to demonstrate native involvements in local, regional, and global changes over time. Others have begun the difficult task of analyzing Kwakiutl religion and cosmology, relying especially on the original Kwakwala texts translated and transmitted to Boas by Hunt.1
The Kwakiutl in Time and Place
As significant as “the Kwakiutl” have been for anthropology and for popular audiences, we must not fall into the trap of thinking of them as bearers of some primordial culture, frozen in a moment outside ordinary time. Such an image has tempted the human sciences since the early nineteenth century, when the notion that each people had a distinctive culture of its own first achieved widespread popularity. It is especially ironic for the Kwakiutl to be depicted as unchanging, since Boas selected them for study as much for the fact that their “newly acquired customs had assumed novel significance” as “because they were less affected by the whites than the other tribes” (Boas 1908, in Wike 1957, 302).
To think of Kwakiutl as bearers of a changeless cultural pattern is particularly inappropriate, since their existential conditions have changed in major ways since the times of first contact on the coast in 1774, when a Spanish ship encountered Haida off the Queen Charlotte Islands. James Cook explored Nootka Sound on his third Pacific voyage in 1778; George Vancouver was the first ship captain to meet Kwakiutl in 1792. In the initial years of the nineteenth century fur-trading companies intruded into the region overland, but systematic collection of furs in the Kwakiutl region began only in 1821. In the two decades thereafter, the Hudson Bay Company installed forts and collecting stations along the coast, and in 1849 it received a royal charter to establish a colony on Vancouver Island. The first company settlement on the island was Fort Victoria, founded on the island’s southeastern tip in 1843, which soon became Victoria, a sizable city that attracted Indian laborers and settlers as well as Europeans. Coal mining had begun in Kwakiud territory in 1830, and the company founded Fort Rupert there in 1849. Fort Rupert remained the company’s main post until it yielded influence in the 1870s to Alert Bay “as the principal focus of the White economy on northern Vancouver Island” (Galois 1994, 210).
By midcentury the British government had begun to make its military power felt in the region. In 1843 the chief trader at Fort Victoria had discouraged a Songhi attack on the fort by demonstrating the effectiveness of cannon, but the natives continued to think, with good reason, that their bows and arrows outperformed European muskets in forested and accidented terrain (Fisher 1977, 40). Naval vessels were often sent out to pacify Indians along the western coast of Vancouver Island (Fisher 1977, 149). In 1850 and 1851 Nahwitti, an Indian settlement at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, was twice taken and destroyed by naval assault in response to the murder of deserters from a Hudson Bay Company ship. In December 1865 a landing party and cannonades from HMS Clio attacked the Kwakiutl village of Tsaxis at Fort Rupert, to impose colonial justice upon a local dispute. Many houses were burned down and a large number of canoes destroyed. The village studied by Boas and Hunt was thus the Tsaxis rebuilt in 1866 (Galois 1994, 214–15). Warfare among Indians intensified in the 1850s and 1860s, not least because the Kwakiutl at Fort Rupert were warring on rival groups in order to consolidate their position as middlemen in the fur trade (p. 58). Yet in the early 1870s Indian warfare and slave raiding diminished again, probably due as much to growing Indian involvement in the expanding money economy of the region as to efforts by outsiders to settle disputes by discussion instead of by war.
By 1858 governmental powers were transferred from the Hudson Bay Company to the government of British Columbia, and in 1871 British Columbia joined the Canadian Confederation. Until 1864 Governor James Douglas followed a policy of purchasing land from Indians where needed to facilitate European settlement, while otherwise remaining mindful of native interests. With the Terms of the Union of 1871 drawn up between British Columbia and Canada, however, native peoples became a “responsibility” of the federal government and thus of governors “less concerned than their predecessor [James Douglas] about Indian rights regarding land” (Fisher 1977, 160). In 1879 government commissions and agents began to allot the Kwakiutl to restricted reserves, and in 1881 the government Kwakewlth Agency was established at Alert Bay. Although the Kwakiutl were unusual among Kwakwaka’wakw tribes in having some of their claims to settlement and resource sites confirmed by treaties (Galois 1994, 198–203), alienation of village precincts and locations for fishing, hunting, and gathering went on apace. When Kwakwaka’wakw applied for additional lands in 1914, 109 of 195 tracts were listed as “alienated.” The Kwakiutl headed the list of the tribes listed as claimants (Galois 1994, 60). As government reinforced its grip on native life Royal Mounted Policemen, missionaries, and schoolteachers were called on to intensify their zeal in applying the laws against potlatching and winter dancing passed in 1888. Government representatives and missionaries saw the ritual displays and distributions of the potlatch system as “wasteful” and the winter ceremonials as “barbaric.” Although the direct impact of missionaries on the Tsaxis Kwakiud remained limited, their evaluation of the “atrocities” and “superstitions” of the Indians—“overwhelmingly shocking to behold” (Missionary William Duncan, on Fort Rupert, in Fisher 1977, 127)—strongly influenced the tone of relations between the indigenous groups and new settlers.
These events affected Kwakiutl life in major ways, but the Kwakwaka’wakw communities did maintain a measure of autonomy even in the face of increasing interference of traders, officials, and missionaries. This autonomy owed much, initially, to their sheltered location along inland waterways, a zone they had occupied by driving out other peoples either just before or just after initial contact. At the same time—and in contrast to the riverine peoples of the North and of the Pacific outer coast—this location put them at first only at the periphery of the ocean-borne commerce in furs. The inland straits they had occupied did not support sea otters, initially the main target of that maritime trade. The Kwakwaka’wakw settlements also lacked direct access to inland waterways and to the major trade routes that connected the coast with the interior. By the 1830s, forty years or so later, however, they had become traveling middlemen between the landings and posts of the Hudson Bay Company to the north and northwest and the camps of fur hunters and trappers scattered through the hinterland. Although in the 1840s the Hudson Bay Company tried to cut out Indian middlemen elsewhere in order to monopolize the trade itself, the establishment of Fort Rupert in Kwakiutl territory in 1849 reinforced the middleman role of these Indians. The fort was originally set up to protect the local coal mine rather than as a post in the fur trade, but the company may have permitted the Tsaxis Kwakiutl to settle there and to expand their trading activities in exchange for a role in protecting the fort against Tsimshian and Haida raiders.
At the same time, the Kwakwaka’wakw—like other peoples along the coast—were affected by two major transformations. One was caused directly by massive demographic changes; the other was due to their inclusion in a capitalist economy and their incorporation into an occupying state.
In contrast to earlier estimates that set the precontact population of Kwakwaka’wakw at about 4,500 (Kroeber 1947, 135), recent studies put it as high as 19,000. According to Robert Boyd, the population fell to around 8,500 in 1835, declined further to 7,650 in 1862, and fell precipitously between 1862 and 1924 to little more than 1,000 (Boyd 1990; Galois 1994). This demographic disaster was caused by the impact of repeated epidemics and infectious diseases (first smallpox, then measles, followed by venereal disease and tuberculosis) on an immunologically defenseless population. The epidemiological effects were intensified by the widespread sale of cheap alcohol to the native population. Population loss was further exacerbated through outmigration. This population decrease coincided with the burgeoning of the money economy introduced by the Europeans. European immigration and settlement on Vancouver Island also proceeded apace, until the non-Indian population began to outnumber the Kwakwaka’wakw in their own territories shortly before World War I (Galois 1994, 63).
Such a catastrophic loss of population put severe pressures on the Kwakiutl social and cultural system, which was organized around carefully delineated hierarchies of rank and which required that these rank positions be filled in dependable ways. As epidemics killed off increasing numbers of legitimate incumbents to political and ritual positions,
