in her kitchen (photograph by Margaret Blackman)
I always liked sitting here and writing, looking up now and then to see Hannah (who lives next door) going in or out and collecting my thoughts as I watched the changing configurations of the western skies. But now a plank ledge runs the length of the window and the foliage of some fifty African violets sitting on it obscures much of the view. A fuchsia hangs from the ceiling and its embrace with a leggy geranium blots out Emma Matthews’ house ….”
Even the long plank could not contain all the products of Nani’s amazing green thumb; I discovered yet more African violets atop the washing machine, their leaves aflutter when the machine entered its spin cycle.
Nani’s house is seldom inactive, and then only for a relatively short period, as she typically retires at 11:30 and arises as early as 5 A.M. Usually there are other boarders; various children, children-in-law, and grandchildren drop by during the day, and the health aide stops in on her rounds of the village. Hannah Parnell and Dora Brooks, Robert Davidson’s lineage nieces, and Carrie Weir, a sister’s daughter, appear every day or so to visit and have tea; and, not infrequently, someone from New Masset comes by to introduce a visiting friend to Nani.
Nani’s tremendous energy is evident in the wonderful creative confusion that pervades her home. On a typical day loaves and loaves of bread rise in the kitchen under the protective covers of fresh linen towels; the combined vapors from a pot of stew and the kettle of “Indian medicine” beside it on the stove mingle and steam the kitchen window; an unfinished cedar bark hat stands spiderlike on the front room dining table; a small cat darts under a chair rustling the wide dry strips of cedar bark draped over it; Nani’s crocheting lies where she left it on one of the front room chesterfields; the kitchen radio blaring messages to people in remote mainland communities competes with “The Edge of Night” emanating from the television in the front room; in the smokehouse adjacent to the house, Nani hangs halibut fillets on racks above the smoldering alder fire. Such was the setting in which Nani related her life story to me. Why she agreed to relate it is the result of several factors, among them her familiarity with anthropological inquiry, the compatibility of the life history mode with Haida values, and, not insignificantly, her relationship to me.
From the time she was very young Florence Davidson was aware of the interest of outsiders in Haida culture and artifacts. Her father worked for C. F. Newcombe of the Provincial Museum in Victoria as an informant and artist, and Florence recalls Newcombe’s many visits to her father’s home. She is too young to have had personal memories of John Swanton, who relied upon both her father and her uncle as informants and resided with the latter during his fieldwork in 1900–1901, but she may have heard them speak of him. In the later years of her marriage the Davidson home was frequented by the occasional anthropologist. Wilson Duff, for example, interviewed Florence more than once about her father and his forebears, and Mary Lee Stearns visited the Davidson home several times in 1965–66 to interview Robert Davidson during the course of her study of contemporary Masset culture (Stearns 1975, 1981).
Following the death of her husband in 1969, Florence emerged as a knowledgeable elder in her own right. In addition to her work with me, which began in 1970, she served as an informant on Haida ethnobotany for Nancy Turner in 1970 and 1971 (Turner 1974). In 1974 Florence was one of several Haida elders who contributed data to Marjorie Mitchell for a multi-media curriculum project on the Haida. In the early 1970s Florence worked briefly with linguists Barbara Efrat and Robert Levine of the British Columbia Provincial Museum, and since 1975 she has served as a linguistic informant for John Enrico, now a permanent boarder in her home. Moreover, she has appeared at museum openings as an elder ambassador of her culture, publicly demonstrated her skills at basket and button blanket making, and welcomed into her Masset home countless friends of white friends interested in Haida culture and eager to learn something of it from this grandmotherly representative.
In a brief life history of Flora Zuni, Panday cautions that the life history is not a natural or universal narrative mode among American Indians, noting that “Pueblo traditions do not provide any model of such confessional introspection” (1978:217). I am not certain if the life history is a Haida narrative form, but certainly as an anthropological form it is compatible with Haida traditions. The phrase used repeatedly by Florence Davidson during the course of her narration and selected by her as the title of this work—“during my time”—is a free translation of an often used Haida time referent, di ؟eneng ge gUt ən di Unsɨdɨng, “I see it [or, I know it] all of my lifetime.” Such personalization of events goes hand-in-hand with the well-known emphasis in Northwest Coast culture upon the individual. The importance of rank, the feasting and potlatching that encouraged competition and individual expression, the custom of acquiring newly invented names at potlatches, and the mortuary potlatch as a vehicle for formally remembering a person long after his or her death (see Blackman 1973), all exemplify the significance of the individual in traditional Haida culture. Though Florence lamented the ordinariness of her life, the question “Why would anyone be interested in my life story?” understandably never arose.
Finally, although some anthropologists, such as Kluckhohn (1945:97), have regretted the intrusion of the anthropologist into the native life-history document, it goes without saying that the relationship between anthropologist and life-history subject is critical to the telling of the story in the first place and ultimately to the understanding of the final record. I agree with Brumble, who notes that “much of the fascination [with life histories is] a result of, rather than in spite of, their being so often collaborative” (1981:2).
Florence Davidson and I come from different worlds and different generations. Her children, the welfare of her family, and the church have been the focus of her long life; I have no children and at the center of my life is my academic career. She has lived the life of a housewife and mother, and I have not. How strange I must sometimes seem to her, spending long periods of time far from home, traveling freely, childless at an age when I should have a large family of my own. “How’s your big family,” she often teases me when we talk long distance. I once asked her what I might do to show I had “respect for myself,” an important Haida virtue. “Dress up and stay home,” she retorted, with laughter in her eyes. Yet our cultural, social, and age differences are softened by the mutual respect and affection we have developed over the years of our collaboration and friendship. My own grandmothers, strong, creative women and important figures in my childhood, did not survive into my adulthood. In many important ways, Nani has filled that gap in my life. Her life history was given to me, I think, as an anthropologist dedicated to learning the “old-fashioned ways,” as a granddaughter curious about a grandmother’s past, and as a woman interested in the events and people that shape women’s lives. I doubt that Florence Davidson could have comfortably related her life history to me before I had established my commitment to learning about her culture, and I am certain that she could not have told her story to a man.
Although I had written Nani regarding arrangements for the project, we did not discuss it in any detail until my arrival in Masset. That first night I indicated to Nani that it would be nice to include what she knew about her ancestors. She thought for a moment and began relating how her father and grandfather had seen lucky signs in the woods, how her mother and her mother’s mother’s sister had been rescued from the smallpox epidemic, and how her grandfather had been called to take the chieftainship at Kiusta. When I protested that I had not yet unpacked my tape recorder, she replied, smiling, “It’s OK, I was just practicing for tomorrow.”
The following day she deliberated for some time about where to begin her narrative and settled on the drowning of her brother Robert, which occurred one month before her birth. From that point on, however, there was little chronological order to the narrative. Often she would select a topic to initiate the day’s recording: “Let’s talk about when my mother and I used to go for spruce roots”; or, “Did I tell you about the time when we built this house?” On other occasions she would leave the decision up to me, asking, “What shall we talk about?” or commanding, “You ask me questions.”
