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The Kwakiutl

If the connections between power and ideas can be unraveled by focusing on instances in which both dimensions are dramatically evident, one promising scenario is offered by the people long called Kwakiutl by anthropologists, as well as others. The Kwakiutl have furnished a type-case of a “chiefdom,” a term applied to societies that are neither simple nor lacking in social stratification but are without the complex architecture of states. They are headed by personages endowed with managerial authority, “chiefs,” who can overrule segmentary interests yet are not able to marshal their subjects with a fully fledged apparatus of coercion that can compel obedience. Chiefs usually derive this authority from a culturally constructed connection with supernatural forces, and they are thus in a position to endow their political functions with a unique cosmological aura.

The name for the people that became known to outsiders as Kwakiutl was used by Franz Boas and George Hunt in their inquiries in the field, as well as in their writings, and thus passed into general use in both professional and popular writings. The people now want to be known as Kwakwaka’wakw, speakers of the Kwakwala language, of whom the four tribes of Kwakiutl who inhabited the village of Tsaxis adjacent to Fort Rupert form a part. For clarity’s sake, I shall refer to this group as Kwakiutl or Tsaxis Kwakiutl, and to the Kwakwala speakers in general as Kwakwaka’wakw. Expunging “Kwakiutl” from the literature altogether seems counterproductive.

Examining the case of the Kwakiutl will involve us in ethnography, to detail some of their unfamiliar characteristics, but I shall also try to be historical, to highlight changes in their society and culture. These changes often responded to influences stemming from the larger social fields in which they were involved. Finally, this account will rely on general ethnology, as we draw out the major organizing themes of Kwakiutl culture through analytic concepts that build on the comparative study of many cultures. My aim is to use this historically oriented ethnography and this analytic ethnology to explicate the particular links between power and ideas in a salient case derived from the anthropological inventory.

In anthropology, the Tsaxis Kwakiutl or “Fort Ruperts,” as they also came to be known, occupy a special position. As the principal group studied by Boas, who is often spoken of as the founding ancestor of American anthropology, their example had considerable influence on the field after Boas’s time. Their culture also became known to nonanthropological audiences, because Ruth Benedict portrayed it, in her widely read Patterns of Culture, as striving to annihilate “the ordinary bounds and limits of existence” (1934, 72). In this depiction, she drew on Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of ancient Greek art, which he saw as marked by a central contradiction between the Apollonian search for measure and limits and the Dionysian will to break through the boundaries of the self in ecstasy and intoxication. To Benedict, the people of Zuni pueblo were Apollonian, the Kwakiutl their Dionysian antithesis. In this interpretation, the Zuni walked with care along the well-delineated pathways of life; the Kwakiutl sought instead to break through the boundaries of mundane reality. Apart from Benedict’s depiction, the Kwakiutl came to be known to museum visitors through their art, including their dramatic carvings and evocative masks.

Finally, the great public displays and giveaways of wealth of the Kwakiutl, the so-called potlatches, drew the attention of economists and sociologists, among others, because of their apparent nonconformance to “Western” canons of economic rationality. Some European intellectuals, such as Georges Bataille (1967), even celebrated the Kwakiutl as a dramatic example of how humanity might recover in the quest for excess the strength and purity of dynamic vitality.

The Kwakiutl reside on the northern Pacific coast of North America, one of the “First Nations” present there before the coming of the Europeans. Anthropologists include them—along with Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Nootka, and the Coast Salish—in an area of similar cultures grouped together as “Northwest Coast.” This cultural belt runs along the rainy, heavily dissected and forested coast from Yakutat Bay in Alaska south to Kato, near Cape Mendocino in Northern California. The Kwakiutl live along the northern coast of Vancouver Island and along the bays and inlets around Queen Charlotte Bay, from Smith Sound inlet in the north to Cape Mudge in the south. A high range of mountains, traversing Vancouver Island, separates them from their southern neighbors, the Nootka (now known as the Nuu-chah-nulth).

Kwakiutl speak Kwakwala, one of six languages of the Wakashan language family. This language family is grouped into two categories: northern Wakashan, including Kwakwala, Bella Bella (Heiltsuk), and Haisla; and southern Wakashan, made up of Nitinat, Nootka, and Makah. Although there were cultural exchanges between Kwakwala speakers and both Heiltsuk and Nootka, their languages are not mutually intelligible. Bella Bella and Haisla are divided from the other Wakashan-speaking groups by the Bella Coola (now Nuxalk), who speak a Salishan language. I want to underline that these named groupings all refer to languages, not to “tribes.” Speaking one of these languages may underwrite an acknowledgment of common identity that can be expressed in common ritual performance and myths, but it does not translate into sentiments of political unity or common organization. In all these groups the basic social unit was the localized community, often distinguished by dialect from its nearest neighbors. It is still unclear whether all these languages stem from a common linguistic stock that later differentiated or derive from different linguistic backgrounds.

Similarly, it is not yet certain whether the Kwakiud differentiated culturally from a basic pattern laid down some seven thousand years ago or whether the northern Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian and the southern Kwakwaka’wakw and Nootka are descendants of people that were organized rather differently, both socially and culturally (see Adams 1981). Rubel and Rosman argue persuasively that the social organization of the northern groups resembled that of neighboring Athabascan-speaking food collectors on their northern and eastern periphery, reckoning descent matrilineally and divided into exogamous moities and clans. In contrast, the southern groups, including the Kwakiutl, reckoned descent ambilaterally through both fathers and mothers. This produced lines of descent with overlapping memberships and crosscutting marriages, for which exclusive rules of exogamy or endogamy were irrelevant. They share these characteristics with the inland Salish-speaking people inhabiting the Thompson and Fraser River valleys of interior British Columbia (but not the Coast Salish); these inland groups lived in bands that were not based on exclusive criteria of descent, accorded recognition to individuals of wealth and influence, but lacked hereditary chiefs and nobles. Rubel and Rosman postulate 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 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, 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).