An Historic Event in the Political Economy of the Tsimshian: Information on the Ownership of the Zimacord District

Abstract

This paper reconstructs and presents a bit of ethnographic information that is based upon a piece of the oral history of the Tsimshian people, a society native to what is now northwestern British Columbia. The value of the history lies not only in the events described, but also in the illustration it provides of relationships between a set of houses in two neighbouring villages prior to the Canadian Confederation. In the history can be seen several aspects of the old property relationships under which the Tsimshian lived, as well as an outline of their social organization. Anthropologically understood, property is a socially embedded definition of relationships between persons within a society. The property piece itself, not necessarily a material object, is a mediation of these relationships, a focus of attention for how persons and groups are to relate to one another. Thus, property defines the rights and obligations people and groups have to each other, setting the limits to the use of the property while demanding adherence to the dominant mores of the community, and re-establishing these relationships in the process. Any particular form of property is always stamped by the impression of the society in which it exists and by which it is defined. In the story about the Zimacord District lies the mark of Tsimshian society attempting to re-assert proper practices towards territorial resource property, and to justify a particular arrangement of ownership, in this case that of the acquisition of property by one group from another. In both the history and the additional associated archival information we encounter a form of ownership of resources that is thoroughly permeated by three principal relationships in Tsimshian social life: residence, descent and associations or sodalities. These three interactive elements, which were central to the Tsimshian political economy because they were also property relationships, provide a convenient framework for conceptualizing the dynamics and organization of Tsimshian social structure. The history is presented in two rather discrete parts: first, the story itself and, second,