Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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that the Bella Coola, Nootka, and Kwakiutl once shared a common social organizational pattern with these peoples, and then developed bounded kin groups with fixed group claims to resources and social hierarchies of rank, hereditary leadership by chiefs, and differential privileges for senior and junior lines when they moved to the coast with its more abundant resources (Rubel and Rosman 1983; Rosman and Rubel 1986).
Scattered reports on the Kwakiutl were collected throughout the nineteenth century, and a number of field studies were carried out in the twentieth century (notably by Helen Codere, focused on the ethnohistory of the Kwakiutl associated with Fort Rupert, and by Ronald and Evelyn Rohner, on the tribes of Gilford Island). The bulk of what we know about them, however, comes to us from the work of Boas, aided by his local assistant George Hunt. Boas visited the Northwest Coast first in 1886 and for a last time in 1930; in all he made twelve field trips to the Northwest Coast, totaling twenty-eight and one-half months (White 1963, 9–10). Together Boas and Hunt are responsible for many thousands of printed pages, in a collaboration that spanned forty-five years. The most recent of the texts dealing with their Kwakiutl materials is Boas’s Kwakiutl Ethnography, left incomplete at the time of his death in 1942, then edited by Helen Codere and published in 1966.
Following Boas’s definition of culture as a manifestation of the mental life of man, the Boas-Hunt texts focus on myths and rituals, especially on those elaborated between 1849—when the Kwakiutl moved to the vicinity of Fort Rupert—and the time of the ethnographic inquiry. Much of the materials on ritual drew on native reports; some Boas observed himself, especially in 1886. Given Boas’s major concern with language and linguistics, native texts were recorded in Kwakiutl, then translated, and published in both Wakashan and English. Since controlling and enacting myths and rituals were largely the prerogatives of chiefs and nobles, what these texts reveal to us is primarily the discourse of chiefs and nobility, and to a minimal degree the doings of commoners. This bias was due not to neglect on Boas’s part but to the difficulty of obtaining information on commoners. When Boas urged Hunt to collect data on the names and rights of common people, because “they are just as important as those of people of high blood,” Hunt replied that this was “hard to get for they shame to talk about themselves” (in Berman 1991, 45).
The texts are also minimally informative about the lives of Kwakiutl women. Guided perhaps by the then-prevailing concept of culture as a homogeneous body of customs and ideas, these texts note gender differentiation in activities but leave them unexplored. They chart the distinctions in the social division of tasks, as well as customs surrounding female puberty, food taboos, ritual work in food processing, and female roles in arranged marriages. They speak of women, fictitiously defined as males, holding positions of authority until their successor was old enough to take over (Boas 1966, 52), and they mention that women with the appropriate privileges performed dances as part of the retinue of the major spirit-figure of the ceremonial season. But what women did and thought was not explored in their own terms, and their informal roles received no attention.
Although the materials collected constituted the cynosure of Boasian anthropology during its first decades, the texts themselves—along with Boas’s famous typewriter with Kwakiutl typography—were long neglected, because they did not easily fit with subsequent theoretical paradigms. More recently, they have served as the basis for new interpretations. One set of such studies has sought to move away from representations of the First Nations of the Northwest Coast as inhabitants of an unchanging and timeless “ethnographic present” and 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