Dynamic Traditions: "Cannery Days" at Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology

Abstract

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 enterprises. 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 of central BC. Using interviews with