stemmed from major shifts in the political economy of the region. Until 1858 Indian hunting, trapping, and marketing of fur-bearing animals served as the economic mainstay of British Columbia, but even then some Indians had taken employment as casual laborers on Hudson Bay Company posts and ships, in transport, and on company farms. Some also worked independently in panning for gold, mining surface coal, logging, and longshoring. Women found employment in housework and as sex workers in Canadian settlements, such as Victoria. From 1870 on, rising numbers of men, women, and children took jobs in the increasingly mechanized canneries and on fishing schooners. The growing demand for cheap protein on the part of the British working class supported a steadily expanding market for canned salmon, much as it did around the same time for corned beef in cans from Argentina (McDonald 1994, 163). Seventeen canneries were established in Kwakwaka’wakw territory between 1881 and 1929 (Galois 1994, appendix 4). From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, “wage labour was clearly of importance to many Indian families” (Knight 1978, 21). Young people, especially noninheriting younger sons or women hoping to escape parental control and arranged marriages, found emigration to work sites outside Kwakiutl territory attractive. Cannery work also produced a cohort of Indian labor recruiters who acted as intermediaries between factories and workers in the communities, identifying workers and advancing money against repayment from future wages. One of these was the Kwakiutl chief Charles Nowell, who described his activities between 1905 and the late 1920s in his autobiography (Ford 1941). Work in the fisheries and canneries also produced serious labor troubles and strike activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1870 on, Indians owned or operated stores, small farms, and sawmills, as well as packing outfits and charter services. By 1900 “a number of Indian men were skippers and mates of larger steam vessels” (Knight 1978, 12). One such skipper and later owner of a fleet of seiners was the later Kwakiutl chief James Sewid of Alert Bay (see his autobiography in Spradley and Sewid 1972). Today most Kwakiutl depend for a living on the mechanized commercial fishing industry and are subject to the technological and organizational changes demanded by the world economy of which that industry is a part.
If the capitalist sector of activities was under the command of regional entrepreneurs and colonial agents, the native resource areas and settlements remained the home sites of Kwakwaka’wakw people trying to continue a way of life governed by their own rules of social and religious organization. In these home sites they were able to keep up their traditional subsistence. They fished for salmon, especially abundant in the waters around Tsaxis and Fort Rupert, as well as herring, candlefish, halibut, and cod. They collected fish spawn and shellfish; hunted seals and porpoises along the shore and mountain goats, elk, and deer inland; and gathered roots and berries. The supply of fish and wild plant food was generally plentiful, although it varied by season and location. Periods of relative abundance alternated with times of shortage and occasionally even of hunger (Suttles 1962, 1968; Piddocke 1965; Donald and Mitchell 1975; Ames 1994). Yet in the last two decades of the nineteenth century the rising circulation of money also enabled some Kwakwaka’wakw to buy dried fish or eulachon oil for cash instead of relying on supplies drawn from resource-procurement sites in tribal territory (Galois 1994, 59).
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