Anthropology and First Nations in British Columbia

Abstract

Observations about human society and culture by academically trained visitors to British Columbia began long before anthropology was a recognized discipline (for a summary, see Suttles and Jonaitis 1990, 73ff.)Specialists attached to military and trading expeditions made the first ethnographic and linguistic observations. Collections of such information by visitors and resident immigrants continued during the long scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (Cole 1985) in the nineteenth century. The first and most influential of academic anthropologists to give attention to the cultures of the province was Franz Boas, who began his research on the Northwest Coast of British Columbia in 1886, and continued until 1931 (Rohner, 309-13). Working from Columbia University in New York, Boas trained and collaborated with two other important British Columbia researchers, George Hunt, a part Tlingit man raised among Kwakwaka'wakw of Fort Rupert, and James Teit, a Scot with wide experience of Nlka'pamuxw and other Salish nations of the interior. In the same period there were numerous other observers, such as Charles Hill-Tout, English immigrant farmer and schoolmaster, who conducted research among Salish people (Maud 1978), and G. M. Dawson of the Ottawa-based Geological Survey of Canada, who contributed to linguistic and ethnological studies over a wide area (Cole and Lockner 1989, 18-22). First Nations continued to attract formally trained anthropologists who visited briefly and then returned to their distant home universities. By the mid-point of the present century almost every language group in the province had been visited and written about by one or more ethnographers. The most significant feature of all this work, and the integrating theme, was research of the sort that has come to be called, sometimes pejoratively, salvage ethnography. Its purpose was to record from experienced and