the University of British Columbia, which overlooked the opportunity to grant him an honorary degree. 3 He bought a tract of forest and logged it without knowing the first thing about how to do it. 4 He tried to get a commission in the Foresters’ Regiment to fight in France in the 1914–18 war, though he was fifty-eight years of age.5 When other presidencies faded, he became President of the Happier Old Age Club of Vancouver in his eighties. These gestures, among many others,6 put him at risk: the dignified scholar lecturing at a wobbling podium. Voraciously self-tutored, neglecting his livelihood to talk to Native people in a dying language, button-holing the scholarly world with his pet theories, always with great expectations of patronage: he puts himself in a position to be laughed at. Having acknowledged this, one can also say that he actually pulls it off quite well most of the time. His inner dignity is real enough, not something dependent upon the opinions of others. It sees him through.
I have therefore to take exception to a previous study, an M.A. thesis by Judith Banks, entitled Comparative Biographies of Two British Columbia Anthropologists: Charles Hill-Tout and James A. Teit (University of British Columbia, 1970), which discusses Hill-Tout’s supposed crippling alienation and its psychological causes. The author was told by Hill-Tout’s eldest son that his father had been orphaned at about seven years of age, and on the basis of this erroneous information she proposed that his life and work suffered from “separation anxiety” and other debilities that orphans are said to have. 7 Unfortunately she was working without the correspondence and other biographical resources to correct the faulty memory of her interviewee. As the essay “Some Psychical Phenomena Bearing Upon the Question of Spirit Control” shows (below), if we are to pity Hill-Tout, it cannot be because he was an orphan child, since it is clear that he lost his father only after he had reached the age of sixteen, and his mother at some substantial time after that.
Judith Banks is correct, of course, that Hill-Tout as a theorizer on the subjects of evolution, migrations of peoples and languages, will be ignored. His letter to Colonel Powell, Director of the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, D.C., is a case in point. It is included here in lieu of Hill-Tout’s forty-four page article on the “Oceanic Origin of the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish Stocks of British Columbia and Fundamental Unity of Same'” (1898). No matter that Edward Sapir’s Mosan theory, proposing a similar kind of “fundamental unity,” later became widely accepted for a time, and may again; no matter that a future Thor Heyerdahl may prove that the Northwest coast peoples came from where Hill-Tout said they did. The overriding fact is that Hill-Tout went about the matter in a clumsy way, pontificating on shakey ground. J. N. B. Hewitt, after thorough critical examination of the proposal, reported to Powell that Hill-Tout was on entirely the wrong track, relying “solely and primarily on vague resemblances of form to decide the question of the relationship of any two or more terms – a method of procedure at variance with well-recognized rules of comparative grammar.”8 The “Notes on the Cosmogony and History of the Squamish” (in volume II of the present edition) shows him making similar deductions from superficial resemblances between Dene and Chinese words. In this area, Hill-Tout must be discounted. But we are willing to let that overly-speculative side of Hill-Tout go, because of the value of his empirical field work, where pet theories intrude occasionally, but not damagingly.
The “Psychical Phenomena” essay, as a rare autobiographical statement, is informative on Hill-Tout’s special qualifications for fieldresearch. This essay bridges Westminster and New Westminster; for, without the receptive audience in London, i.e. the Society for Psychical Research, whose President was Oliver Lodge and would, in 1911, be Andrew Lang, we might never have learned of the seances conducted in Vancouver, which led our dignified professor to become something of a shaman, travelling beyond the bounds of normal perception and control. The scientist in him wins out in the end, but meanwhile, as an awed participant. Hill-Tout makes an emotional pilgrimage to his dead father in a seance situation. He describes himself at one point grovelling on the floor deranged, at another point nursing a friend in his arms like a mother. A mature man of obvious modesty is here revealing moments of sensitivity, moments when he was not himself. Again, he risks appearing comical, and again the real dignity of the man and his prose wins us over; and moves us, because of what these experiences mean in terms of his future as an ethnologist. In effect, by deliberately inducing extraordinary spirit happenings in a seance he was training for his “vision.” He found out what it was to be possessed, and also knew the bliss of gaining a guardian being. In field work later his informants would surely pick up some sense of his “medicine.” Captain Paul of the Lillooet did, and gave Hill-Tout “one of his ancestral mystery names.” Because of his own journeys into a spirit world, he could talk about these things to Captain Paul and others without hypocrisy. 9
Cartoon in The Vancouver Province, 1934.
One wishes that all Hill-Tout’s work might have been on this level of primary experience, but he was human enough to fill in with secondary material. “Haida Stories and Beliefs” is a notable example of reportage second-hand. He acknowledges indebtedness to the Rev. Mr. Harrison; apparently he was simply using Harrison’s notes. The embarrassment is that Harrison himself published most of these same stories in his book Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (1925), and had even printed some of them before Hill-Tout.10 The piece as it stands is worth preserving in that Harrison nowhere published all the material it contains, notably the Haida songs.
In the Bella Coola review included below there is a similar case, where Hill-Tout presents a legend from an unnamed non-Bella Coola source, possibly a white man. Both these lapses occurred in a time when so little had been put on record that it must have seemed useful to get into print whatever came most immediately to hand, while the serious sustained field work was being prepared, more slowly, for publication.
The review of Boas’ Mythology of the Bella Coola raises the question of Hill-Tout’s professional standing in a further way. A scholar is judged not only by his original work but also by his critical intelligence. Book-reviewing is a self-regulating process by which a profession tries to keep healthy. Hill-Tout apparently did not relish controversy on this level; his review is lethargic, and it is his only one. He resigned his watch-dog role as soon as he began it. Lack of library facilities might have had something to do with it; or, again, his like-minded audience was too far away. It is not that he was lazy; he did keep up — quoting Spencer and Gillen, for instance, as soon as their Australian work was published in 1899. By 1923, when he was called to give the Presidential Address before Section II of the Royal Society of Canada, he was keeping up very well indeed. His topic, “Recent Discoveries and New Trends in Anthropology,” was entirely devoted to the previous two years: field discoveries in Rhodesia, Nebraska, and Patagonia; L. B. Berman’s 1921 book on endocrinology; a recent lecture by Sir Arthur Keith at Johns Hopkins University; and news of something at the University of Alberta “flashed around the world” while his address was being penned. This is “reviewing” of a kind, the continual sifting of materials in order to achieve a cosmology. But one’s true metal shows, not from a Presidential platform, but in the nitty-gritty of book-reviewing. Hill-Tout certainly had independent views and expressed them clearly, but he generally avoided an arena where they would be seriously contested.
Again, these criticisms do not really disturb the ground on which Hill-Tout’s true reputation will rest, the field reports which make up the bulk of The Salish People volumes. John R. Swanton, an amiable and judicious man, probably hit it right in a letter he sent to Hill-Tout on 4 January 1905, by which time five of the field reports were out. “You must keep me informed of the progress of your labors,” he writes, “especially when the time approaches for you to come over to this side.” The Bureau of Ethnology is worried about two neglected areas, Oregon and Washington, and there is a hint of future support there. “After the labors of yourself and Prof. Boas among the Salish, Kwakiutl and Tsimshian, those of Morice among the interior Atha-pascan tribes and of myself among the Haidas and Tlingit we have most of the northwest pretty well covered beyond latitude 49°.”11
