of the Nancy Reagans and the Donald Trumps. The life story is also seen—for a price—as anyone’s route to immortality or at least to a place, however modest, in history. The February 1989 issue of the popular high-tech catalogue The Sharper Image made the following limited offer to its more up-scale customers: “Hold the story of your life in your hands in a custom-written, leather-bound biography.” Touted as a personalized treasure that would only appreciate in value with each reading, it was available for a mere $27,000. Appealing to a much wider audience, the U. S. Postal Service in 1988 offered free genealogical charts as part of a program encouraging children, through oral history interviews, to learn from their grandparents their family history. Works such as William Zimmerman’s How to Tape Instant Oral Biographies and the Foxfire series also make the point that the life history is not confined to the rarefied realm of the academy but is a form of endeavor open to all.
The life history is enjoying a renewed popularity in Anthropology as well. The sharing of ethnographic authority, the growing recognition of multivocality, heterogeneity, and cultural diversity within cultures once oversimplified as homogeneous have bestowed increased credibility and value on personal experience and individual narratives. No longer justified primarily in terms of what they reveal about culture or how they amplify other ethnographic data, life histories are increasingly being read and understood as texts that reveal the multiple ways in which people conceptualize, integrate, and present their lives to others.
More difficult to calculate is the personal value of the life history. For both the subject and the interviewer, the life history endeavor holds a gift. For the narrator, it offers an unparalleled opportunity for life review to an attentive audience; for the interviewer, it offers the receipt of a well-told story with all its insights, reflections, and shared experience. As one anthropologist confessed, the life history endeavor is “a constant meditation on life.”8 For Florence and me, the process is ongoing; I return each year not only to renew our close personal relationship and to have my daughter know the woman she calls her great Nani, but to continue to touch and learn from the life Florence has shared with me.
MARGARET B. BLACKMAN
January 1992
1. See, for example, Keesing (1983), Underhill (1978). Marjorie Shostak is in the process of writing a second edition of Nisa. Other accounts ask new questions of old texts: e.g., Krupat (1985), Brumble (1988), Bataille and Sands (1984).
2. See, for example, Marcus and Fischer (1986), Clifford and Marcus (1986), and Clifford (1988).
3. See Ames (1986:43–44).
4. Marjorie Shostak, personal communication.
5. Proper and skilled speechmaking is a valued Haida attribute, so it is not surprising that such concerns would extend to the biographer of a Haida. See Boelscher (1988) for a discussion of contemporary Haida speechmaking.
6. Biographical accounts of the artistic careers and works of Haida artists Robert Davidson and Bill Reid have appeared (Stewart 1979; Shadbolt 1986), and there are biographical accounts of past Haida as well (Robinson 1978; Morley 1967). However, all these differ considerably from the life history.
7. Just within Florence’s family since 1987, in addition to her birthday feast, there have been three memorial potlatches, two totem-pole raisings, and the taking up of a chieftainship; planned for the fall of 1991 is another headstone-moving and a totem-pole raising.
8. Gelya Frank, personal communication.
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
Poets and photographers refer to them as the Misty Isles—the Queen Charlottes, nestled in the sometimes turbulent waters off the northern mainland coast of British Columbia. These islands hold for me, as for the many others who live or visit here, a special enchantment. I have marked my life’s most weighty problems in measured footsteps along the sandy miles of spruce-rimmed North Beach, watched the moon rise in full splendor above the yawning tranquil mouth of the Yakoun River where the Masset Haida go to fish each spring for salmon. And, at times, my mind has glimpsed fleeting shadows from the islands’ past: Haida hunters in search of seals at the land’s edge, women and children roasting the lupine roots they called “black bear’s tail” in stone-lined pits on the meadowland of Rose Spit. For me, there stand before the mile-long row of modern houses in the Haida village of Masset fading images of cedar-plank community houses, oversize animals entwined in their skyward climb up cedar totem poles, and long, graceful canoes beached above the high-tide mark, images known now only in photographs taken by adventurous visitors from the last century. As late as 1970, when I first came to know the Queen Charlottes, these images were recalled in the memories of a few elderly Haida who had been born in the old-style houses, but today, eleven years later, they and their remembrances have gone to their ancestors.
I have made the journey from the urban East to the Queen Charlottes several times. In 1970 I came with my former husband, Jim Blackman, to spend the year studying Haida culture history gleaned from the memories of Haida elders and from the volumes of museum and archival photographs I had amassed. Two years passed before I returned to the islands in the summer of 1973 to research changing Haida kinship organization. The following summer I came again, to study the traditional and changing relationship of the Haida people to their natural environment. In August of 1975 I flew to the Charlottes with my colleague and friend, now husband, Ed Hall to introduce him to “my” Misty Isles.
In 1977 I made the journey twice, ostensibly for study purposes but as much for sentimental as academic reasons. I had come to fulfill a promise made to Florence Edenshaw Davidson of Masset in 1973: we would, one of these days, sit together and record her life history, which would eventually be published as a book. I had never seriously questioned why I would do it, save when justification had to be made to secure funding for the project. Justification for me lay in my personal relationship to Florence Davidson. She had served as my main female teacher in my previous Haida studies and we had developed a close working relationship; she had taken me into her home and I lived with her during most of my field research; but, most importantly, she accepted me, as she has others, as a grandchild. To live once again in her home, to learn from her, to be a recipient of her sparkling humor and grandmotherly love—these were the main reasons I found myself on a plane from Vancouver bound for the Queen Charlotte Islands in January and again in June of 1977.
Then as I flew northward, and now as I write, my visual images of Florence Davidson are vivid. A short, sturdy woman whose once black hair has grayed in front, she has a dignity and bearing which make her seem taller than she really is. In 1977 she was eighty-one, but her physical strength and energy, her involvement in Masset ceremonial life, and her mental spirit belie her years. I see her now, dressed in an elegant long black dress, Haida carved gold bracelets encircling both arms, standing to make a speech in Haida at a feast, most likely a feast she herself has hosted. In the early mornings I often awoke to find her in a housedress or bathrobe pummelling down the mound of bread dough rising in an enormous enamel washbasin on the kitchen table. I remember her from 1973 in slacks, headscarf, and gumboots, expertly slicing salmon at her Yakoun River fish camp where I had joined her for the several days she spent putting up her annual stock of sockeye. I recall a photograph I took of her in 1971, dressed in hat and gloves about to depart for an Anglican Church Women’s conference at a Nass River Indian village. Her gloved hands clutched two large tins of seaweed which she had dried to trade with the Nass natives for eulachon grease. Most often, though, I see her laughing, talking in Haida to a visitor over a cup of tea as they sit at the old oak table in her ample kitchen.
I have seen her, too, through the eyes of others. Weaving a hat, she smiles from the pages of Ulli Steltzer’s Indian Artists at Work (1976). She appears in two National Film Board of Canada films (“Haida Carver” and “This was the Time”), which feature her artist grandson
