. 89 Ibid, 16. 90 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 113. 91 Spradley, ed., Guests Never Leave Hungry, 108. 92 Ibid., 69–70 93 Ibid., 70–1. 94 Wilson Duff, Written Haida field notes, notebook #13, PABC GR-809, reel B6043. 95 Ibid. 96 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 31. 97 Ibid. 98 Newcombe Family Papers, PABC MS-1077, box 59, file 7, reel A1769. 99 Ibid. 100 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 314. 101 Ibid, 315–16. 102 [n.a.], Totem Poles of Alert Bay, Alert Bay: U’mista Cultural Centre, n.d., 2. 103 Lou-Ann Ika’wega Neel, personal communication, 11 September 2014. 104 I discuss this practice in detail as it relates to the Tsimshian-speaking peoples in “A Faith of Stone” and also in “In the Way of the White Man’s Totem Poles.” 105 Stewart and Tait, Looking at Totem Poles. 106 [n.a.], Totem Poles of Alert Bay, 2. 107 Wilson Duff, Written Haida field notes, notebook #13, PABC GR-809, reel B6043. 108 Judith Ostrowitz and Aldona Jonaitis, “Postscript: The Treasures of Siwidi,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 258. 109 Holm, Smoky-Top, 67. 110 Rohner and Bettauer, The Kwakiutl, 54. 111 Wilson Duff, Written Haida field notes, notebook #13, PABC GR-809, reel B6043. 112 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 41. 113 Spradley, ed., Guests Never Leave Hungry, 30. 114 Ibid., 60. 115 Ibid., 86–87. 116 Ibid., 161. 117 UBC MOA catalogue. 118 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 43–5. 119 Ibid., 20. 120 Anglican Diocese Archives of British Columbia, file 2004.45, text 760, Totem. 121 PABC, Newcombe family files, MS 1762, add. mss. vol. 58, file 34. 122 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 70 123 Anglican Diocese Archives of British Columbia, St Paul’s royal naval station and garrison church, Esquimalt, minutes of the church committee, box 10, book 4, Minutes of the ninth regular meeting held in the church house, 2 October 1925.

230  Notes to pages 149–61

1 24 Ibid. 125 BCPM, Report of the Provincial Museum for the Year 1957, C24. 126 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 166. 127 Anglican Diocese Archives of British Columbia, Christ Church Parish Vestry meeting minutes in mission house, text 271, box 1 of 6. 128 Anglican Diocese Archives of British Columbia, British Columbia Diocesan Board of Anglican Church Women fonds, meeting minutes 9 January 1924, 23 January 1925, and 12 February 1925. 129 Charlie Nowell to C.F. Newcombe, October 25, 1908, PABC, Newcombe family files, MS 1077, B06047, add. mss, vol. 43, folder 21. 130 Charlie Nowell to C.F. Newcombe, September, 1921, PABC, Newcombe family files, MS 1077, B06047, add. mss, vol. 43, folder 23. 131 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 87. 132 Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, 137. 133 Ibid., 139. 134 Holm, Smoky-Top, 44–5. Chapter Five: Model Poles and Curio Items 1 Hawker, Tales of Ghosts, 116. 2 Jonaitis and Glass, The Totem Pole, 131. 3 Ibid., 130. 4 Townsend-Gault, “Circulating Aboriginality,” 185. 5 Ibid., 192. 6 Ibid., 186. 7 Macnair and Hoover, The Magic Leaves. 8 Cole, Captured Heritage. 9 Hinckley, “The Inside Passage.” 10 Hawker, “The Johnson Street Gang.” 11 Jonathan Batkin, “Pueblo Pottery and the Early Curio Trade,” in Phillips and Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture, 282–97. 12 This list is based on photographs from the Alaska State Library and correspondence from Nelson Wahlstrom to Erna Gunther, dated 20 May 1953 and provided to me by the Burke Museum. 13 Duncan, 1001 Curious Things. 14 Jonaitis and Glass, The Totem Pole, 123. 15 [Anon.], “Mabel E. Waters dies; Ran Bear Totem,” Wrangell Sentinel, 7 April 1976, 6. 16 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 14. 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 32. 19 Ibid., 37. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Ibid. 22 Phillips and Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of the Cultural Encounter,” in Phillips and Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture, 9.



Notes to pages 165–83  231

23 Tippett, Bill Reid, 89. 24 Wilson Duff, Written Haida field notes, notebook #13, PABC GR-809, reel B6043. 25 Ibid. 26 Barbeau, Totem Poles, vol. 1, 155 27 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 256. 28 Online biography, Seattle Art Museum. 29 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 127–8. 30 PABC, Newcombe family files, MS 1762, add. mss, vol. 58, file 34. 31 Beavers (Castor canadensis) rarely appear in Kwakwaka’wakw art, although they were a pervasive presence in the riverine systems of the Pacific coast and hunted for their pelts in the nineteenth century. Semi-aquatic and active at night, they were another animal that moved from one zone to another. Their famous damming activities increase the flow of seasonally dry rivers and thereby the possibility of salmon spawning. The Kwakwaka’wakw recognized the beaver for its industriousness and prayed over its slain body: “I wanted to catch you because I wish you to give me your ability to work, that I may be like you; for there is no work that you cannot do, You-ThrowingDown-In-One-Day, you Tree-feller, you Owner-of-Weather, and also that no evil befall me in what I’m doing, friend.” Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 157. 32 Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 315. 33 Jonaitis and Glass, The Totem Pole, 157–8. 34 Malin, Totem Poles, 171. 35 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 124–32. 36 Hawker, Tales of Ghosts, 169. 37 Anglican Diocese Archives of British Columbia, St Paul’s royal naval station and garrison church, Esquimalt, minutes of the church committee, box 10, book 4, Minutes of the ninth regular meeting held in the church house, 2 October 1925. 38 UBC MOA catalogue notes. 39 Ibid. 40 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 178. 41 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 233. 42 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 27. 43 Jacknis, “George Hunt, Collector of Indian Specimens,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 198. Chapter Six: Two-Dimensional Art 1 The Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) was an important food fish for the Kwakwa­ ka’wakw people and became an industrially important fish with the arrival of Europeans. Available all year long, it is a bottom-feeder, found as deep as 900 metres, and can be large, up to 15 kilograms in weight. The Kwakwaka’wakw caught rock cod with hooks attached to lines made of kelp. The hooks were sunk with weights and the lines attached to buoys made of bladder. Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, 8. 2 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 250. 3 Dawn, The Northwest Coast Native Print, 5. 4 Ibid.

232  Notes to pages 183–202

5 Ibid. 6 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 250. 7 Dawn, Northwest Coast Native Print, 9–11. 8 Quoted in Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, 43. 9 Dawn, The Northwest Coast Native Print, 11. 10 Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons, 85–131. 11 Ibid., 122. 12 I discuss these developments in detail in Tales of Ghosts. 13 Macnair, Hoover, and Neary, The Legacy, 96. 14 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 250. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 87. 17 Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 61. 18 Malin, Northwest Coast Indian Painting, 87–8. 19 Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, 216–17. 20 Ibid., 217. 21 Ibid., 187. 22 The sculpin, or sea scorpion, is a fish that often grows no more than 9 centimetres. It is known by its Latin nomenclature Scorpaeniformes and has eleven suborders. The suborder Cottoidei is the most common in the North Pacific and further consists of many subvariations, including the bullhead. A small, territorial fish, it has fierce scales on both its gills and spine and can disguise itself as a barnacle. A bottom-­ feeder, it is found in both fresh and salt water in British Columbia. Hawthorn notes that sculpins, like loons, killer whales, and frogs, all have an affinity with copper and treasure. Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 28. 23 BCPM, Report of the Provincial Museum for the Year 1953, B21. 24 Savard, Images from the Likeness House, 44. 25 Joseph, “Behind the Mask,” in Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 28. 26 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 56. 27 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 228. 28 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 35. 29 Ibid. 30 Duff, The Killer Whale Copper. 31 Jonaitis, ed.,“Chiefly Feasts,” in Chiefly Feasts, 40. 32 Holm, Smoky-Top, 61. 33 Ibid., 67. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 126–38. 37 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 33. 38 Suttles, “Streams of Property, Armor of Wealth,” in Jonaitis, ed., Chiefly Feasts, 90. 39 Ibid. 40 Kramer, Kesu’, 87.



Notes to pages 202–12  233

41 Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 203. 42 The mythological character of frog would be based, at least in part, on the behaviour of the Pacific tree frog, Pseudacris regilla, a small amphibian found in the North Pacific that breeds in freshwater and can be found from the coastal shoreline up to an altitude of 10,000 feet. As with many of the creatures celebrated in Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial cycles, it has a transformative ability. It was able to live in myriad environments, move from water to land and back, and change colour from brown to green. It begins to mate during the winter months, at around the same time as the ćέqa, with the males migrating to water and ribbeting loudly to call the females. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Savard, Images from the Likeness House, 44. 48 Lavoie, “First Nation protest.” 49 George Hunt, Jr, personal communication, 3 July 2013. 50 Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 194. 51 Ibid., 28. 52 Sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus), known commonly as the Steller sea lion, congregate in rookeries in May, where males establish set territories. The males have earflaps, unlike harbour seals. They are large animals, hunted for food and fur, although their fur was lowest in value in the nineteenth century fur trade. In Kwakwaka’wakw thought, sea lions were the living house posts of Komokwa’s house. Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 28. 53 Ibid. 54 Pacific harbour seals (Phoca vitulina), another social animal residing within Kwakwaka’wakw territories, prefer to remain in familiar resting sites, where they haul themselves out of the water to rest, rarely straying farther than 20 kilometres offshore. Harbour seals don’t have ear flaps, which gives them a distinctive, earless appearance. They typically give birth in the early summer. Seals had a strong affinity with Komokwa as well. The initiated Hamatsa and war dancers referred to themselves as Seals. Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians, 37. 55 Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven, 232. 56 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 133. 57 Ibid., 24. 58 Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art, p.28. Conclusion 1 Meuli, Shadow House, 326. 2 Holm, Smoky-Top, 48. 3 Phillips and Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter,” in Unpacking Culture, 3. 4 Macnair, Joseph, and Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky, 53.

234  Notes to pages 212–15

5 Holm, Smoky-Top, 29. 6 Martine Reid, “In Search of Things Past, Remembered, Retraced, and Reinvented,” in Canadian Museum of Civilization, ed., In the Shadow of the Sun, 75. 7 Townsend-Gault, “Circulating Aboriginality,” 197. 8 Ostrowitz, Privileging the Past, 8. 9 Hawker, Tales of Ghosts, 115–22. 10 Malin, Totem Poles, 171.

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INDEX

Alert Bay (Yalis), 5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 27, 32, 38, 44, 60, 71, 74, 86, 92, 96, 110, 117, 119, 132, 133, 135, 137, 145, 150, 155, 161, 166 Alfred, Agnes (Ack-koo), 12, 128 Alfred, Flora, 132, 133 Alfred, Moses, 19, 133 Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia, 21, 150 American Museum of Natural History, 82, 88, 121, 180 Anfield, F. Earl, 22, 186 Angermann, Donald, 19 Assu, Dan, 21 Atlakim, 78, 119, 198 Bakbakwalanooksiwae (άxwbakwalanuxwsiwε?), 76, 77, 80, 199 Barbeau, Marius, 14, 45, 121, 125, 166, 175 Barrett, Samuel, 29, 98 Beans, Mary, 89, 100 Bell, Jim, 133 Blunden Harbour (Ba’a’s), 44, 45, 60, 61 Boas, Franz, 6, 11, 29, 30, 31, 34, 38, 44, 76, 92, 95, 98, 108, 120, 124 Bondsound, Arthur, 45, 60

Cape Mudge (Ceqʷəl̓utən), 20 Ćέqa (Tseka, Tsetseka, Cedar Bark Dance), 10, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 111, 181 Charlie, Sam, 89, 91 Chief George, 44 Christ Church Cathedral Memorial Hall, 38, 147–9, 202 Clark, Johnny, 128 Clutesi, George, 183–5, 197 Coast Salish, 11 Codere, Helen, 76, 173 Constance, Sara (Abaya’a), 126 Copper, 77, 85, 94, 97, 114, 168, 190, 195 Cranmer, Dan, 19, 76, 94, 108, 134, 168 Cramner, Doug, 5, 33, 35, 201 Cranmer, Emma, 94 Cranmer potlatch, 19, 20, 21, 27, 76, 98, 114, 150 Crosby, Marcia, 34 Curtis, Edward, 130 Davis, John, 45 Dawn, Leslie, 183–4 De Laguna, Frederica, 121 Denver Art Museum, 100, 103, 159 Dluwalakha (Tlogwe Noontlem, Klasila), 78, 80, 88, 92, 94, 98, 103, 111, 114, 119, 120, 139, 144

242 Index

Duff, Wilson, 12, 32, 118, 134, 139, 144, 165, 195 Dzawa̱da̱’enux̱w, 9 Dzawadi, 9 Dzunukwa (Dzonoqwa or Tsonokwa), 64, 65, 88, 97, 114, 139, 147, 168, 180 Eagle, 100 Ebbets, Mary, 29, 120 Edenshaw, Charles, 35, 165 Fort McLoughlin, 119 Fort Rupert (Tsax̱is), 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 21, 38, 44, 61, 72, 76, 82, 98, 100, 103, 109–10, 119, 120, 133, 139, 159, 175 Galokwudzuwis, 80, 82 George, Charlie, Jr, 44, 45, 106, 183 George, Charlie, Sr, 44 Gilford Island, 11, 60, 61, 82, 142 Glass, Aaron, 32, 33, 155, 173 Glenbow Museum, 111, 121, 204 Gunther, Erna, 32 Gwasila (Gwa’sa̱la), 98, 103, 119, 121, 124 Gwawaenuk (Gwawa̱’enux̱w), 11, 60 Gwayasdums (G̱wa’yasda̱ms), 13, 61, 73, 130, 133, 193 Gwayi (Gwa’yi), 130, 151 Gwekelis (Gwikalis, Wyclese, or Waitlas, Quascilla), 124 Hahuamis, 60 Haida, 33, 35, 158 Halibut, 77 Hall, Jim, 19 Halliday, William, 20, 96 Hamatsa, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 98, 144, 199, 201 Harris, Bob, 21, 45, 60, 92, 95, 109, 135, 183 Harris, Joseph, 155, 166 Hawkins, Dick, 45 Hawthorn, Audrey, 33, 35, 44, 81, 94, 97, 98, 108, 117, 181, 189, 202 Hawthorn, Harry, 33 Heiltsuk, 119

Heye, George, 27, 28, 96 Hibben, Frank, 128 Hokeah, Jack, 186, 197 Hokhokw, 79, 82, 199 Holm, Bill, 6, 32, 34, 35, 44, 45, 61, 142, 195, 198 Hoover, Alan, 35, 189 Hunt, Charlie, 20 Hunt, David, 120, 128 Hunt, George, 6, 11, 28, 29, 82, 88, 91, 94, 98, 103, 108, 112, 120, 121, 131, 132, 190 Hunt, Helen, 125 Hunt, Henry, 25, 65, 98, 185 Hunt, Richard, 65, 98 Hunt, Robert, 28, 120 Hunt, Tony, 25, 65, 183, 185 Indian Act, 17, 19, 21 Jacobsen, Johan Adrian, 28 James, Emma, 14, 137 James, Lucy Lilac, 12, 137, 147 Johnson, Herbert, 45, 61, 151 Jonaitis, Aldona, 100, 103, 155, 173, 195 Kabotie, Fred, 186, 193 Kalugwis (Ḵalug̱wis), 16, 19, 112, 126, 128, 129 Kawages, 111 Kaniki’lakw (Khanekelaq), 85, 175 Killer whale, 85, 126, 131, 190 King George V, 151 Knox, Helen, 92 Komkiutis, 10, 12 K’omoks, 11 Komokwa (Kumugwe, Qomogwa), 11, 75, 77, 85, 97, 100, 103–4, 109, 127, 139, 190, 198, 202, 206 Komoyoi, 10, 11, 92, 131 Kramer, Jennifer, 35, 201 Kugwisilaogwa, 9 Kwakiutl (Kwaguʼł), 9, 10, 12, 44, 61, 92, 94, 95, 129 Kwakwakawalanooksiwae, 80, 81 Kwankwanxwaliga, 75



Kweeha , 10, 61, 94 Kwikw, 11, 100 Kwikwesutinux (Ḵwiḵwa̱sut̓inux̱w), 12, 14, 45, 60, 82, 85, 94, 133, 150, 151, 198 L’arhotlas (Tlaho-glass), 117, 134, 166 Lekwiltok (Liq̓ʷala), 9, 19 Loon, 77, 106, 108 Macnair, Peter, 35. 42, 45, 94, 96–7, 100, 114, 189 Mamalilikulla (Mamaliliḵa̱la), 9, 12, 14, 19, 91, 100, 106, 112, 132, 133, 198 Martin (Yax’nukwala), 14 Martin, David, 81 Martin, Herbert, 14, 19 Martin, Mungo, 5, 14, 15, 17, 25, 32, 33, 34, 65, 67, 71, 73, 81, 86, 88, 95, 97, 98, 100, 106, 111, 124, 125, 126, 128, 139, 144, 152, 159, 165, 173, 179, 183, 187, 189, 193, 198, 199, 201 Martin, Spruce, 14, 19 McGregor, Walter, 33 McKenna–McBride Commission, 17, 21, 74, 121, 125, 129 Memkoolish (’Mimkumlis), 3, 133 Meuli, Jonathan, 33, 92 Milwaukee Public Museum, 29, 159 Mink, 94, 95, 110, 126, 127 Morgan, Judith, 183, 185, 197 Mountain, Harry, 106 Museum für Völkerkunde, 28 Museum of Anthropology, 33, 35, 45, 81, 88, 97, 166 Nakwoktak (’Nak̕ waxda’x̱w), 45, 119, 121, 124 Namugwis, 11, 92 ’Namxxelagayu, 27, 29, 35, 36, 60, 67, 71, 73, 74, 110 Naqemgilisala, 11 National Museum of the American Indian, 27, 28, 35, 88, 96 Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, 21, 152

Index  243

Nawitti (T̕ łat̕ łasik̕ wala), 9 Neary, Kevin, 35, 189 Neel, David, 179 Neel, Ellen, 5, 13, 14, 22, 42, 44, 64, 79, 147, 159, 160, 173, 183-184 Neel, Lou-Ann Ika’wega, 137 Neel, Ted, 14 New Design Gallery, 25 Newcombe, C.F., 91, 94, 100, 147, 183 Newman, Charlie, 12, 14, 15, 75, 76, 147, 150 Nimpkish (’Na̱mg̱is), 9, 12, 19, 25, 33, 60, 73, 74, 85, 108, 117, 119, 133, 135, 137 Nina, Sara (Sara Finlay, Sara Nin, ’Nagedzi), 13, 14, 130 Nowell, Charles, 20, 94, 128 Nowell, Tom, 20 Numaym (numayma, numemot, numema or namima), 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 25, 27, 45, 74, 75, 80, 85, 95, 100, 103, 108, 112, 124, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 137, 152, 190, 198 Nuu-chah-nulth, 21, 159, 183 Nuxalk, 130, 133 Nuyamil, 27, 120, 183 Nuyamtsawe, 10 Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre, 20, 88 Ohmid, Tom, 125 Omal, 11, 103 Orchard, William C., 27 Oowikeno (Wuikinuxv), 103, 119 Port Hardy, 40, 125 Potlatch, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 75, 80, 88, 94, 127, 128, 142 Portland Art Museum, 82, 179, 199 Price, Dick, 44 Quadra Island, 20 Queen Elizabeth II, 128 Quatsino Sound (G̱usgimukw), 9, 92 Qulos (Kulus, kolus), 65, 67, 75, 85, 125, 130, 155, 171, 198 Raley, George, 32, 130, 132, 166 Reid, Bill, 25, 33

244 Index

Royal British Columbia Museum, 42, 64, 65, 91, 94, 98, 108, 121, 149, 153, 161, 188, 204 Salmon, 108, 109, 111 Salmon, Jeff, 137 Salmon, Mabel, 137 Sandhill Crane, 77, 100 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 19, 96 Scow, Alfred, 88 Scow, Barry, 88 Scow, John, 73, 111, 119 Scow, William, 21, 110, 152 Sculpin, 77, 139, 171, 193 Sea Eagle, 121, 139, 144, 171 Seattle, 32, 120, 121 Seattle Art Museum, 86, 88 Seaweed, Joe, 44, 81 Seaweed, Willie, 35, 44, 60, 64, 67, 79, 81, 100, 151, 165 Serigraphy, 25, 183 Sewid, James, 21, 128, 132, 145 Sewid-Smith, Tom, 126 Se-wit (Si-wit), 139, 190, 193 Shaiks, 120 Shaughnessy, Arthur, 22, 45, 166–9 Sisaxo’las, 124, 131–4, 139, 160 Sisiutl (sisiyutl), 75, 86, 94, 95, 109, 111, 114, 117, 127, 144, 171, 174, 189 Smith Inlet (T̓a̱kus), 44, 60, 61, 100, 124 Smith, Peter (Sewidanaquilla, also spelled Siwid’nakwala, Adatsa), 112, 126 Smith, Sewid, 112 Speck, Henry (Ozistalis), 5, 22, 25, 35, 184, 187 Speck, Wedlidi, 91 Stanley Park, 45, 117, 130, 137, 155 St Michael’s Residential School, 5, 22, 184, 186 Swanton, John, 33 Tatantsit, 98, 121, 124, 139 Tataxwus, 110

Thomas Burke Museum, 100, 114, 159 Thunderbird, 38, 64, 67, 85, 92, 98, 100, 109, 117, 130, 134, 139, 151, 155, 160, 168, 174, 204 Thunderbird and bear poles, 117, 155, 166 Tlawitsis (Ławitsis), 112, 129 Tlingit, 119 Tongass, 29, 120 Tsawatainuk, 60, 61, 111, 130, 168 Tsawidi, 119 Tsekame, 12, 75, 82, 98, 144, 149-151, 168171, 175, 198, 202 Tsimshian, 111, 119 Tsuna, 75 Tuxwi’d (Tokwit, ’ma’maka, and hawinalat), 86, 88 U’mista Cultural Centre, 20, 91, 92, 149 University of British Columbia, 33, 35, 81, 88, 97 University of Washington, 32, 100, 114 Vancouver, 32, 38, 75, 130, 137, 155 Vancouver City Museum, 38, 139, 142, 161, 171, 181, 190, 193 Victoria, 32, 125, 159 Village Island, 3, 19, 38, 106–7, 139 Walas Kwakiutl, 9, 10, 60, 61, 125, 130, 132, 150 Walkus, Charlie G., 44, 45 Wamiss, Tom Patch, 45, 151 Waters, Walter C., 114, 159 Webber, William, 5, 22, 32, 75, 161, 190, 193, 202 Whannack, Ed, 133, 144, 145, 152 Whulk (Xwa̱lkw), 60 Winagama’yi, 10 Winalgilis, 78, 86 Wolf, 95, 175 Yurhwayu, 45