Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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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, the enhanced opportunities and burdens of rank intensified pressures and tensions among the survivors. More recently, the population has begun to rise again, and it now stands at approximately 3,500.2
Other transformations 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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