Franz Boas in Translation: Place, Myth, and History

By Ann G. Simonds, Richard L. Bland and Don Dumond

Franz Boas in Translation is the ultimate study of the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas and his work on the American Northwest. This groundbreaking study analyses what Boas did with local Native American legends passed down by the region’s tribal groups. Three translations, originally published in 1888 and 1895, are presented here and constitute Boas’s early attempts to define the cultural history of Pacific Northwest tribes. Using definitive plots, details, and incidents from a large collection of myths, comparative myths from other indigenous cultures, and a statistical method of multivariant analysis, Boas not only defined the historical relations of the regional tribes but also the role of diffusion in those relations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781680534597

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Preface

The three publications of Franz Boas translated and annotated here grew out of his first field trip to British Columbia in 1886 (Rohner 1969; Yampolsky 1958).¹ The first chapter, which serves as an introduction to Chapters II and III, is an article he published in 1886 and lists the tribes, their constituent groupings, and their locations—information Boas collected from Native Americans and Euro-Americans in British Columbia, and from the records in the Office of Indian Affairs in Victoria (Rohner 1969:74–75). Thus, it represents official and unofficial knowledge of the tribes, their names and locations in the mid-nineteenth century. We have included the map that Boas drew to accompany the article. It is of considerable value in interpreting his early research as detailed in his diaries (Rohner 1969; Yampolsky 1958) and in his correspondence (Boas 1972; Rohner 1963, 1969). This map and its underlying data may be compared to similar earlier efforts by Hale (1846), Latham (1851), Scouler (1841, 1848), and others.

Chapter II is the first of Boas’s many publications of myths or narratives from the Northwest Coast.² All of these narratives were recorded in 1886, and with the exception of those of the Koskimo and Ditinaht, these narratives form the core of his Indianische Sagen (Indian Legends), published between 1891 and 1895.

Chapter III presents the concluding part of a twenty-six-part series on Northwest Coast mythology, which Boas published between 1891 and 1895 in the Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte.³ It contains his conclusions, tables comparing the presence or absence of motifs in the various tribes, a statistical analysis of the distribution of motifs, and a narrative motif or element list in which the motifs are cross-referenced to the narratives published in the previous twenty-five parts. In 1895 these publications were gathered together and issued in book form with the title lndianische Sagen von der nordpacifischen Küste Amerikas.⁴ The two editions are virtually the same, with only a new very short Introduction and a few corrections and modifications of the original versions of the narratives. Boas did, however, add some new narratives, all those from his article Die Tsimschian (The Tsimshian, 1888f) and a few from another article on Tlingit mythology he also published in 1888 (1888c). In 2002 Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, using a translation by Dietrich Bertz, brought out an English edition of the 1895 book, entitled Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America (Boas 2002). Drawing heavily on their expertise in linguistics, their long and intimate acquaintance with the region, and the knowledge of tribal consultants, they have provided ample linguistic, geographic, and ethnographic annotation. They did not, however, significantly edit the final chapter (our Chapter III), providing only a bare minimum of annotation and leaving the cross references in the original German 1895 page numbers.

Given the continuing interest (Cole 1999; Darnell 2001) in Boas’s career and role in the development of anthropology, particularly in the United States, this final chapter deserves more extensive examination and annotation for several reasons. The central issue in late 19th Century and early 20th Century ethnology was how is the history of the development of a culture determined when its history is unwritten. This summary is Boas’s first attempt to address this issue. Basing his analysis on a large body of ethnographic data, here myths and legends, collected from linguistically and culturally related tribes living in a limited geographic area, Boas charts the culture history of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Boas himself considers his findings on this topic, which he translated into English in 1896 and 1896a, so important he refers to them many times in subsequent publications (1914, 1916a), which means all his subsequent work on mythology draws directly from this summary. Second, Boas uses statistics to analyze the distribution of selected narrative motifs in order to prove historical relatedness. As this is the only time Boas uses a statistical method to analyze ethnographic data, we asked Don Dumond to examine Boas’s method and results. His assessment is included. Third, Boas seldom tells us from whom or from where he obtained his data and ideas, making contextual studies of his work very difficult, but this concluding chapter is somewhat of an exception to this practice, and therefore provides insight into the derivations of his ideas. Thus, we have provided full names, some biographical and bibliographic information for all the sources he cites. Finally, we have converted the cross references to their page numbers in Bouchard and Kennedy’s edition. This means that the reader of the latter will be able to find the motifs in the appropriate narratives. While there are readers whose sole interest will be the narratives, there are folklorists and historians of anthropology who will want to examine Boas’s early approach to the study of mythology. What questions did he ask? How did he answer them? What were his results, and how successful was he in demonstrating the historical relatedness of the Northwest Coast tribes?

We hope that the translation and annotation of these early German works of Boas may help to answer these questions, as well as explain the role of these particular narratives in his approach to mythology and ethnology near the turn of the nineteenth century. We also hope that they will provide a basis for further research on this collection of narratives and on Boas’s early work on the Pacific Northwest Coast and its relation to his concept of ethnology.

Ann G. Simonds

¹ Boas arrived in British Columbia in September and remained there until the end of December 1886. When he talks about this trip, he says he spent 1886–1887 in the field (Boas 1888a:49; 1891:625). In terms of the actual time spent on the coast, this is obviously not correct; he is talking about the winter season, which spans two calendar years. Kroeber makes a similar point (1943:9, 11; see also Rohner 1966).

² William Bascom’s (1965) terminology is adopted here. Boas tended to use tale, story, legend, and myth interchangeably, so he is often no help to a reader who wishes to classify a narrative (Boas 1891 and 1896). Narrative is an acceptably neutral term that allows the reader to choose which term seems most appropriate in either Native American or Euro-American classifications. Boas does clarify somewhat his conception of the issue in 1914. Calling both myths and folk-tales tales, he defines two classes that are based on Native ideas. Class one consists of tales that describe a time when the earth and human beings did not exist in their present forms. The second class contains tales of the contemporary period. The first are myths; the second history. According to Boas, while the content of both classes intertwines, the distinction is quite clear in the Native mind (1914:377–378; 1916:565).

³ Proceedings of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory published in Berlin, and at this time edited by Rudolf Virchow, physician, physical anthropologist, and pathologist.

⁴ Indian Legends of the North Pacific Coast of America (1895a).

Introduction to Chapters I and II Boas in the Field (1886)

Boas was no stranger to fieldwork when he went to British Columbia in 1886. In 1883 he went to Baffin Island and spent a year on Cumberland Sound and Davis Inlet studying the geography of the area as well as the geographical concepts and migration patterns of the Inuit (Boas 1885, 1888, 1998; Cole 1983, 1999; Kroeber 1943:8–9). When he returned to Germany in 1885,⁵ he went to work as an assistant at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, then directed by Adolf Bastian (Kroeber 1943:9; Penny 2003).⁶ His main responsibility was to conduct scholarly research on the collections made by Johan Adrian Jacobsen for the Museum (Bolz and Sanner 1999:183; Glass 2017).⁷ Here Boas found congenial colleagues and support for his growing interest in anthropology and ethnology (Boas 1909:307).

In Berlin at this time there was considerable interest in the peoples of the Northwest Coast of America. This interest came from various sources. Bastian had heard of these northern tribes when he visited Portland, Oregon, on his way to the Orient in the late 1870s and became interested in the area as a source of possible fieldwork and of material for the Museum’s collections (Bastian 1882). The German natural scientists, Aurel and Arthur Krause (Krause [1885] 1956; McCaffrey 1993) made a trip to Alaska in 1883 and 1884 and were in Berlin talking about their work (Boas 1909:307). Then, in 1886, Johan Adrian Jacobsen and his brother Filip⁸ brought nine Nuxalk (Bella Coola)⁹ to Berlin as Völkerschauungen or ethnic exhibitions to perform songs and dances for the German public (Cole 1982; 1999:97; Haberland 1987). Of course, the Nuxalk were introduced to the anthropological community. They visited the museum and performed for the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. Rudolf Virchow¹⁰ took their physical measurements. Boas and Aurel Krause collected linguistic and ethnographic information from them, through the medium of Filip Jacobsen’s Chinook jargon (Boas 1886).¹¹ The elaborately decorated objects of the Museum’s Northwest collections, the exotic dramas of the Nuxalk performances, and the discussions with the brothers Krause and Jacobsen and others—all irresistibly drew Boas to the coast, and he proposed a field trip to the area (Boas 1909:307; Cole 1999:97–98).¹² Unfortunately, he failed to obtain funding from professional sources. So relying on financial help from family and friends and conserving his own slim resources, Boas traveled to New York, purchased a Canadian Railway pass, and entrained to British Columbia in September of 1886 (Boas 1972: Boas to George M. Dawson, August 1886; Rohner 1969:17; Yampolsky 1958).

On this first trip Boas employed what may be called an opportunistic field method.¹³ Quite literally every opportunity was taken to obtain the desired information, particularly as his trip was limited to three months (Rohner 1969:22; Yampolsky 1958:314). Fortunately for Boas, not only were there Euro-Americans in the region who had contacts in the Native communities, who could therefore introduce him to potential consultants, and who could interpret for him if necessary, but the city of Victoria had a large Native American population made up of members of the various tribes from all up and down the coast. Thus, Boas was able to talk to representatives of a number of these tribes as well as to Indian agents, to traders and their Native American wives, to farmers, to missionaries, to travelers, in short to anyone who might be able to provide useful information and data (Rohner 1969:22–26, 58; Yampolsky 1958).

On this trip Boas set out to acquaint himself with the area as a whole and so his tasks were fairly broadly defined. One of these tasks was to determine the distribution of the tribes and their subgroupings and to create an ethnographic map detailing this distribution (Boas 1887a, 1887b; Rohner 1969). The result was the German article translated and presented here in Chapter I. He collected these data through interviews and from the records of the Department of Indian Affairs in Victoria (Rohner 1969:74–75).

Another purpose was to obtain more precise information on objects held by the Museum für Völkerkunde, particularly those collected by Jacobsen, and by other institutions, as the specifics of many of these had not been recorded at the time of their collection. To accomplish this he took with him a set of photographs and drawings, mainly of masks, and in the process of asking people to identify the objects and to discuss their functions, he collected quite a bit of information on religion and other topics (Boas 1888a:52; 1890b:7; Rohner 1969:21, 22, 24, 34, 39).¹⁴ He also collected objects for the Museum, mainly at Nawhiti on Hope Island off northern Vancouver Island and at Fort Rupert on Beaver Harbour on the island (Bolz and Sanner 1999:183). He sold these to the Museum to meet part of the expenses of the trip (Boas 1890b:11; Boas 1972: Boas to Otis T. Mason, 3 April 1887, 26 June 1887).¹⁵

Boas was also interested in the languages, and even though late in his career he maintained that there was little time for linguistic work on the 1886 trip, a careful reading of his letter-diary indicates that he spent a fair amount of time trying to learn the languages, collecting linguistic data, and trying to sort out the relationships of the various languages (Boas 1930:x; Rohner 1969:19–77). Using interpreters and Chinook jargon (Boas 1895a:v), he collected long lists of vocabulary, details of the grammars that he elicited by means of a set of questions (Rohner 1969:50, 59, 64), stories, and a small number of texts, which were transcriptions of narratives in the Native languages he used to illustrate the grammars.¹⁶ Many of the narratives, which he calls stories at this time, were told to him in Chinook jargon either by the consultant or by an interpreter (Rohner 1969:25, 37). He then translated the jargon version into German, usually in the evening when he didn’t have anything else to do (Rohner 1969:64, 71). If his later field notes (e.g., Boas 1890a) are any indication, Boas recorded the non-Native language portions of his notes in shorthand. It was a common practice at German universities in the late nineteenth century for students to take verbatim lecture notes in shorthand, which means he was probably accustomed to taking notes in this fashion (Sokal 1981:xxi).¹⁷

The only time Boas seems to have been able to work in German was with his Nuxalk (Bella Coola) consultants. Having worked on the language in Berlin and being able to consult some of the same individuals, some of whom spoke some German, in Victoria, he found he could take dictation directly from Nuxalk into German, although he didn’t think his understanding of the Native language was very good, and therefore the results were poor (Boas 1895b:v; 1895d:31; 1930:x; Rohner 1969:28, 30, 31, 49–51). While his nascent understanding of the various languages prevented Boas from obtaining a large number of texts, he was able to record a large number of stories or narratives (Rohner 1969:66, 69, 73). When he left the field in December, he took with him a manuscript of over 320 pages (Rohner 1969:73); it is this manuscript that formed the basis of the article translated and presented here in Chapter II.

While Chapter I is simply a limited empirical study, the description of the distribution of tribal groupings, Chapter II begins Boas’s engagement with the central issue of nineteenth century anthropology—the evolution of human culture. When Boas entered the field, culture was thought to evolve through a set of stages—from simple to complex, from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from savagery to barbarism to civilization—and that this evolution, therefore, was progressive. All cultures were assigned to a stage determined by a comparative method in which contemporaneous cultures from all over the world were compared. Ignoring geographical proximity and historical relatedness, the resulting similarities were defined first as survivals of earlier stages of evolutionary development, and therefore proof that all cultures had passed through the stages. Similarities between cultures were thought to be the result of the psychic unity of humankind, which had led to the independent invention of all cultural traits, or at least to those significant for the growth of culture, and thus to parallel development. Culture, then, grew according to fixed laws of development, and while the diffusion of cultural traits did occur, people did not borrow a trait until their culture had attained the stage appropriate for it.

Boas did not believe that cultural similarities constituted proof of uniform development. To him it was equally plausible, and could be proven, that the same cultural phenomena developed from different sources, and therefore that the human mind was not everywhere and at all times the same. His approach, which he began to set out in Chapter II, rested not on determining worldwide isolated resemblances and interpreting them according to a set of a priori assumptions about the course of cultural development but on tracing a number of complex cultural phenomena spread over a limited continuous geographical area containing not one culture but at least several. The examination of the interactions and interrelations of these cultures as seen in the cultural phenomena led to a greater understanding of the roles of the environment, independent invention and diffusion, and human psychology in the development of culture.

The article in Chapter II is not only a preliminary report of his 1886 field trip; it is a prelude to the articles and monographs on mythology that follow it. It does not, however, present a systematic or comprehensive analysis of the mythology. Boas also does not discuss the actual process of borrowing; nor does he examine why people borrow, under what circumstances borrowing takes place, or why specific elements and narratives were chosen for adoption and others were not. Boas does, however, begin to lay out his approach to the culture history of the area as seen in the distribution of narratives and their elements. Thus, many of the narratives, their variants, and his interpretations and ideas found in the 1888 article appear in later publications in more evolved forms.

Boas considered mythology to be one of the most fruitful avenues in the pursuit of culture history, and the Northwest Coast narratives presented a challenge to this pursuit. Here was an area of considerable cultural uniformity, regardless of the very great linguistic diversity found there (Boas 1887a:289). Such a high degree of uniformity meant that there had been frequent interaction and acculturation,¹⁸ accompanied by the diffusion and borrowing of cultural traits, over a long period of time between the peoples inhabiting the region. While an examination of the diffusion of narrative elements and of their recombination in the mythology of their borrowers revealed the history of social interaction, it did not allow the origin of most, if any, of the narratives to be traced; it did, however, determine the varied sources from which the mythology was created.

The core narratives Boas employed to demonstrate his arguments were first presented in this article. They contain a basic set of elements he used again and again in his discussions of Northwest Coast mythology and folklore. Here they are largely actors—Raven, Mink, the Wanderer or Transformer, Sun, Moon, the Carpenters of the Nuxalk (Bella Coola), other spiritual beings such as the Wild Woman of the Woods, and certain supernatural ancestors of various social groups. It was the similarities in the behaviors of these actors and in the incidents in which they participate that provided Boas with clues to the diffusion of the narratives and their constituent elements, and therefore to the history of the narratives and of the people who told them.

Proof of diffusion lay in the comparison of narratives and their component elements. The presence of a large number of analogous elements and their appearance over a continuous area proved borrowing had taken place (Boas 1891:14–15). Thus, the narratives that best served Boas’s purposes were widespread and had a large number of elements in common. The distribution of the latter, as well as the ways in which they were recombined in narratives, indicated to Boas the direction of the diffusion and thus the historical relations between cultures. He gives the example of the narrative The Visit to Heaven, in which a young man enters Heaven¹⁹ by means of a chain of arrows and kills the Sun. This is an important narrative among the Coast Salish, who live in the southern part of the region. On the northern coast, among the Tsimshian, it is a minor motif used simply to embellish one of their narratives. Drawing upon the Raven cycle,²⁰ Boas again contrasts the northern and southern areas of the region. The Raven narratives are found in their most complete and complex forms in the north, that is, among the Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit, who, according to Boas, share substantially the same set of Raven narratives. As the latter diffused southward and were borrowed by other peoples, they began to fragment and to lose their coherence and unity. Other actors (e.g., Mink) take Raven’s place, and his adventures are assigned to other actors (e.g., it is Deer who obtains fire in the south). Actors and incidents are dropped completely. These differences in the Raven narratives led Boas to define two culture circles on the coast. Circles are particular geographic areas in which certain narratives or complexes of narratives known as cycles originated and spread, often piecemeal, to other circles. The first was the northern circle, composed of the narratives of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian. He contrasts it with the southern one, made up of Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Coast Salish, and other narratives. As there are no significant geographical and linguistic barriers to diffusion, narratives and their elements have also spread from the south to the north, undergoing transformation as they are borrowed.

Like this article and the examples selected, all of Boas’s work on mythology rests on a detailed knowledge of the narratives themselves, for his analysis always involves the tracing of particular elements or combinations thereof. As his reasons for assigning relationships are not always obvious, this knowledge is essential to following the course of the postulated diffusion and the inferred historical relationships of the contiguous cultures. Included in this knowledge are the plots of the narratives, because an evaluation of the results of diffusion rests on what happened to an element or incident when it was incorporated in a corpus of narratives. It is its place in the plot that indicates how it was accepted. Such an enormous amount of particular data is not easily organized or readily comprehended. So it is not surprising that when Boas came to interpret his much larger collection of narratives in the early 1890s, he chose a statistical method to reduce his data to manageable proportions.

⁵ He had stopped in the United States on his way back to Germany to visit relatives. Here he established contact with various Arctic explorers and with John Wesley Powell at the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, who agreed to publish his monograph on the Eskimos (Cole 1999:83).

⁶ Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) was a medical doctor and ethnologist as well as one of the leaders of German anthropology in the late nineteenth century. He was largely responsible for the building of the Museum, which opened in 1886 (Koepping 1983; Penny 2002).

⁷ Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1853–1947) was a Norwegian who Bastian hired in the early 1880s to collect in Alaska and on the coast for the Museum für Völkerkunde (Boas 1909:307; Cole 1985; Jacobsen 1977). The coastal collections are illustrated in Bastian et al. 1883.

⁸ Filip (Philip) Jacobsen lived for a number of years in the Bella Coola area where he had a fishery and animal breeding station. Boas met him again on the coast in 1886 (Rohner 1969:66–67). Later, Jacobsen supplied Boas with a small collection of Nuxalk pieces for the World’s Columbian Exhibition (1893), gave him a small collection of Nuxalk narratives, and assisted Boas in the field in 1897 (Cole 1982, 1985, 1999; Rohner 1969:199).

⁹ These Nuxalk were the only representatives of a Pacific Northwest culture to travel to Europe in such a group in the nineteenth century. Not only did the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast not want to go to Europe, but they were not a popular attraction there. It was groups of Plains Indians who were sought after, particularly for German audiences (Bruckner 2003; Cole 1982; 1985:62–63, 67; Golchen and Haberland 1987:3–4, 5).

¹⁰ Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) was a physician, physical anthropologist, and pathologist from whom Boas learned anthropometric methods (Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959:21–24) and who Kroeber says perhaps influenced Boas personally more than any other scientist (Kroeber 1943:10). See Virchow 1886 in which he describes these men, gives their measurements, and discusses a few aspects of Nuxalk society.

¹¹ Chinook jargon originated as a trade language in the Pacific Northwest, although exactly when is not known. It is largely derived from Lower Chinookan but includes contributions from other coastal indigenous languages as well as from French and English. Boas characterized it as incomplete in that the meaning of it often had to be inferred because the subject and object were frequently missing. Understanding was further complicated by the lack of differentiation between nouns and verbs. According to Boas, one had to be very alert in listening to their mythical tales when told in the jargon (Rohner 1969:28).

¹² Apparently Boas had also become tired of working with the Eskimo materials (Rohner 1969:22), but his waning interest in the Inuit may have been a result of not having enough data to work with. He makes an interesting comment in the letter-diary he wrote his parents in October 1886. Writing of his work he tells them, I shall not be so stupid as to tear them [his notes] up as I did my Eskimo material (Rohner 1969:50). Just how much of his Eskimo field data he destroyed is not known, but that he may have destroyed a portion of his notes is suggested by an examination of his major publication The Central Eskimo (1888). It relies heavily on museum collections and on published sources such as explorers accounts, an ethnohistorical approach Boas never used again as extensively, and which seems to indicate he had insufficient field data. It does however seem more likely that Boas’s Arctic experience was so psychologically and physically demanding that a shift to the Pacific Northwest was not only more exciting but far less arduous (Cole 1983; Müller-Wille 1998).

¹³ This was a type of field method advocated by Adolf Bastian (Koepping 1983). It was practiced by a number of nineteenth-century ethnologists, a good example being Lewis Henry Morgan, who employed it when he collected kinship terminologies in the early 1860s (White 1959). It was also the preferred method of the Brothers Grimm in gathering European folktales and other oral traditions (Kamenetsky 1992:113–150).

¹⁴ Boas discusses the considerable difficulties of collecting this kind of information in 1890b:7–8.

¹⁵ Those objects that were duplicated in the Berlin Museum’s collection were exchanged with the United States National Museum for objects from other areas in North America (Boas 1972: Otis T. Mason to Boas, 3 December 1887, 30 December 1887; G. Brown Goode to Boas, 7 March 1888). The items Boas collected and those from other museums, e.g., the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution), appear in drawings and photographs in Boas’s article on masks and ornaments of the Kwakiutl (1890b) and in his huge monograph, The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897a). See also Glass 2017.

¹⁶ Some of Boas’s original 1886 fieldnotes are in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (Glenn 1993) and in the Library of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Pilling 1893). His later fieldnotes may be found at the Library of the American Philosophical Library in Philadelphia (Freeman 1966).

¹⁷ What system he used has not been determined. James McKeen Cattell, the psychologist and a colleague of Boas at Columbia University, learned Pitman’s, a phonetic system developed for English (Sokal 1981:xxi). Boas may have used one of the two popular German systems: Gabelsberger’s or Stolze’s (Rockwell 1884:18–19). See Kendall 1982:78:4599a. Recently Rainer Hatoum has transcribed and transliterated some of these shorthand notes (2016, 2018).

¹⁸ By acculturation Boas meant any form of historical intercultural contact (e.g., trade, marriage) in which cultural exchange takes place.

¹⁹ I am following Boas’s mid–nineteenth-century usage here. Later he gives Sky or Sky Land (Boas 1938).

²⁰ Boas uses the term cycle, which he does not define, to refer to a group or complex of interrelated narratives in which a single spiritual being is usually the central character, for example, Raven (Boas 1891a:12; 1914:392; 1916a:586).

Chapter I

Editorial Note

Boas wrote a number of articles that were similar to this one—Boas 1887a, 1887g, 1888c, d, g, 1889b, c, 1895e²¹—but this is the only one in which he discusses the distribution of the tribes in detail.

We have retained his spellings of the Native names. Their original forms act like benchmarks in the evolution of his knowledge and understanding of the languages represented, and thus may prove useful to specialists and students in this area. We hope that someday someone will discuss this evolution in detail, as Boas seems to have had a remarkable aptitude for languages even though he had no formal training in linguistics (Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959:19).

Our anglicized spellings of the tribal names are taken from the 1990 Handbook of North American Indians on the Northwest Coast, edited by Wayne Suttles, which seemed to us to be practical given the ready accessibility of the Handbook series. Most of the names of the tribes were known when Boas began work on the Northwest Coast (Hale 1846; Scouler 1841, 1848; Latham 1851; Tolmie and Dawson 1884), even if he didn’t think so (Rohner 1969:74). His own work produced a more complete and detailed picture of the tribal terminology and distribution, particularly with respect to the local groups, but it had little effect on the commonplace terminology. After the turn of the nineteenth century, Boas himself used the latter fairly consistently.

In this chapter and subsequent ones the footnotes contributed by Bland as translator are marked Trans. Those contributed by Boas himself are marked F.B. All unmarked footnotes were written by Simonds. Boas’s interlinear text notes are in parentheses, as in the original texts. All interlinear text notes in brackets were written by Bland and/or Simonds.

Toward the Ethnology of British Columbia

²²

To the ethnologist’s regret indigenous customs and cultures in many parts of the world are disappearing, and particularly on the Northwest Coast of America. The central roles of trade and of art in the culture of that region demonstrate that the individual here was not satisfied with the needs of daily life but also recognized other, higher goals. A look at the multiplicity of designs with which all the articles of daily usage are decorated, and a consideration of the feasts and religious dances, demonstrate a lively imagination and a rich treasure of legends. And it is significant that people of different languages and histories, from Oregon to Alaska, took part in this culture.

The questions that here wait to be answered are important for both ethnology and geography, and the time that remains for solving them is short. Since Native manners and customs are quickly disappearing in the face of the demands of European culture, the questions I will try to answer here are important for ethnology and geography. The traders, who now penetrate into the most remote fjords of the coast and disregard and tread underfoot the family ties of Indians, act as a disintegrating element and exercise a powerful force through the holdings of respected European companies. Even more devastating to the culture of the people is the influence of the missionaries, and with the continuing settlement of the coast the remains of the old manners and customs, which up to today have retained their old force, will quickly vanish.²³

The interest in these groups of people led the author to British Columbia in the fall of 1886.²⁴ He traveled the coast from Victoria to the northern point of Vancouver Island.²⁵ The results of observations on the distribution of tribes are given on the accompanying map. Since it was impossible to visit all tribes due to the brevity of the available time, a part of the report rests on inquiries, and it is therefore possible that it contains inaccuracies.²⁶ The basic features of the map meanwhile are reliable, since the inquiries are mutually corroborated by individuals of different tribes. Where some doubt exists, this is mentioned in the text. It must be added that the interior boundaries could not be precisely determined.

In the area of investigation, between Bentinck Arm and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, three different tribal languages are found: the Kwā´kiūtl [Kwakuitl],²⁷ whose territory stretches unbroken from Gardner Canal to Bute Inlet, the Selisch [Salish] on Bentinck Arm and on the southern part of Vancouver Island, and the west Vancouver language.²⁸ Since the Indians themselves do not use a single name or one name for the language groups, the naming remains arbitrary, and therefore I follow the prevalent usage, which at present can make no claim of greater correctness than other designations. The name Kwā´kiūtl [Kwakuitl], which is applied by A. Hall, Tolmie, and Dawson²⁹ to the northern language group, actually belongs only to the tribe presently living at Ft. Rupert, and is extended by the named authors to the entire people.³⁰ Other authors use Hēiltsuk, the name of the tribe from Milbank [sic] Sound, in place of Kwakiutl.³¹ The name Bellabella [Bella Bella], which is frequently given to them, is, according to Dr. Tolmies’ very probable assumption, formed from Milbank. It is impossible for the Kwā´kiūtl [Kwakuitl] to say the word Milbank and from their mouth it sounds like Bilbal or Bilballa, from which traders then formed the harmonious Bella Bella. The name Bellacula [Bella Coola], by which the tribes of Bentinck Arm are known, has arisen in a similar way. The Kwā´kiūtl [Kwakuitl] call these tribes, which have no common name for themselves, Bi´lchula.³² The English, who cannot pronounce the gutteral ch, transform this word into the more comfortable and harmonious Bellacula [Bella Coola]. The Bi´lchula and the so-called Qauitschin [Cowichan] belong to the Selisch [Salish] language family. The name Qauitschin [Cowichan], under which the most numerous tribes of southeastern Vancouver Island and the mainland opposite are grouped, denotes literally Skinner Bluffs in Cowitshin [Cowichan] Bay. The Natives extended this name to the entire river valley and its occupants. While the dialect of the Kwā´kiūtl [Kwakuitl] shows very little deviation, the Selisch [Salish] language group consists of a great number of dialects which are so different from each other that the tribes cannot understand one another, but since the basis of the grammar and the roots of most words are all common, they must all be designated a single language. Qauitschin [Cowichan] is related to the language of Thompson River, which, according to a report by J. B. Good,³³ is spoken in three dialects—the Suē´pmaq, Slē´tlemaq, and Nitlaka´pamaq.³⁴ The last language of our area is that of the west Vancouver Island tribes, which have been named Aht by Sproat.³⁵ This is limited to the west coast of Vancouver Island from Cape Cook to Sooke Inlet.

The majority of dialects are spoken by several tribes; however, the linguistic affiliation is generally not indicated by a common name.

Each tribe occupies a particular territory, and within the latter the idea of property is very strongly developed. Not only does each tribe have its own sea fishing grounds and rivers in which they alone have the right to catch salmon, and stretches of