Dynamic Traditions: “Cannery Days” at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology

Abstract

DYNAMIC TRADITIONS: “CANNERY DAYS”AT VANCOUVER’S MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY DIANNE NEWELL AND KATHLEEN PAULSEN The new approaches to the history of production technology view technological change as a dynamic social and cultural process, one in which class, gender, and race intersect. Recently, these ideas found their way into a temporary exhibit, “Cannery Days: A Chapter in the Lives of the Heiltsuk,” at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. The curator of this exhibit, Pamela Windsor (now Pamela Brown), is a Heiltsuk woman from the Indian village of Waglisa (Bella Bella), British Columbia; she undertook the project as a component of her graduate degree in anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her novel look at the Pacific salmon-canning industry effectively counters the conventional wisdom that Indian working women were merely a “reserve army of labor,” powerless victims in traditionally Western, male-dominated, technologically “advanced” en­ terprises. It also presents a unique understanding of the ancient and continuing relationship between Indian peoples and fisheries. On the Pacific coast of North America, from northern California to northern Alaska, salmon canneries represented the introduction of factory-based production in Indian territories. The perfection and adoption of high-speed, continuous-processing machinery was a long process in this industry, and in British Columbia (BC), adoption of the new techniques was especially slow and geographically uneven. Thus handwork remained a vital component of the canning lines, especially for the remote areas and in processing the premium grades and small or irregular tins. Indian women and their families constituted the bulk of the labor force in the BC sector down to the 1960s, when automation, centralization, diversification, and unionization finally transformed the industry and its labor requirements. Three generations of Brown’s family, including herself, have fished and worked in the coastal fish plants ofcentral BC. Using interviews with Dr. Newell is professor of history at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry: A Groom Man’ s Game (1989) and Tangled Webs ofHistory: Indians and the Law in Canada’ s Pacific Coast Fisheries (1993). Ms. Paulsen, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, is studying the role of Indian women in the early settlement of British Columbia.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3504-0006$01.00 864 “Cannery Days’at Vancouver’ s Museum ofAnthropology 865 community members and photographs collected within the community and in various archives, the exhibit looks at the fishing and fish­ processing industry by focusing on the lives and contributions of Indians, especiallywomen, in the salmon cannery built at Namu in 1893. The Namu cannery was a highly successful and persistent operation located in Heiltsuk territory; it was also one of the last of the rural plants to close its doors for good. Brown responded to the challenge of poor funding and low priority for exhibit space for student projects by setting her text and images in a series of twenty-five 30-inch x 22-inch framed panels (see fig. 1), hung two at a time, one above another, on the walls of the museum’s lecture theater. Materials for the panels were already available in the museum workshop, the track lighting was permanendy in place in the theater, and the services of the museum’s designers were available to her. The simple elegance of her “framed stories,” which contain a narrative voice and selected quotations from transcriptions of the taped interviews, all in large type, with photographs and native drawings, effectively convey the intimate relationship between the people, the marine resources of their territories, and technology—both old and new, aboriginal and Western. She says: “By using old photographs to look at the history of canneries like Namu, I was able to gain a better sense of how Heiltsuk women connected their social and family life to their cannery work.” The focus of her primary research effort, however, was interviews, which were transcribed and edited, following a strict ethical review process that involved an academic committee and the Heiltsuk community members interviewed, for use in the exhibit. The 250 pages of transcripts are now...