Trickster’s turn:

New Books on

Gerta Moray

Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian New York: Random House Inc., .  pp. Illus. . paper.

Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art Karen Duffek and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, editors : Douglas & McIntyre, .  pp. Illus. . cloth.

here is no doubt that Bill Reid emblem? Is he the token of a Canada Tis a significant figure in Canadian where art flourishes and liberal values art. His monumental make embrace racial diversity? Or is this his presence inescapable. They are the latest instance of the settler appro- widely admired in an age when public priation of the Aboriginal image to is often contentious and the signal the identity of a new colonial “fine arts” have fragmented into a state? And a decoy, perhaps, that host of special interest groups. From hides the ongoing expropriation of and the Raven and the First Men, -, disregard for Canada’s ? at ubc’s Museum of Anthropology Reid’s career has continually raised such (moa) to the Black : Spirit of awkward questions. As a Canadian of , -, at the Canadian mixed Euro-American and Haida Embassy in Washington and its “jade” ancestry he began his life in a white cousin, for which Vancouver Airport urban setting and established a career paid  million in  – the highest as a professional broadcaster. When price ever for a work – he trained in arts, joined Reid’s commissions have come from anthropological expeditions to salvage civic institutions, governments, and totem poles from depopulated Haida corporations alike. Now his work villages, and transferred the intricate appears on the Canadian twenty- nineteenth-century Haida designs he dollar bill. This kind of honour has was studying in museums onto golden been accorded to few artists in Canada: brooches and caskets for wealthy col- the Group of Seven, , Paul- lectors, the question arose as to whether Emile Borduas, and Jean-Paul Riopelle he was simply a “white man’s Indian.” are the only comparable examples. What sort of a “Haida” was he? And What are the aspirations symbolized was this really the “renaissance” of by Reid’s adoption as a Canadian Northwest Coast Aboriginal art that bc studies, no. , Summer  93 94 bc studies Bill Reid Books 95 the press and art world announced it to The essays are grouped around four be? main themes: () Reid’s understanding Throughout his career Reid wrestled of and influence on conceptions of with these questions. But by the end Haida art; () his relationships beyond of his life he had registered for Indian the studio with the communities in legal status and joined his mother’s which he participated – the First in their resistance to Nations, the museum and art worlds; logging and their reassertion of land () the construct of a Northwest Coast claims. His continuing prominence renaissance and Reid’s iconic position now will have the benefit of keeping within it; and () the legacy of a contentious aspects of Canada’s history European-defined modernity that has in view. Taking on the persona of shaped concepts of Aboriginality and Raven, Reid has become the trickster that continues to affect the histories, in the pack of cards of Canadian art. lives, and identities of Aboriginal It is timely, then, that two recent peoples (Duffek and Townsend-Gault books set out to assess his significance. ). First Nations writers contribute to Both start from the closure brought all sections of the book, and what they with Reid’s death in , which was have to say is salutary reading in a marked by the dramatic celebrations Canadian context that has for too of his life and achievements by the long depended on unilateral “new- museum world and by the Haida comer” accounts of the Aboriginal community, which buried him with population. traditional ceremony at his ancestral On the issue of Bill Reid’s claim to village of T’anuu. These events brought be “Haida,” which troubled him to the together members of Aboriginal and point where he repeatedly confessed non-Aboriginal communities, and that he was “to all intents and purposes a led to a  symposium at moa for good wasp Canadian” (Bringhurst ), a critical and in-depth examination the Haida contributors are unanimous. of his legacy. Maria Tippett attended Miles Richardson, former president of the symposium and completed her the Council of the Haida Nation, states biography, Bill Reid: The Making of an that this is not even a question since, Indian in . And now papers from in Haida custom, lineage is traced the symposium itself are published as through the maternal line. Reid was Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Haida, and his upbringing without Modern Native Art, edited by Karen explicit knowledge of his Haida heri- Duffek and Charlotte Townsend- tage was “not a unique experience Gault. They offer excerpts from the amongst Haidas or amongst First heated debates on identity politics Nations people generally” (Duffek and and on the legacies of colonialism Townsend-Gault ). Or, as Guujaw that have dominated the worlds of art puts it: “Like me, that was what he and anthropology during the past two was – Haida – and there was nothing decades. There are contributions from he could do about it” (). Or in the representatives of the Haida Nation words of Gwaganad (Diane Brown): and from a range of First Nations and “We are going to show our respect for Euro-Canadian artists and scholars, him now. He was a very skilful Haida, many of whom have worked with Bill he was a very gifted Haida. He put the Reid and knew him well. Haidas up. Thank you, Iljuwas. Thank you, Bill” (). She acknowledges there 94 bc studies Bill Reid Books 95

were frictions between Reid and the plexus, had Martin, Hunt, and himself Skidegate community but reports their doubled up with laughter (-). In his delight in his antics: “He liked to be own turn, the Kwakwaka’wakw carver a trickster, he liked to be referred to, Doug Cranmer jokes, “When people in fact, by one of his honoured names asked me, ‘Did you work with Bill – Yaahl Sgwansung, which means ‘the Reid?’ I used to reply, in fun, ‘Yes, I Only Raven’ – given to him by Florence taught him everything he knew’”(). Davidson” (). This living up to his Many First Nations contributors name exemplifies what Loretta Todd, pay tribute to Reid’s role in winning the Métis/Cree film director, describes international recognition for North- in her essay “Beyond” as Reid’s final west Coast traditional art, and to realization that his idea of himself his concern with high standards and “would be nothing without the language with innovative extensions for the art. of his life – a language that preceded The paper by Kwakwaka’wakw artist him. And in that way, he was no longer Marianne Nicholson is an example alone” (). (-). A serious problem for the First Nations contributors used the First Nations, however, is the belief symposium to assert their own customs that Reid stated many times throughout and perspectives. As Gwaganad states, his career that the “real” traditional Haida protocol respects the feelings of Haida culture was now dead. Several the bereaved, prescribing that a year papers examine this narrative of a pass after someone’s death before she/ “dying culture” – one originated by the he is publicly discussed. Since that settler community. The most incisive time has passed, she can now speak analysis of its history and insidious about Reid. Intertribal courtesy, and logic, together with suggestions for a rivalries, are demonstrated by several way forward from the current situation, speakers: Ki-ke-in, a Nuu-chah- comes from Marcia Crosby, a historian nulth artist, describes the collegiality of Tsimshian and Haida ancestry. Bill and respect that Reid showed to him on Reid was born not at the end of Haida many occasions, despite their difference culture, she suggests, but in the middle in age and fame. Then he tells of an of this narrative structure. In his incident he heard from his teacher, seductively eloquent writings, as she Henry Hunt, ’s son- points out, his mourning for the lost in-law. Martin had replied to Reid’s “genius, personality, and individual and boasting about the superiority of the social complexity of the dead became Haida in everything by telling him the Reid’s point of reference for what con- story of the capture, enslavement, and temporary Haida life was not. Like humiliation of a Haida war chief who many non-Native experts, it’s clear he led a raid on Tsaaxiis (Fort Rupert) in believed he knew more about what it the nineteenth century. When the Haida was to be a ‘real’ Haida than did those managed to escape, he was chased by who lived in the twentieth century” some Kwakwaka’wakw boys from the (). By rejecting any cultural forms village who shot at him in the treetop other than the ancient visual forms, where he had taken refuge, and waited Reid brushes aside the period of assimi- for him to drop down after he had bled lation through which his mother and to death. According to Ki-ke-in this he himself grew up, and he ends by piece of verbal aggression, which hits erasing “the details of a time of great the reader like a punch in the solar change and half a century of aboriginal 96 bc studies Bill Reid Books 97 life, including his own” (). Crosby And while Reid argued that the value suggests that different questions now of his own art and of traditional Haida need to be asked – about the ongoing art existed as a modern art form of identities and identifications of Haida international value, and was thus people in the midst of assimilation, made for all human beings, he was when their “Indian” identity was indeed puzzled whether that might make it “a legally imposed on them from outside medium without a message.” Crosby’s but when their “Haida” identification reply is that “exploring the logic of could be freely chosen. This might its contemporary making by other be through the wearing of the Haida contemporary Haida artists, and its jewellery that Reid saw on the arms use-value for Haida people – its reason of his mother and aunts, or through for being – requires a different para- the retention of ancient meanings, digm than the [modernist] one Reid once embodied in cultural objects used. It requires putting Bill Reid – and ritual and now invested in the his beliefs, his stories, his assumptions, emergence of a new kind of Aboriginal as well as those of his peers – in the politics and in other forms (). “When middle of contemporary Haida history” we change the field of questions, we (). shift the focus from constructing Most writers, both Aboriginal and Reid and his mother’s beginnings as non-Aboriginal, seek to complicate the a time of assimilation and ‘hopeless idea, popular in the s, that Bill Reid demoralization for natives’ to its context led a “renaissance” of Northwest Coast in the history of Canada’s ‘shameful’ “art.” Aldona Jonaitis focuses on the past ... When we begin to look at our role of the post-Second World War “art histories from a different perspective, boom” and on the modern art system’s we see the incredibly diverse ways that demand for art stars as catalysts for aboriginal people were challenged to the collecting activities of patrons and deal with the impact of colonization. museums as well as for the shaping of Sophie Reid’s history then, is not about Reid’s reputation. Her account perhaps stagnation and decline, but is rich in its loses sight of the simultaneous political complexity” (-). concerns of figures like Having shifted the question, Crosby and the Hawthorns. Aaron Glass pro- sees the evidence of such a history of poses that, rather than a reviver, Reid continuity and pride even in Reid’s own (like George Hunt and Mungo Martin conversation and activities. She evokes before him) can be seen as a “culture a meeting during which Reid told her a broker” – an individual who is called story that linked his family and hers – upon to translate between the cultural his memory of his mother’s description values of two different communities, of the funeral preparations in Skidegate which may make quite different de- for Crosby’s great-grandmother, Ada mands upon her/him. Crosby, and of seeing the tattoos of The collection offers an interesting aristocratic crests on Ada’s chest, about balance between personal witness and which an old woman commented, “She scholarly analysis. Opening essays by so plitty.” She notes Reid’s grasp of the Ruth Phillips, and by Karen Duffek Skidegate intonation, his devotion to and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “the old people,” and the similar stories introduce the main issues with the and memories she herself had heard in clarity and mature perspective that conversations between her own parents. we have come to rely on from these 96 bc studies Bill Reid Books 97

distinguished scholars. There are lives” (Tippett ). This is disingenuous: fascinating reflections from George we know that the “dark side” is what Rammell, the sculptor who assisted most often sells biographies today. And Reid on most of his large-scale com- what does Tippett represent as Reid’s missions; from Bill McLennan on the dark side? On the one hand there are “modernity” of ’s the illnesses that made his life difficult work; and from David Summers on – bipolar affective disorder diagnosed the potential relevance of the European around  and the Parkinson’s disease Renaissance concept. Between them that, until his death, progressively the academic contributors (too many to disabled him. The latter affliction has mention individually) offer an extensive made Reid something of a public hero; analysis of the systemic problems of but Tippett also convincingly links colonialism and the destructive effects his health problems to his difficulties of their own community’s institutions with personal relationships, with his on the lives of Aboriginal peoples. Yet relationships with his assistants, and to their enumeration of transgressions debates about how far he was the actual sometimes misses the irony that it executor of his works. What is insidious is often those people who felt most is the continual implication that Reid sympathy for First Nations peoples exploited his Aboriginal ancestry in and who advocated for them that, deceptive and self-serving ways, that because they were in the forefront of the ambiguities in his statements about contact, have become the scapegoats when and how far he became aware of of postcolonial critiques. Nonetheless, his Haida extended family amount these are well-documented exam- to some kind of deception. Tippett inations of the complexities of a very makes it her mission to expose Reid star-crossed history as well as of as the “unreliable narrator of his the current field of Aboriginal art own past” (): “My work offers a production and strategies. They will challenge to Bill’s autobiographical be useful to students of the visual arts self, which he consciously or un- and museum studies, and to all those consciously often misrepresented.” interested in relations between Natives Because “his autobiographical accounts and newcomers in Canadian history. ... acquired authority through repe- Maria Tippett’s biography of Bill tition” those who wrote about him Reid is informed by the same post- have “unwittingly propagated ... a colonial premises as are the papers romantic, mythical story” (). Artists in Bill Reid and Beyond, although the indeed have frequently contributed to genre of biography, with its linear their own mythologization through deployment of the details of a single dramatic declarations of the passions life, gives little space to theoretical that drive their work. Such statements arguments. However, Tippett’s use of are inherently revealing, and what we current academic wisdom to demon- need are questions about the pressures strate repeatedly that she is politically and the obsessions that make an artist correct, and that Bill Reid was not, is represent him or herself in particular frustrating. She remarks at the outset or exaggerated ways. Unfortunately, that “biographers become unpopular when Tippett quotes Reid’s views, when they challenge the received instead of exploring their underlying wisdom. Few people want to know connotations, she proceeds at once about the dark side of their heroes’ to contradict them: “But he was 98 bc studies Bill Reid Books 99 wrong” (). By treating matters of shifts experienced by First Nations interpretation as matters of simple fact, generations in the middle decades of she creates misleading simplifications. the twentieth century. The same is Typical examples are her ripostes to true of her comments on Reid’s ability Reid’s laments that Haida culture was to sell his work to a non-Aboriginal dead. Describing a visit made by the audience. Through a succession of family to Haida Gwaii in  when Bill snide comments, Tippett’s Reid is was twelve, she writes: “Far from the turned into a self-serving opportunist: popular belief that Native culture was “Once again, Reid knew how to make rapidly dying out, Bill knew as a result the most out of a good thing” (). of his visit to Skidegate that it was very Although not aided by copious much alive” (). Does this make Reid letters and journals (as was the case a liar? Or does it merely show that with her previous biographical sub- he and Tippett are conceptualizing jects) Tippett amasses information culture differently? Tippett’s evidence from interviews and from a search of the vitality of “Native culture” is through press and archival materials. that “Charles Gladstone and other Despite the frequently belittling Native artists in Skidegate ... [were] tone of her narrative, she provides a supplementing their incomes by selling useful context for the circumstances their work through white middlemen” and events through which Reid’s life (). Reid’s judgments come from a unfolded. A significant find that adds period in his life when his study of to the history of Reid’s Haida family nineteenth-century Haida carving is a notebook kept between  and convinced him that the central role that  by his grandmother, Josephine traditional imagery and cosmology had Ellsworth. The entries begin three once held in Haida society had lapsed. years after Ellsworth and the rest of the Robert Davidson describes a sim- population moved away from the village ilar experience during his youth in of T’anuu, and they provide glimpses Haida Gwaii: “At this time the art was into this time of transition, showing at a low ebb. There was no evidence the Haida response to the arrival of anywhere in the village of the once white settlers in northern British great culture that I came from. All we Columbia during Reid’s grandparents’ had were photographs ... There were no generation. Josephine was a convert to totem poles left in Massett, absolutely Christianity and attended school to none” (Steltzer and Davidson ). learn to speak and write in English. Tippett’s statement that, in , She and her second husband, Charles “Native art, as Ellen Neel made so Gladstone, raised a proud and talented clear in her talk [to the BC Indian family of six children, all educated Arts and Welfare Society’s and ubc’s at the local mission day school in Conference on Native Indian Affairs], Skidegate. Their daughter Sophie, who was very much alive” (Tippett ), became Bill Reid’s mother, left home elides Neel’s anger and frustration at at the age of ten for the Coqualeetza the economic impossibility of actually Industrial Institute, as did her younger making the work she wanted to make. sister Eleanor and her brother Percy. Tippett’s simplistic overstatements, All three went on to postsecondary while avoiding the previous “dying education and professional training. culture” tropes, thus do little to aid the Reid was thus the third generation reader’s understanding of the cultural in a Haida family that prided itself on 98 bc studies Bill Reid Books 99

appropriating Euro-Canadian skills on his return he eulogized him on the and opportunities. cbc (Bringhurst ; again, this is not Photographs and other evidence mentioned by Tippett). It was soon show that Sophie stayed in regular after this that Reid wrote an open touch with her Haida relatives during letter to the Vancouver Sun explaining those years and that she took the chil- and defending Aboriginal totem poles dren on at least two visits to Skidegate. and suggesting that the public should When Reid said in his  curriculum “allow Native peoples to relearn their vitae that he had not become aware of pride and skill in ‘the old arts’” (Tippett being “anything other than an average ). This was the agenda he himself Caucasian North American” until his would follow. early teens, this is plausible; however, Tippett’s book is particularly useful the statement that he had not visited for tracing out details of the many Skidegate or met his grandfather until vicissitudes of Reid’s public life. he was an adult was certainly not true What it signally lacks is a sympathy (Bringhurst  - ). One can only for the artist’s vision, for his sense of assume that the early family visits humour, and for the actual quality of did not hold the same significance his writing and artistic production. The in his memory as did his own later, art-historical commentary adheres to repeated visits to his grandfather the “influence-spotting” and stylistic (which began in his early twenties). emphasis of modernism rather than Both and Robert moving ahead into interpretation. Bringhurst give details they learned Tippett repeatedly makes a big deal from Reid about when, in  at the out of Reid’s “copying” and “stealing” age of twenty-three, he visited his the designs of earlier Haida artists, grandfather in Skidegate – a visit that, when such copying was both normal oddly, is neither discussed nor denied and necessary. There are also many in Tippett’s biography (Shadbolt ; odd comments, as when Tippett states Bringhurst ). that Reid’s illustrations to Christie Tippett usefully pinpoints the Harris’s Raven’s Cry “owed much to moment when Reid made the first the illustrations [of] Prairie wood- published declaration of his Haida cut artist Walter J. Phillips” (). She ancestry. This was in  in an inter- doubtless means W. Langdon Kihn; view with Rhodi Lake, a reporter but, even so, Reid’s stylization found from the Vancouver Sun, soon after all it needed in argillite carvings. It his return to Vancouver after four is difficult to see how Reid’s s crucial years in Toronto. In Toronto jewellery and Raven and the First Men Reid had established his career with was “in tune with the funky art of the the cbc and studied at the Ryerson [sic] artist David Gilhooly” Polytechnic’s School of Jewellery (), even if Reid admired Gilhooly’s Arts. He also became fascinated by work. The book is also peppered the Haida totem poles at the Royal with the kinds of errors that slip Ontario Museum, applied Haida de- through when copy editors have little signs to some of his silver work, and independent knowledge of the subject. made two further trips to Skidegate Anthony Walsh appears as Welsh; to visit his grandfather. Early in  Richard Simmins is Simms; Amelia Reid again visited Skidegate, this time Connolly (Douglas) is Connally, and to attend his grandfather’s funeral, and becomes Coast Salish instead of Cree; a 100 bc studies photograph of Bill Reid on the balcony References Book Reviews of the Hayward Gallery, London, is Bringhurst, Robert, ed. Solitary Raven: labelled Montreal; and so on. The Selected Writings of Bill Reid. In her eagerness to refute earlier Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, celebratory accounts of Bill Reid’s art . and life, Maria Tippett seems unaware that her own biography, like any piece Duffek, Karen, and Charlotte Townsend- of writing, is a discursive construct. Gault, eds. Bill Reid and Beyond: But she swings so far in the opposite Expanding on Modern Native Art. direction that her own bias becomes Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, clearly visible to the reader. It is in . the collection of symposium papers Shadbolt, Doris. Bill Reid. Vancouver: that Reid, with all his contradictions Douglas and McIntyre, . and complexities, finally comes to life, Steltzer, Uli, and Robert Davidson. through the words of those who knew Eagle Transforming: The Art of Robert him and who struggled with him and Davidson. Vancouver: Douglas and his work. McIntyre, . Tippett, Maria. Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian. Toronto: Random House Canada, .

bc studies, no. , Summer  101 100 bc studies

Book Reviews

The Secret Voyage of limited Drake’s northward advance to Sir Francis Drake, 1577-1580 the California or Oregon coasts. Bawlf developed the novel conclusion Samuel R. Bawlf that Drake undertook a remarkable Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas voyage northward in search of the western entrance to the Northwest and McIntyre, .  pp. Illus. Passage. Without repeating all his . paper. detailed arguments, the key elements Christon I. Archer concerned deciphering coded details that appeared in otherwise imaginary University of Calgary coastlines depicted on maps and globes. For example, on the  globe his book represents an expanded produced by Emery Molyneux, Bawlf Tform of the much debated revela- recognized an indentation illustrating tions of Samuel Bawlf concerning the the continental coastline lying inside of Pacific Ocean explorations of Francis Vancouver Island, which, for unknown Drake during his  - voyage of reasons, was not depicted. While the circumnavigation. Parts of the voyage actual details on the map were shown account are well known, such as the crudely and were extremely small trial and execution of the nobleman in scale, Bawlf recognized Prince of Thomas Doughty, the difficult passage Wales Island, the Queen Charlotte through the Strait of Magellan, and Islands, Vancouver Island, and the the plundering of Spanish commerce Olympic Peninsula. He identified on the Pacific side of the Americas Cape Flattery and concluded, without from Chile to Huatulco on the coast apparent evidence, that Drake landed of New Spain. However, from this near fifty degrees latitude on Vancouver point onward, until the Golden Hinde Island. Sailing north to the Queen completed the Pacific Ocean crossing, Charlotte Islands, Drake traced the Bawlf argues that Drake’s movements Inside Passage east of Prince of Wales were shrouded by state secrecy con- Island, visited the delta of the Stikine nected with the desire to suppress River, and worked his way north again information about the Northwest to view an ice-filled Chatham Strait Passage. Most previous historians have that he believed must be the entrance

bc studies, no. , Summer  101 102 bc studies Book Reviews 103 to the Strait of Anian. This remarkable are imaginary, to say the least. He voyage left the present reviewer in a states repeatedly that Drake “would state of advanced incredulity. How have seen,” “would have been,” “would could a seaman of Drake’s intelligence have traveled”; and he employs similar and experience ever have contemplated phrases that are designed to flesh out such a voyage with the Golden Hinde what Drake might have seen and done in need of careening and freighted had he managed to make such a trip. with an enormous treasure captured After all, the much better equipped along the coasts of Spanish America? eighteenth-century explorers ex- Moreover, it seems unlikely, given perienced enormous difficulties in their the time available, that Drake could Northwest Coast explorations, which possibly have completed such a slowed the acquisition of cartographic demanding detour to his voyage of evidence. Did Drake not fear narrow circumnavigation. passages, hidden reefs, swift currents, While on the Northwest Coast treacherous storms, lee shores, thick Drake set up heavy posts with in- fog, and other dangers that, at the scribed metal plates that Bawlf notes very least, could have left his men might have been in imitation of permanently marooned upon a most totem poles. He reports that, in , inhospitable coast? As Bawlf notes, in a prospector on Kuiu Island (close to  the Russian explorer Alexi Chirikov Chatham Strait) who visited a Tlingit lost two boats on the southern Alaska burial cave found a small metal plate coast, probably due to treacherous rip whose Latin inscription mentioned tides rather than to Aboriginal attacks. Drake. Like other will-o’-the-wisp Similarly, the Comte de la Pérouse lost evidence cited in The Secret Voyage, two boats and the lives of all aboard in that pertaining to the plate was lost in plain sight of horrified witnesses who a robbery and never recovered. Drake were helpless to lend assistance. Even headed south to the eastern side of George Vancouver faced the danger Vancouver Island and cruised through of losing the Discovery on submerged the narrows of Johnstone Strait, with rocks – rocks that, according to Bawlf, its dangerous rip tides. Bawlf has Drake Drake passed almost  years before selecting a site for the future colony of on the way to his planned settlement Nova Albion at today’s Comox Bay. at Comox Bay. The author fails to He continued through Georgia Strait, take into account that the presence of viewed the mouth of the Fraser River English intruders would have provoked before entering Puget Sound, and the coastal peoples to protect their then sailed back through Juan de Fuca lands, resources, and possessions. Strait to the open sea. If this was not At the least Drake would have enough, Drake was said to have visited suffered innumerable incidents with the mouth of the Columbia River – Aboriginals anxious to possess iron possibly taking his pinnace across the and other metal items. Although the treacherous bar. Any knowledgeable Elizabethan explorers had matchlock reader of Northwest Coast literature arquebuses, these weapons were by no will be left almost breathless by Bawlf’s means as effective as were eighteenth- version of Drake’s progress. century flintlock muskets. Without the existence of any With his well designed and at- journals or charts and with only crude tractively illustrated book, and maps to guide him, Bawlf’s conclusions his strongly expressed convictions, 102 bc studies Book Reviews 103

Samuel Bawlf may lure some less These promoters sought to build the knowledgeable readers into accepting cultural, geographic, and institutional his fantastical account of Drake’s visit infrastructure of a tourist economy, to the Northwest Coast. However, first through internal organization (at Bawlf clearly permits his imagination the local and later at the regional level), to overreach the thin shreds of evidence then by mobilizing the provincial state contained in his sources. He does not and eventually even by encouraging take into account the work of many British Columbians to behave hos- well-known historians who contradict pitably. Their projects were mostly his views, and he fails to turn up successful. By the postwar period, startling new archival evidence to tourism had carved out an institutional defend his hypotheses. Historians will place in the growing provincial bu- continue to accept the view that Drake reaucracy, was recognized as a key followed the navigational instructions element of the provincial economy, captured from Spanish pilots and sailed and was woven into the image and from the coast of New Spain for Asian landscape of . waters without deviating northward. In travelling along this narrative Though Bawlf’s study is not good road, Dawson connects tourism to history, by identifying Comox as the consumer culture and to the bur- site of Drake’s proposed Nova Albion geoning literature that charts its settlement, it might well enhance that history. Most notably, in the middle town’s value as a tourist destination. chapters of the book, Dawson connects understudied Depression-era and wartime promotional activities to the Selling British Columbia: more familiar postwar consumer surge. Between  and , he argues, the Tourism and Consumer Culture, basic cultural and institutional infra- 1890-1970 structure of the postwar tourist boom Michael Dawson (and perhaps, we might infer, the broader consumer boom as well) was Vancouver: UBC Press, . built: business elites forged links  pp. Illus. . paper. with government bureaucracies and politicians, and defined the strategies Steve Penfold that became staples of postwar con- sumer culture. This is an important discussion, making Selling British n this interesting book, Michael Columbia a must-read for historians IDawson studies the rise of a tourist interested in either consumer history economy in British Columbia over the or twentieth-century Canada. course of the twentieth century. At the The book seems excessively detailed heart of the story are loosely related at times, but it is refreshingly clear and groups of tourist promoters – business straightforward in style, even when elites, bureaucrats, and politicians covering topics that invite jargon, – who gradually define tourism as “an such as cultural appropriation and industry in itself” (), transforming anti-modernism. The detail partly it from a creature of settlement and follows from Dawson’s intellectual industrial development into an element approach. Dawson-the-cultural- of an emerging consumer society. historian (familiar to readers of his 104 bc studies Book Reviews 105 earlier book on the Mounties) peeks way he tries to do this – to admit through on occasion, particularly when that “agency” is often rhetorically he analyzes the selective use of imperial overplayed, something that we throw and Aboriginal symbolism. Much of into our boilerplate introductions, Selling British Columbia, however, pretending to court controversy when, provides close readings of promotional in fact, the concept is a commonsense ideas and institutional politics, leaning impulse in the academy. Dawson’s heavily on biographies of business sort of political economy, which is and political personalities, minutes still attentive to ideas and meaning, from tourist bodies and chambers of will do us good. commerce, government reports, and In the ongoing academic conver- other institutional sources. sation about consumer societies and In this sense, though placing economic development, Selling British tourism within the context of the Columbia raises important questions emerging consumer ethos, Selling that need to be thought through. British Columbia implicitly parallels Dawson’s analytic gaze is mostly from an older tradition of historical political the centre. Local interests appear on economy (of which H.V. Nelles’s The occasion, but the main characters are Politics of Development []is the metropolitan elites, bureaucrats, and exemplar). Dawson emphasizes the provincial politicians who travel widely ideological and institutional links to collect ideas, compare notes, and between government bureaucracies, manage the challenges of competition politicians, and regional business and promotion. Dawson approvingly elites, all in the name of a particular cites James Scott’s Seeing Like a State notion of economic development. In () to emphasize how these projects the minds of the promoters and in resembled other systems of “state- the way Dawson relates its growing initiated social engineering” (-). economic and geographic influence, Yet, unlike the highways the promoters tourism comes off as a sort of staple advocated or the economic staples they for the service economy. aspired to match in importance (e.g., This implicit analytic similarity hydro or timber), the tourist industry follows logically from Dawson’s more itself – restaurants, hotels and motels, explicit theoretical argument, laid resorts, hunting and fishing expe- out in his introduction, that studies ditions – was mostly decentralized of consumer society have been too and entrepreneurial well into the interested in consumer agency and postwar period. Within Dawson’s not interested enough in the power narrative arc, which leads organized of cultural producers. Of course, it promoters to the provincial state, this is always easier to focus on producers point doesn’t matter very much since it when they have produced all your is clear that they successfully influenced sources: even Dawson admits that economic priorities and created a tourists themselves are largely absent “formidable apparatus of consumer from his story. In this case, however, culture” (). But in moving beyond the hackneyed criticism about sources consumer agency, how do we place this (though true) would miss Dawson’s apparatus within British Columbia’s larger point. You needn’t agree with broader economic culture? Dawson’s his desire to swing the pendulum to promoters seem to spend much of their producers – or with the particular time, even after they have won over the 104 bc studies Book Reviews 105

province, cajoling local entrepreneurs In the Shadow of Evil to modernize, to advertise, and to adopt Beatrice Culleton Mosionier consistent symbols – to go along, in other words, with a modern tourist Penticton: Theytus Books, . project that tended to exclude smaller  pp. . paper. interests. Were local restaurant owners or motel operators cultural producers? Whispering in Shadows Were they subjects in, or objects of, the promoters’ project? Were they both? Jeannette Armstrong Since, in addition to modernist Penticton: Theytus Books, . elites, Scott is interested in the way in-  pp. . paper. stitutions require informal knowledge to operate, arguing that we should Jeanne Perreault move from consumer agency to the University of Calgary power of cultural producers continues to raise difficult questions. The point eatrice Culleton Mosionier is is not to criticize Dawson’s book but, well known and highly respected rather, to engage with it. Selling British B for her first novel, In Search of April Columbia is a good discussion of the Raintree (), which received serious ability of tourist promoters to develop critical attention and has been widely an economic vision and to convince the taught at the university level. A toned- state to underwrite it; however, if we down version for high school students move past (or at least de-emphasize) truncated one of the most vivid racially agency as a totem concept, and admit inflected rape scenes written in English. that “cultural producers” shaped and In this second novel, In the Shadow of structured consumer decisions, who Evil, Culleton Mosionier revisits do we define as “cultural producers”? some familiar territory, although the How do we attend to the limitations of emphasis on Aboriginal experience their projects without simply recreating is reduced. She tells the story of a the drawbacks of the power-agency conflicted sister relationship, this time opposition? And what do we do with from the perspective and narrative voice “the market”? However invented of the darker-skinned younger child; an economic construct and dicey an the incompetent, alcoholic mother; the analytic concept, it did have remarkable untrustworthy foster care system; and power to destroy any project that the main character’s long struggle to sought to impose coherence, as Marx undo the effects of betrayal and loss. taught us more than a century ago and I admired In Search of April Raintree, as Keynesian bureaucrats discovered enjoyed its tight and complex structure, somewhat later. In thinking through and was moved by its powerful arti- these questions, Dawson has provided culation of the minds and experiences a good start. Who would have thought of both Cheryl and April. This novel, that provincial government could be so too, has a story – a very important one, engaging a topic? one that is not often told – the story of how the evil of sexual violation grips a child, even though she is a “survivor,” and, throughout her life, keeps her in its “shadow.” Culleton Mosionier shows 106 bc studies Book Reviews 107 how this evil is both psychologically her. It is hard to imagine the children’s internalized and externally manifested stories she’d write. – a powerful metaphor for how the While the autobiographical nar-rator sexual predator steals the joy of a child may appear to offer great intimacy and victim’s life. emotional authenticity to the story, the Culleton Mosionier somewhat com- mind of this narrator single character plicates the structure of first person must be intense and textured. The narrative as the novel opens with an author must be ruthlessly critical of unidentified evil voice planning a dead air. Here is an example of the tormenting cat-and-mouse game with mental processes of the narrator in a the unsuspecting object of his attention. moment of despair: A second narrative opening lyrically My first thought when I woke describes the members (with names) the following morning was to of a wolf pack enacting their free lives. wish that I didn’t have to go The novel proper is narrated in the first through another day. And why person by a woman who, although should I wait? I now had no plagued with insecurity from an early doubt that Peter and Todd were trauma, is now a successful writer with dead, so I really didn’t have to a loving husband and a cherished son. wait for the police to find their She tells the story of the unwelcome bodies. And I had never cared visit of her estranged sister and, soon for the ritual of funerals. I knew, after, the mysterious disappearance of too, that Peter’s parents would her husband and child. Flashbacks claim the bodies once they were of her life as a sexually abused foster found, so they could bury them child, a young woman, and a writer too. Inside the small enclosure of children’s books are interspersed of the cabin I paced restlessly, with the ongoing unravelling of her just as I had when I was younger life as sinister events accrue around and felt trapped and needed to her. Her only supports are a wise and be free. () kind Aboriginal couple who are her neighbours and a ghostly wolf that This interior voice does not sound, appears at key moments. Despite the to me, like the actual thought/feeling elements of the “thriller” here, the story processes of an anguished and des- occurs almost entirely within the mind perate person. The voice is flattened, of the main character, and the tension reporting the mental movements rather and drama associated with that genre than living them. Given the importance are absent. The narrator tells us in of this sotry and the real knowledge the detail about her actions and thoughts, author demonstrates about the reality both in the present and in the past. she is portraying, how is it that the The latter sections are not presented novel fails its readers? As I read, I found as memories but relivings, and the myself wondering repeatedly, “Where movement is slow, often repetitive. Set is the editor?” Almost every writer against the generally uninflected voice acknowledges the assistance of these of the narrator, none of the scenes from gifted first readers, their keen eye for childhood, adolescence, or her present the clunky line, the wooden dialogue, adulthood give us much feeling for who or the drag of a too-long description. she is, why her husband loves her, or This text is free of irritating errors, why her elder sister remains devoted to typos, and the like. But the weaknesses 106 bc studies Book Reviews 107

in it suggest either that editorial advice Penny, whose own name seems for- was not given or that the author refused eign to her until she hears it in her to take it. A significant representation great-grandmother Susapeen’s voice of a too common life experience is – “Paen-aye” – is presented as a muffled here. This numbing feels like speaking/thinking presence and as loss and waste, especially given the a character intimately known by the strength and courage it takes to write narrator. Penny is an artist, and some a novel of this substance. In the Shadow of the novel’s most effective segments of Evil is gripping almost in spite of involve her musing and puzzling over itself: the author knows much about her effort to get the colour of snow just the menace and the power of evil and right on her canvas, or her grappling its mercilessness pervades the novel. with the relation of art to ethics There seems to be a conundrum: to and the marketplace. Armstrong’s me the flattened prose dulls the effect narrative takes us through Penny’s of emotional tension; yet I am left life, first as a young woman, then with an overwhelming sense of the through her childhood memories, and narrator’s damaged spirit. Perhaps the finally through the memories of her narrative style reflects the defensive grandmothers. Direct narrative makes layer that the narrator exudes in order us feel the stink of the pesticides and to insulate herself against the pain the weight of the apples Penny picks and horror of the past. If this is so, at her summer job. The materiality Culleton Mosioneir will have to find of the bodily experience is so strong ways to singnal her intention more here that I was reminded of Robert clearly. Her work deserves it. Frost’s “After Apple Picking.” Penny becomes an activist in environmental * * * and indigenous resistance movements Like In the Shadow of Evil Jeannette which take her, in one of the novel’s Armstrong’s novel, Whispering in most powerful sections, into the Chiapas Shadows, also uses the image of guerrilla movements. Armstrong “shadow”; however, to Armstrong the presents a thorough analysis of the force of shadows is not evil but part of interconnections of politics, economics, the necessary world – something not to and ecology in the strangulation of the be feared but, rather, accepted, taken earth’s peoples and the consumption in, and changed. Armstrong’s work as of its resources. Her despair at seeing a poet and an activist permeates the the marketing of her art as inextricable language and content of this novel, from a global system that consumes the which reads as an assemblage of the many to support the few leads her to main character Penny’s chronological destroy her paintings and to quit narratives: her letters to sisters, lovers, making art. and friends, and her diary entries. Unfortunately, much of the political The novel is even formatted like a information comes to us as polemic prose poem, with much white space, rather than in the dramatic forms of abrupt shifts from dialogue to Penny’s the apple picking or the Chiapas visit. italicized self-talk, to diary entries, Penny, a single mother, continues with and to bare description. The fragments her world-travelling activism until she hang together, each making the nar- exhausts herself and returns home rative more intelligible, the emotional with her children to the reserve, her reality of the character more dense. family, and the earth. This trajectory 108 bc studies Book Reviews 109 of movement from a centre outwards presents herself here as a fully mature and then back is not uncommon among author whole-heartedly engaged with First Nations authors; however, in her characters and the world in which significant ways, Armstrong’s character we all live. is dissimilar from the abused and neglected children depicted in some other Aboriginal novels. Penny is Songhees Pictorial: raised in a loving and strong extended family, and she is capable to taking on A History of the Songhees People a wide range of experiences and making as Seen by Outsiders, 1790-1912 numerous decisions. The harm done to Grant Keddie her is a byproduct of the larger injury foisted upon the earth and its peoples Victoria: Royal BC Museum, . by the greed and blind consumption of  pp. Illus. . paper. global capitalism. We are meant, for example, to connect the cancer that John Lutz strikes her to the poisonous chemicals used by the apple growers. And the metaphoric cancer of environmental his is a wonderful addition to destruction and cultural genocide Tthe history of Aboriginal peoples shifts back and forth, from foreground in British Columbia and Canada. It is to background, in Penny’s life. unusual because it takes images as the Whispering in Shadows, like In the starting point and valuable because the Shadow of Evil, raises a profound people upon whom it focuses are among question: how can one resist the the least known in the written history forces arrayed against the earth and of the region, despite being the most still maintain a life that is connected to observed. It is also a great example of the earth. Everyone who struggles with popular history: an appealing coffee the contradictions of contemporary table book that is original, scholarly, life will feel grateful for Armstrong’s and authoritative. insight and her generosity as well as The Songhees (also known as for her unflinching assessment of power the Lekwungen) were the first Abo- and money and how they work. riginal group in western Canada to Armstrong’s prose is rich, en- experience urbanization: the town of gaging, and crisp. Her spiritual and Victoria, and then the city, enveloped philosophical musings, along with her them within two decades of the first intricate assessment of activism and arrival of Europeans. Their reserve its costs to her family, make even the was in constant view of the city and lecture-like sections of the novel af- in the direct sightline of the colonial fecting. This balance falters only when and provincial legislative buildings. someone rails about how immigration Moreover, Songhees people were fre- works for global capital, or what effect quently in the city: working, buying tourism has on local economies, or why goods, and selling fish, game, or art mass industrialism paralyzes creativity. work. Among the Songhees, as well Even these segments never go on too as other Aboriginal visitors to their long. Armstrong seems to trust her reserve, Victorians found the stereo- reader much more in Whispering than type of the lazy, mercurial, drunken, she does in Slash (Theytus, ). She immoral Indian. This became the 108 bc studies Book Reviews 109

story of the Songhees among the a new reserve in the (then) suburbs of settler population, and since many of Esquimalt. There are accounts of the the capital’s politicians, residents, and traditional territories of the different visitors had never encountered other families who signed the Fort Victoria views of Aboriginal peoples, these treaties in  -; their integration images ended up, in many respects, into the mercantilist economy of the defining the province’s “Indians.” fur trade and the capitalist economy of Ironically, anthropologists largely the city; their often fractious relations ignored the Songhees because they with visiting Aboriginal groups; were too much like Europeans in dress, their escape from the devastating religion, work, and social (including smallpox epidemic of  ; major drinking) habits, and because they potlatches; and the series of attempts intermarried extensively with other to remove them, culminating in the racial/ethnic groups. As a stereotype  agreement. There are also brief they were hyper-visible, but as a sidebars with biographies and/or cultural group they were invisible. details about specific places, images, Keddie’s book makes the Songhees/ and photographers. Lekwungen visible in a way that is not Grant Keddie is well placed to only respectful but celebratory. Each create such a book as his office over- of the nearly  images is supported looks the old settlement site. As by detailed research and commentary. curator of archaeology at the Royal Keddie delves into each photo with a British Columbia Museum (rbcm) detective’s eye. Working with archival he has been at the forefront not only sources (e.g., checking cannery records of local archaeology but also of larger for the owner of a boat with a cannery issues around the pre-European cul- number), he identified many of the tural changes of Pacific Northwest people in the images. By studying Aboriginal peoples. One of the great the appearance or disappearance of assets of the museum is its expansive buildings and checking the tax rolls ethnographic photographic collection, for their date of construction, the which, when combined with the rich height of vegetation in comparison BC Archives Collection (now being to what is depicted in other photos, formally merged with the rbcm col- and other techniques he is able to date lection), provides the majority of images and, specifically, to identify images in the volume. activities (distinguishing, for example, If the Songhees were always within the potlatch photos of  from those clear view of Victoria, Victorians were of  and those of  from those of also in clear view of the Songhees. ). The incredibly painstaking and We do not get much sense of what thorough research and description of the Songhees thought of Victoria, the photos makes Songhees Pictorial but Mission Hill (on the reserve) was outstanding. a great vantage point from which to The organization is roughly chrono- take in the growing city. The collection logical, starting with brief accounts of panoramic photographs of the city from the Spanish visits of  but taken from the reserve between  and focusing on the period between the  are important contributions to the  establishment of Fort Victoria city’s history. and the - sale of the Songhees Songhees Pictorial is handsomely reserve and the people’s relocation to designed and the text is full of original 110 bc studies Book Reviews 111 details and descriptions, which are kept These matters do not cloud the short to fit the pictorial format. In order fact that Songhees Pictorial is a fine to ensure the format’s popularity, the book. It is a novel experiment in museum decided on a ninety-nine- merging popular and scholarly, print page Internet supplement that provides and Internet publishing. Impeccably fuller descriptions and comparisons researched, Keddie’s handsome book and that includes many photos not adds a new dimension to Aboriginal published in the book. history in Canada by focusing on a Songhees Pictorial is self-consciously previously ignored “urban” Aboriginal an outsider’s view. Its celebratory tone community and by meticulously using is an antidote to the often disparaging photographs as its central “primary” commentary on, or the total invisibility source. of, the Songhees in BC histories; how- ever, this does make the scholarship less “critical” than it might be. Keddie’s Constructing Cultures chosen photographs and text emphasize the smiling faces, celebrations, and Then and Now: strong leadership of the chiefs. Critical Celebrating Franz Boas and the commentary on Chief Freezie is largely Jesup North Pacific Expedition. absent; the secret , payment to Chief Cooper to “facilitate” the sale of Contributions to Circumpolar the reserve and his forced resignation Anthropology, vol. 4 in  go unremarked in Keddie’s gloss, Laurel Kendall and Igor which has him as chief for life, from Krupnik, editors  to . It is a testimony to the book’s suc- Washington: Arctic Studies Center, cess that it leaves you wanting more. National Museum of Natural It would have been great to see more History, Smithsonian Institution, from Keddie and colleague Dan .  pp. Illus., maps. paper. Savard, who contributed a short essay, on how to critically read these parti- David G. Anderson cular photographs; it would have been University of Aberdeen interesting to see images (or be pro- vided with a discussion) of the Johnson his is a rich, edited volume on Street ravine or even Johnson Street, Tthe anthropology of the North both of which were Indian spaces in the Pacific. It was produced following a city; and the appendix on the Songhees  conference held in New York at traditional worldview is tantalizingly the American Museum of Natural short. Wilson Duff ’s Songhees place History (amnh), which celebrated names might have been included with the centenary of the Jesup North the more detailed but narrower list of Pacific Expedition – an ambitious, place names in one of the subfamily multidisciplinary international expe- territories. While the photographs are dition designed to study the cultures meticulously documented, the textual surrounding the North Pacific of the references are not, and readers are left Russian Empire, Canada, and Alaska. to wonder which of the bibliographic This expedition was an important sources cited for each chapter is the landmark in the development of com- source of specific statements. parative ethnology and the founding 110 bc studies Book Reviews 111

of cultural anthropology in the United As is made clear by its title, the States. Directed by Franz Boas, often theme of this volume is “constructing credited with being the “founder” of cultures.” Unlike other interdisci- American cultural anthropology, it plinary volumes, Constructing Cultures produced a number of fundamental has an unusual theoretical focus – the monographs that still serve as classic delicate alliance between indigenous studies of the peoples of this region. peoples and those who study them. The purpose of the  conference, Many revisionary histories of expe- and this volume, is not only to re- ditionary science have begun to dig flect upon the Jesup North Pacific for the histories of those bicultural and expedition but also to continue its bilingual field assistants who, in many legacy. A group of enthusiasts at cases, silently provided data to the the Smithsonian Institution in scholars whose careers were forged by Washington and at the amnh have these expeditions. Constructing Cultures encouraged a multidisciplinary team continues in this tradition by providing of scholars to apply for funding to new data not only on the collaboration continue its research. As a monument between Boas and Teit but also on the to the expedition’s work, Constructing relatively unknown work of Pilsudski, Cultures offers the reader a rich col- Laufer, and Shotridge. A fine chapter by lection of chapters on the history of Sergei Kan summarizes the important science, linguistic analysis, physical role of indigenous interpreters. anthropology (which made use of Part  of Constructing Cultures genetic markers), and summaries of presents five chapters by recent re- museum collections. To my knowledge searchers. There is a contemporary it is one of the best resource books on ethnography of Kamchatka (Koester), the history of the region, surpassing the a chapter on archaeology (Artuiunov), volumes published by the Smithsonian a summary of genetic research (Schurr following the Crossroads of Continents and Wallace), a summary of linguistic exhibit in . research (Krauss), and a chapter on By far the heaviest emphasis in the natural history of the region Constructing Cultures is upon the his- (Hoffmann). Although each of these tory of expeditionary anthropology at chapters provides a good overview the turn of the last century. Parts  and (in the case of Schurr/Wallace and  of the volume present ten extremely Koester, excellent overviews) they tend well researched chapters on the themes to get lost among the other chapters and actors involved in the Jesup North on the history of the Jesup expedition. Pacific expedition. The introductory Then, as now, the work by physical chapters by Krupnik, Vakhtin, scientists has taken a back seat to the Schweitzer, Lee, and Graburn provide work on cultural contact. That being a solid and critical understanding of the said, it is important to note that all of goals of the expedition, giving readers the chapters are extremely well edited, access to a wealth of unpublished situating their findings within the sources. Indeed, until I read this context of original research hypotheses book I was unaware of the depth of deriving from the Jesup expedition. the manuscript and photographic The final section presents six chap- collections that the expedition had ters on the material culture of the amassed, all of which complement the region as housed in museums and, most many extant published works. significantly, as used by local people. 112 bc studies Book Reviews 113

This section again reflects the main Wartime Images, Peacetime theme of the book – how expeditionary Wounds: The Media and the science not only has amassed cultural material but also has provided the Gustafsen Lake Standoff bricks and mortar for local peoples to Sandra Lambertus rebuild their culture. The chapters by Webster, Ivanov-Unarov, and Loring/ Toronto: University of Toronto Veltre provide exceptionally good Press, .  pp. Maps, Illus. examples of how museum collections . cloth. live in the present. Kenneth Brealey Constructing Cultures contains a number of high-quality black-and- Fraser Valley University College white illustrations printed on glossy paper. For students of anthropology welcome addition to the liter- the book provides rich material on Aature on Aboriginal symbolic the history of science in the region, politics and direct action in Canada, while for activists working along the this book describes the standoff BC coast it provides several important between the rcmp and a handful of comparative examples of how cultures Native activists and supporters at change and revitalize themselves over Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia, time. in summer . Its purpose is to show Constructing Cultures is the fourth how the state and mass media use in a series of edited books on the such confrontations to position, and anthropology of the Circumpolar reinforce stereotypes of, Aboriginal Arctic. Two of the other three volumes peoples in liberal democracies generally. concern the anthropology of the North Lambertus situates a content analysis Pacific. Readers of this book will be (of media reports and interviews with interested in Volume  (), which is reporters and the rcmp) within a specifically devoted to the history of blend of structural anthropology and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. discourse analysis to examine “the Like Constructing Cultures, these underlying relations between Canadian volumes are of high intellectual quality; Aboriginal peoples, the media, and unfortunately, they are all published the rcmp” (); and, while necessarily with flimsy softcover bindings and having to work primarily with “outsider letter-sized paper. It would be good if accounts,” she is largely successful in the Smithsonian could invest the funds this endeavour. to improve the physical presentation of Beginning with the occupancy of what is an excellent series that offers the sundance site at the Lyle Ranch, a great service to the history and and then tracing the escalation of ethnology of the Circumpolar region. the standoff from the first attempts to evict the camp occupants, to the arrival of the rcmp and the creation of a militarized zone about the camp, through a series of armed encounters between the rcmp and the camp occupants, to attempts by Native and non-Native intervenors to defuse the standoff, to the eventual surrender of 112 bc studies Book Reviews 113

the occupants and the court case that pending Nisga’a Treaty, and she ac- followed, the account is essentially knowledges its links to some of the chronological. Lambertus shows how other highly mediated direct actions the rcmp exerted control over media at Lyell Island (), Penticton (), access to the camp and, in so doing, Ipperwash (), and Burnt Church succeeded in presenting the standoff (). But if her aim was to “frame within an increasingly criminal frame. and situate” the discursive context She shows how filtered media reports of Gustafsen Lake, then she needed of (and reporter competition over to provide more tracking between the right to cover) the same events these various events. Lambertus contributed to their contradictory does offer a history of the evolution delivery as well as how “investigative of the Aboriginal land question in journalism” ultimately yielded to a British Columbia, but it occupies at carefully orchestrated rcmp smear best six pages split between the intro- campaign. Some of the story, as it duction and appendix. And some of oscillates between the events and how this material, if only because of its they were reported and interpreted, is selectivity, is factually suspect. This a little choppy; but perhaps this merely may unnecessarily confuse readers reflects the character of the standoff as who have little or no knowledge of the it lurched from one moment of crisis to Aboriginal land question in British another. It certainly captures the rising Columbia. tensions and performative drama that Lambertus correctly states that it is was actually played out on the ground. generally “news sources with power, While all of this became part of the status or news appeal [that] have a public record at trial, Lambertus should greater potential to frame events” (), be commended for having been able to and she properly notes some of the negotiate interviews with players who differences in tone and representation would have had every reason to be dis- between the more liberal urban press trustful of her motives. in the larger Canadian cities and the My reservations have less to do with more conservative local media in the existing content than with the way places like Williams Lake. At the in which Lambertus framed the study same time, there is no examination and what she left out. Curiously, she pre- of stories in the Aboriginal media faces her account with the  blockade or, for that matter, in the alternative at Douglas Lake but consigns references popular press. The author admits that to the  standoff at Oka to isolated these would have provided a valuable passages in the text and appendices. alternate perspective and that Native Surely it was at this earlier event communities were indeed split over that the collaboration between media the efficacy of this action. Lambertus and police to criminalize Aboriginal interviews a handful of local chiefs direct action was most thoroughly but ignores Aboriginal media on the worked out, and surely a discussion grounds that they were generally “not of it would have provided readers with available” (), when in fact they clearly a good introduction to the Gustafsen were. Lake events. Lambertus does note how Most striking in its absence, how- the media and police representation of ever, is any engagement with the Gustafsen Lake informed the rising visual media – a surprising omission crescendo of opposition over the then given the author’s acknowledgment 114 bc studies Book Reviews 115 that it is visual representations that does not have to accept the tactics of the are most likely to entrench stereo- camp occupants, but when Lambertus types. Lambertus includes a dozen further adds, with no evidence, that photographs of the camp and its occu- “Native militant groups are amassing pants, but they are blocked together in illegal weapons and are continuing to the middle of the book, inadequately be a serious threat to national stability” captioned, and not cross-referenced in (), she wanders dangerously close the text. Missing completely are any of to being complicit in the very smear the highly inflammatory images that campaign she is trying to deconstruct. accompanied the various newspaper In the end, the book worked for me reports with which she deals. Indeed, I on some levels but not on others. As was struck by the lack of dialogue with far as the media’s ongoing role in the the literature on visual anthropology, maintenance of the “frontier myth” is the politics of representation, and concerned, the author is clearly in her the frontier myth in colonial settler element – and, to be fair, this is her societies generally. Lambertus states principal aim. Still, it is the discursive that “neither the rcmp nor the media context of blockades and occupancies took into consideration at the time ... that is the villain in the piece, and I their complicity in reinforcing a pre- do think that Lambertus missed an existing stereotype ... of criminal opportunity to develop this side of the Indians at the level of national media standoff in a more robust way. saturation” (), but she does not follow this through. Indeed, the mediations of the colonial encounter in travel writing, Landscapes of Promise: photography, art, and film date back to first contact, and they are surely The Oregon Story, 1800-1940 as relevant to a discursive framing William G. Robbins of Gustafsen Lake (and the public response to it) as are the machinations Seattle: University of Washington of the contemporary media and the Press, .  pp. . paper. legal and empirical history of the land question proper. Landscapes of Conflict: In this light Lambertus might have The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 also chosen a few of her words more carefully than she did. She claims that William G. Robbins “the cross-section of newspaper stories Seattle: University of Washington represented a theme of conflict between Press, .  pp. . cloth. Aboriginal spirituality and western understandings of property ownership” Theodore Binnema (), but in then commenting that University of Northern “the standoff occurred when a group of Native people chose violence as a British Columbia strategy for social transformation” (), she lets the violence of the his two-volume environmental Indian Act and the reserve system – Thistory of Oregon, written by and against which Aboriginal direct a distinguished historian of the action and symbolic politics must be US Pacific Northwest, sets a new measured – off the hook. Certainly, one standard for environmental histories 114 bc studies Book Reviews 115

of individual states (and provinces). as does the argument expressed in the The author is best known for books epilogue: “to grasp the transformation on the political economy of the US that has taken place across the Pacific West, with a particular emphasis Northwest during the last two cen- on the forest industry of the Pacific turies is to know something of relations Northwest. They include Lumberjacks between countryside, its urban centers, and Legislators: Political Economy of the and distant constellations of capital US Lumber Industry, 1890–1941 () and markets. Capitalism has been, in and American Forestry: A History of brief, the most powerful determinant of National, State, and Private Cooperation environmental change during the last (), and more recently, Colony and two centuries” (). Empire: The Capitalist Transformation This argument is also made in of the American West (), which Landscapes of Conflict: “Today, native argues that global capitalism and the peoples and newcomers alike live “industrial statesmen” from outside amidst the awesome changes that have the region did more to shape the been wrought to Oregon’s landscape modern American West than did the since the forces of market capitalism rugged individualists of mythology. first penetrated the region in the early Although the present two volumes nineteenth century” (). This focus represent a change in topic, they are on the market system – which puts vintage Robbins. British Columbia it in good company with many other historians should find them useful environmental histories, as well as with not only because they provide a Robbins’s other books – lends these valuable interpretation of Oregon volumes both their greatest strength environmental history but also because and their greatest weakness. It gives the environmental history of Oregon them coherence and unity at the cost of has so many interesting parallels, subtlety and nuance. There is no doubt similarities, contrasts, and intersections that capitalism has been a tremendous with the environmental history of force for environmental change, but British Columbia. Not only are some important factors and trends Oregon and British Columbia similar – industrialism and technological environmentally and economically, but change, the growth of consumerism and they both also find themselves in the the culture of waste, the emergence of forefront of environmental politics. environmental movements connected Robbins focuses upon the effects with conservation and preservation of of the market system on Oregon’s the national parks, the wilderness environment. Landscapes of Promise movement, and the rise of sport examines this history “from the first hunting and middle-class tourism inroads of market influences” to the – are not discussed as much as many onset of the Second World War (). readers might like. Although he suggests that the central Interestingly, the declensionist thesis is “that culture has been a theme is less apparent in the second powerful force in shaping the place volume than it is in the first. This is we call Oregon,” and that the pace because Robbins points to various of cultural change has dramatically forces that, since , have somewhat accelerated the pace of environmental fettered capitalism. Thus, in Landscapes change (), this does not seem to of Conflict, Robbins points to “those describe the thrust of the book so well individuals and groups who valued 116 bc studies Book Reviews 117 civic commitment and stewardship over Robbins’s studies. Oregon put itself raw profiteering, who sought to build on the cutting edge of environmental a society that promised something legislation when it passed the first more than the reduction of all human bottle-return bill in the United States behavior to market transactions” (xx). in  (Landscapes of Conflict, ). After a section that looks at postwar Interestingly, this bill came a little optimism, population growth, and more than a year after British Columbia economic growth, culminating with enacted the first beverage container the floods of , the book offers deposit recovery system in North sections on agriculture and forestry. America. More significantly, Senate Its last and most optimistic section Bill , Oregon’s pioneering land- consists of three chapters that examine use planning law (which solidified those forces that have curbed Oregon’s the state’s reputation for progressive postwar mania for development environmental legislation) was passed and unfettered private enterprise. It on  May  (Landscapes of Conflict, emphasizes the interesting history of  -); British Columbia’s Land certain politicians (separate chapters Commission Act passed on  April are devoted to Richard Neubeger and . How intertwined were these Tom McCall) much more than it does developments? On  March , environmentalists and environmental ndp premier Dave Barrett answered organizations. suggestions that the Agricultural Land These volumes should be of great Reserves were products of “Marxian interest to bc historians not only socialists” by pointing out that the because they may serve as models for Republican government of Oregon an environmental history of the Pacific had just introduced similar legislation province but also because they suggest (Debates of the Legislative Assembly, bc, interesting parallels and comparisons nd Session, th Parliament, ). with Oregon. Much about Oregon And on  May , when the bc and British Columbia is comparable. government sought to amend the law Similarities range from their natural so that decisions would be rendered endowments, their Aboriginal societies, less prone to political influence, Bill and the economic significance of their Barlee, the agriculture minister, re- forests, salmon, and dams to their marked: “by the way, the state of environmental politics and environ- Oregon, which is one of the foremost mental legislation. Even the floods of states, wishes they had our agricultural  hit both jurisdictions. land reserve act, and they’re right” An environmental history organized (Debates of the Legislative Assembly, around a political unit is defensible; bc, st Session, th Parliament, ). however, not surprisingly, Robbins’s Meanwhile, no one has yet explained books only hint at comparisons be- why the west coast of North America, tween Oregon and its neighbours. from the Mexican border to Alaska, Richard White’s Organic Machine has been on the leading edge of ()and Matthew Evenden’s recent environmental movements for over Fish vs. Power () explore the links a century, spawning organizations in Oregon, Washington, and British from the Sierra Club to Greenpeace, Columbia environmental history even as the same region has been on more fully than does Robbins. Other the leading edge of conspicuous con- connections are only suggested in sumption, consumerism, and waste. If, 116 bc studies Book Reviews 117

to paraphrase Wallace Stegner, people curators of the exhibition, respectively on the west coast are North Americans, review the wider cultural context and only more so, then environmental his- the important federal link established tories of the west coast states and between what had, in an earlier era in provinces are particularly useful. Britain, been described as “Arts and William Robbins has given us a Manufactures.” The postwar West glimpse of how true this is. Coast Canadian version of this was of a different mettle. It derived from a new interrelation between the public A Modern Life: Art and Design in sphere and the emergent consumer economy situated in the suburban sprawl British Columbia, 1945-1960 financed by Reconstruction government Ian Thom and Alan Elder, investment and Cold War rearmament. editors They and the remaining contributors touch on some of these factors. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, Among those factors meriting fuller . pp. . Illus. . paper. consideration are new patterns of Canadian and overseas immigration Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe as well as regional variants on the con- University of British Columbia fluence of social democratic and free enterprise politics. Rachelle Chinery n early and still not inap- provides an overview of the West Apropriate epithet for Vancouver Coast potter’s art that relates the local is Terminal City. This epithet denotes to the international scene through a not only a peripheral cultural as well judicious moulding of biographical as a geographical location but also the and art historical data. The signi- city’s potential for development, despite ficance of personal networks and its tendency to parochialism. Those artists’ sojourns abroad, coupled with attributes apply to this handsomely reference to the larger transatlantic art produced book of illustrations from, discourse, distinguishes Scott Watson’s and essays about, a recent exhibition account of West Coast painting. The of the arts and crafts produced in relative conservatism of Vancouver Vancouver in the decade around the painting, and particularly its bucolic  Design for Living show – each, and even romantic vein, reflect both incidentally, mounted at the Vancouver the switch to an abstracted version Art Gallery. of the picturesque paralleling British The major contribution of the ori- practice and the often overlooked ginal exhibition and current book is biomorphic and spiritual components the collection of excellent examples, of the Modern Movement. Aspects of and colour photographs, of the pic- the complex weft and warp of what is tures, sculptures, ceramics, and generically defined as modernism also furniture produced in and around figure in the chapters by Alan Collier Vancouver from  to . In that and Sherry McKay, respectively, on respect it considerably expands on the bc plywood furniture and the locally comparable enterprise undertaken in published magazine Western Homes and  with Vancouver Art and Artists, Living. Collier has been responsible for 1931-1983. The separate chapters conserving and reinstating the historical written by Ian Thom and Alan Elder, no less than the aesthetic value of this 118 bc studies Book Reviews 119 genus of Canadian furniture, which, struction of Reconstruction-era art quite rightly, figures prominently in the and craft production in the Terminal book and exhibition. The technology City. The oddest omission, either by of plywood and, in particular, the direct or bibliographic reference, is innovations introduced into western of the Vancouver architectural scene. Canada by the Koerner dynasty could All the chapters acknowledge the have been further explored, not least powerful presence of architecture and in order to illustrate the importance of the frequent interchanges between anti-fascist migration and imported architects, artists, and craftspeople. technocracy to the development of The Design for Living show was, after Canadian industry and culture during all, as much about the architectonic the age of C.D. Howe. fabric of contemporary Vancouver Indeed, much of the triumph of the society as it was about the fabrication formal language and visual vocabulary of objects to ornament its comfortable of modernism in North America de- lifestyle. Several of the artists and pended upon the renewed belief in the craftspeople highlighted are shown to social benefit of analytical and industrial have either architectural training or processes; that is, in the materialist interests, most obviously Bert Binning, expression of an ethic that allowed the Douglas Simpson, Peter Cotton, and discourse of social reform to appear to Zoltan Kiss; and it is worth noting be still active amidst the increasing that the single West Coast building commercialization of every component on the National Register of Historic of social practice. This phenomenon is Monuments to date is the modernist scrutinized by McKay, who introduces house Binning designed for himself an interesting counterpoint between the and his wife Jessie Binning with the domestic scene and the new materials architect Charles E. “Ned” Pratt of the and appliances that either decorated distinguished Vancouver firm, Sharp or dominated it, and between the Thompson Berwick Pratt. Moreover, practical and theoretical approaches the purpose of A Modern Life is stated to its definition. The theorists in- to be a “weaving together” of the clude Sigfried Giedion, author of the disciplines of design and architecture. seminal Modernist text, Space, Time and That purpose is appropriate to the Architecture () and Jean Baudrillard, Modern Movement generally and to whose books include the System of the West Coast situation specifically. Objects (). While the comparison The Design for Living show carried illuminates the way in which we arrive forward the dynamic of earlier radical at, or are influenced towards, divergent and commercial initiatives centred ways of understanding the objects on urban renewal and residential that figure in our consciousness, the improvement. The Art in Living literature of advertising (notably by Group that was active in the s Vance Packard) and the critique of late had been formed by artists teaching bourgeois society (by Noam Chomsky at the Vancouver School of Art who or Alvin Toffler) bear equally on the were inspired by the tenets of social diagnosis of modernism’s relapse into reform and aesthetic experimentation modernity. that they admired in Continental art The preceding etymological pun and architectural work. speaks to the potential for a more ex- The first display of new architectural tensive contextualization and decon- space-making, replete with modern 118 bc studies Book Reviews 119

appliances and furniture, was in the Watson. Among the issues worthy of Sky bungalow erected to the designs of additional study are the reasons for Fred T. Hollingsworth in the parking the temporary elevation of the moral lot of the Hudson’s Bay Company store; and aesthetic suasion of architecture Hollingsworth became an architect after in the transatlantic sphere throughout studying at the School of Architecture this era, the shifts in the formal at the University of British Columbia and theoretical discourse of art and and doing a stint as a commercial artist. architecture, and the genealogy of The exigencies of war contributed to Canadian design praxis. Vancouver a broadly welcomed diminution of attracted a remarkable number of the disjunction between so-called emigrant designers from Europe high and low art – one reflected in and Britain (especially following the the alliance of business with cultural Festival of Britain in , which allied interests in the expansion of regional the arts of design with a democratized infrastructure and institutions. The popular culture). But the Vancouver centrality of architecture, encompassing design community remained connected the confident assertion by the profession to various nodes of regional modernist of its primacy in the reordering of the enterprise in Portland, Seattle, San total environment of contemporary Francisco, and Los Angeles. Not living, was recounted in the - only Richard Neutra but also Bernard Canadian Centre for Architecture Maybeck, John Yeon, Harwell (and ) exhibition Harris, and Paul Thiry contributed and book The New Spirit: Modern to the formation of a local idiom. Architecture in Vancouver 1938-1963. The supposedly distinctive post-and- Also omitted from the citations are beam structure, often regarded as the Harold Kalman’s masterly account of main feature of the West Coast style, West Coast Modernism in A History had been anticipated in the s of Canadian Architecture (), such by British, German, and Austrian diagnoses of postwar populist taste as architects, as published in more Thomas Hine’s Populuxe: The Look and than one of the professional journals Life of America in the 50’s and 60’s (), that affected such local practitioners and two other articles by this reviewer as Catherine Wisnicki and Peter that address the ideological range and Thornton. And the reputation of relation of public and private domain Vancouver as a centre of the arts during the period: “Leonard Marsh depended to no small degree upon a and Vancouver Modern” () and talented cadre of local photographers. “The Fe-Male Spaces of Modernism: Their work still awaits comprehensive A Western Canadian Perspective” study in spite of its value to both the (). cultural and commercial production The text of A Modern Life would also systems. The slippage of modernism have benefited by the substitution of from agent of communitarian ethos additional or expanded essays on to consumerist pragmatics and the the connectivity and contribution associated auto-suburbanization of of West Coast art and craft instead modernist endeavour also deserves of by reprinting R.H. Hubbard’s further investigation (alongside the rather chatty romanticization of the arts scene). The more limited extent of episode – partly responsible for some respective practice in Vancouver affords of the mythologizing corrected by an invaluable opportunity to measure 120 bc studies Book Reviews 121 the internal changes and external for sardines, seals, and other marine pressure operating with regard to the life. However, by the beginning of the migration of ideas and creativity. s these inhabitants were finding it A Modern Life nevertheless adds difficult to survive. In this latest book much to the picture of Reconstruction- Yesaki incorporates this information era Vancouver. The relics of its art as he tells the story of what is likely a and design have an accessible vitality period in his father’s life. that compares favourably with the Jinshiro Ezaki, whose surname sometimes stilted ideological and was registered as “Yesaki” by an iconographic artifice of the current immigration officer in Victoria, emi- Vancouver School and the glitz of much grated to British Columbia in  of the recent urban fabric gathered shortly after the birth of his son, under the neologism “Vancouverism.” Miyakichi. He had visited his family just once, when Miyakichi was six years old. Jinshiro was the eldest son in an Watara-Dori (Birds of Passage) extended family and thus, according to custom, was responsible for caring Mitsuo Yesaki for his parents, his unmarried siblings, Vancouver: Peninsula Publishing, and his wife and son. With what he earned in Canada he was able to .  pp. . paper. provide his family in Japan with a big Michiko Midge Ayukawa house. Jinshiro’s dream was that his Victoria son would be a good, earnest student and, after completing the compulsory six years of elementary school, would ATARA-DORI (Birds of Passage) go on to middle school and beyond. is a biographical fiction of a half- W Jinshiro would have gladly worked year period ( June  to  January hard and sent back money for this ) in the life of a Japanese-Canadian purpose. However, Miyakichi was fisher. Mitsuo Yesaki has a thorough not interested in higher learning and knowledge of the Pacific coast fisheries, preferred to accompany his grandfather in particular those in the Steveston on his fishing boat. In  Jinshiro area. He is aware of the canneries, finally accepted the fact that his son the disagreements and strikes, and would only be happy as a fisher, and the racially based legislation that he sent for his wife and son. was passed in order to decrease the In this novel Yesaki tells the story number of Japanese fishers. Yesaki is of his ancestral village and of many of the author of Sutebusuton: A Japanese its inhabitants, who had emigrated to Village on the British Columbia Coast Canada. He describes the arrival of (); with Harold and Kathy Steves Miyakichi and his mother to Victoria, he co-authored Steveston, Cannery their trip to Vancouver, and their Row: An Illustrated History (); and travel by tram to Steveston, where with Sakuya Nishimura he co-authored Miyakichi immediately becomes a Salmon Canning on the Fraser River in boat-puller (assistant) for his father. the 1890s (). Yesaki also travelled to It is a difficult learning experience, his ancestral village in Wakayama pre- but soon he begins to fish on his own. fecture, Japan, where he learned how, Watara-Dori contains a detailed map of for centuries, the inhabitants had fished the Fraser River delta area, showing the 120 bc studies Book Reviews 121

channels, the locations of the canneries, Yesaki will write sequels to this story and the tidal zones. Through it, one can and thus provide us with a much- readily follow Miyakichi’s movements. needed account of later developments Miyakichi is daring and independent. in the Steveston area fisheries and in By reading the tides, using his compass, the lives of Japanese . and observing points on the shoreline, he is able to fish in foggy weather, when more prudent fishers remain on shore. A Stain upon the Sea: One of his happiest days occurs when he opens his own bank account; but he West Coast Salmon Farming is most proud when he is able to give Stephen Hume, Alexandra  to his grandfather for the family’s Morton, Betty Keller, New Year festivities. Rosella Leslie Through the story of Miyakichi’s first year in Canada, Yesaki portrays Madeira Park, bc: Harbour Pub- the daily life of the fishers: how they lishing, .  pp. . paper. fished, lived on board their boats, and attended to their gear. The cost and Lissa Wadewitz effort required to mend and weave new University of Saskatchewan nets becomes evident. He describes the company houses, the outhouses, the his collection explores many Japanese-style bathhouses, the way Tof the controversial issues sur- salvaged logs were sawed and chopped rounding fish farming practices in into firewood, the food that was eaten, British Columbia. In five separate and the New Year celebrations, when essays, the authors illustrate the im- special foods were prepared and the portance of the precautionary principle men made the rounds of their friends in experimenting with new chemicals and neighbours. The women have their and processes that could potentially work too: in the canneries, on nearby have devastating environmental conse- farms, and helping with the nets. These quences. This anthology demonstrates details are all woven into the broader that very little is known about the long- history of Japanese immigration in term effects of fish farming practices, Canada, and they speak of the gradual and the authors advocate both stronger change from a sojourner society to a regulations and the need to proceed family settlement. with care. It is unfortunate that Yesaki self- The first three essays provide intro- published this book. A number of ductions to the environmental concerns printing errors and unsatisfactory surrounding fish farming, the main choices of words and phrases have players involved, and how the industry slipped through. The glossary of has evolved. Stephen Hume’s “Fishing Japanese words is particularly dis- for Answers” discusses the main points appointing. There are a number of errors of contention in the fish farming debate: that would likely have been corrected by escapement, the use of antibiotics, a competent bilingual person. and the impact of the farms on the In spite of these drawbacks, Watara- wild fish population. Hume interviews Dori is a valuable addition to a rather a wide variety of people concerned scant supply of books on the history of with the industry in order to reveal the Japanese in Canada. I hope that local understandings of fish farming 122 bc studies Book Reviews 123 practices and their environmental ef- A Stain upon the Sea is a somewhat fects. He makes several important polemical critique of how governments, points about the potential dangers of industries, and communities allow eco- introducing Atlantic salmon to the nomic concerns to take precedence over Pacific coast and raises good questions both the health of the environment about the government’s seeming de- and of people. The strength of this col- sire to promote fish farming over wild lection is in the questions it raises about fish protection. The second chapter, fish farming practices and our lack of by Betty Keller and Rosella Leslie, knowledge regarding the marine offers a detailed recent history of environment. Still, there are many the fish farming industry in British issues that these authors do not explore Columbia. They spotlight the in- – issues that would help to clarify how dustry’s reliance on foreign capital this industry has developed. A more and the consequences of lax government critical and thorough analysis of the regulations. Otto Langer’s “Any Fish Is government’s motivations and policy a Good Fish” highlights the failures of decisions would have significantly the Department of Fish and Oceans strengthened several of the chapters. Canada (dfo). Langer charges that Why have the provincial and federal constant reorganization and political governments been so negligent in concerns have led the dfo to promote their management of fish farms? fish farming and to ignore the impact Who is responsible? Why hasn’t public of the industry on the environment. pressure made a difference? As it is, the Langer’s chapter calls for impartial authors claim that government officials studies of the fish farming industry and have favoured businesses and economic criticizes the government for letting development over the environment, but politics direct scientific inquiry. they do not offer much in the way of The last two chapters focus on direct evidence to support these claims. the scientific evidence available re- Likewise, several of these chapters garding fish farming practices would have benefited from paying and their potential dangers. Don more attention to larger political and Staniford presents a long list of toxic historical contexts. In particular, it chemicals used by salmon farmers would have been helpful to know and their known – and suspected – more about the relationship between environmental impacts. He charges fish farming and the long history of that fish farmers simply turn to new artificial hatchery propagation. Do fish and more powerful chemicals to control hatcheries confront some of the same the diseases that plague farmed fish. challenges as fish farms? Do they pose Staniford advocates tighter controls any of the same dangers? How are they on the use of chemicals – especially different? Finally, while these authors in the marine environment – and the clearly highlight the paucity of research need for ongoing studies to identify on the introduction of new chemicals their effects. Alexandra Morton’s into the environment, there is no chapter is a personal account of how discussion of potential organic solu- she got involved in fighting fish farms tions. Are there any natural/organic and tracking their impact on wild fish methods for controlling diseases among runs. She outlines the steps she took farmed fish? Is anyone studying this to study regional wild fish stocks and possibility? argues for additional research. 122 bc studies Book Reviews 123

Despite these criticisms, A Stain upon story of the orphan boy, who was the Sea provides a readable overview of rescued by fish after trying to commit fish farming practices and the problems suicide by jumping into the ice-clogged they pose for community members, river, opens a chapter describing the government officials, and the wild commercial fishery, which began in salmon populations of Canada’s west the s. Similarly, a story of how the coast. As most of the chapters do not cedar trees were planted introduces a include footnotes and the authors are chapter showing how different resi- upfront about their environmentalist dents responded to their environment. agenda, this book will likely appeal The Nuxalkmc people used cedar for most to general readers hoping to learn , ceremonial regalia, clothing, more about the rise of this controversial housing, furniture, and even babies’ industry. diapers, whereas the early Norwegian settlers, although they admitted that the forest was useful for lumber and One River, Two Cultures: firewood, saw trees as a nuisance that had to be cleared and burned before one A History of the Bella Coola Valley could get on with farming. Eventually, Paula Wild the settlers found a market for lumber and logs and made forestry a major Madeira Park, bc: Harbour industry, though recent changes have Publishing, .  pp. Illus. caused severe economic depression. Maps. . paper. The First Nations people, whom Wild reports refer to themselves as Patricia E. Roy “Indians,” appear throughout the University of Victoria book both as mythical figures and as interviewees. Wild asserts that ne River, Two Cultures effectively European attempts to assimilate the Osummarizes the structure and First Nations had “devastating” effects, themes of Paula Wild’s study of the and she quotes informants regarding Bella Coola Valley. The Bella Coola their experiences in residential schools River dominates the story. Traditional and the loss of their language. Despite Nuxalkmc (or Nuxalk – Wild uses living in close proximity, there was these terms interchangeably) tales, limited contact between the “Indians” which have been adapted from Franz and what they call the “white guys/ Boas and from T.F. McIlwarith’s ethno- girls” (). Indeed, Wild argues that, graphy of the Bella Coola (written in despite isolation, “there is still a strong the early s) head each chapter. and very separate sense of Nuxalkmc, The juxtaposition of Nuxalkmc Norwegians and ‘outsiders’” (). stories and modern work usually works Yet, all the residents had to con- well. Wild links creation myths with tend with the fact that, as one long- research by geologists, archaeologists, time resident observed, “The river and anthropologists to argue that no goes where it wants to” (). Early scientific theory has “the drama of the European explorers, including origin stories of the Bella Coola First Alexander Mackenzie and Henry Nations – or seriously consider[s] that Spencer Palmer of the Royal Engineers, these oral histories may be based on and settlers depended on First Nations prehistoric fact”(). A Nuxalkmc people and their skill with canoes to 124 bc studies Book Reviews 125 enable them to travel on the Bella own interviews and observations, Coola River. Frequent floods washed Wild has become somewhat of an out later roads and bridges, and the ethnographer, though the absence of river’s shifting course forced settlers footnotes or other citations impairs to move to its opposite side. the book’s value for scholars or as a Although the First Nations peoples historical document in its own right. had carved out “grease trails” – so called However, One River, Two Cultures because they were used to transport is eminently readable. Well-chosen ooligan (the preferred local spelling) and -placed photographs add to its oil inland – travel inland was only interest and informative value. It is for the adventuresome. Despite some a fine introduction to an isolated bc surveying for a road to the Cariboo community with a very long history. gold fields and, later, for railways, little was done to improve the old grease trails until the mid-twentieth Healing in the Wilderness: century. Coastal steamers provided the only real access to the Bella Coola A History of the United Valley from the outside world. After Church Mission Hospitals years of unsuccessfully lobbying the Bob Burrows government to build a road, settlers took matters into their own hands. Madiera Park, bc: Harbour With the help of a small government Publishing, .  pp. Maps, grant, donations of cash and kind, and Illus. . paper. volunteer labour, they pushed through what they called the “Freedom Road” Norman Knowles in ; however, driving on this narrow St. Mary’s University College road, with its steep hills and many switchbacks, remained an adventure. n Healing in the Wilderness Bob An extensive bibliography com- IBurrows recounts the origins and plements One River, Two Cultures, evolution of the medical missions and indicates the breadth and depth of established and maintained by the Wild’s research. It includes memoirs, United Church and its antecedents in contemporary local newspapers, arch- isolated communities across Canada. ival interviews, and Wild’s own en- An ordained United Church minister, counters with residents in the late s who began his ministry in  on a and the early s. Unfortunately, she mission boat based at Ocean Falls missed some potentially rewarding and who later chaired the national sources, such as Douglas Cole’s Franz church committee responsible for all Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906 () the United Church’s mission hospitals, and the collection of McIlwraith’s Burrows is uniquely qualified to recount letters, At Home with the Bella Coola the stories of the men and women who Indians (), edited by John Barker. brought both medical services and For example, she says that Boas decided “practical Christianity” to the frontier to go to Bella Coola as a means of regions of the nation. getting to North America, where his Healing in the Wilderness is divided fiancée lived, whereas Cole implies a into five chronological chapters be- less romantic motive, namely, scientific ginning with the establishment of the curiosity. Nevertheless, through her first medical mission at Port Simpson 124 bc studies Book Reviews 125

in  and concluding with the greatly of the encounter between Aboriginal reduced work of the present day. Each peoples and Western medicine, that chapter includes a general overview of defined much of medical mission the forces and challenges that defined work.1 Prior to the Second World mission work during the period, War the mission hospital was also detailed histories of each of the mission a gendered space. Hospitals were hospitals, biographical portraits of the almost always administered by a male key figures active in the missions, and missionary physician (usually assisted a selection of well-chosen photographs. by his wife) who directed a small staff of Drawing upon interviews with many female medical professionals. Although of the men and women who served in Burrows observes that tensions and the hospital missions as well as research conflicts sometimes afflicted the hos- in the United Church Archives in pital missions, the gendered nature of Toronto and Vancouver, Burrows has those conflicts is passed over, as is the produced an evocative account of the persistent resistance of the Women’s commitment, courage, perseverance, Missionary Society to the creation and resourcefulness of the doctors, of a single medical mission board. nurses, and hospital staff who worked Nor does Burrows participate in the in the missions and their important important debate among historians contributions to the life and well-being of religion over the nature and impact of remote communities, to innovations of secularization.2 The gradual with- in rural medicine, and to the emergence drawal of the United Church from most of public health care. of its medical mission fields during the As a “popular history” designed to pay postwar period is not presented as a homage to the work and contributions sign of growing secularization but, of those involved in the medical mis- rather, as a response to declining need sions of the United Church, Healing and the Church’s policy of encouraging in the Wilderness does not attempt to community responsibility for health engage the rich historical literatures care. The increasing difficulty the on missions, Aboriginal peoples, and Church experienced recruiting doctors health care. The result is a largely and nurses willing to serve in isolated anecdotal history that lacks critical communities suggests, however, that a perspective and that limits Burrows’s analysis and interpretation of events and 1 Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: individuals. Aboriginal resistance to the Aboriginal Health and Healing in British “white man’s medicine,” for example, is Columbia, 1900-50 (Vancouver: UBC acknowledged but no attempt is made Press, 1998); Maureen K. Lux, Medicine to explain its cause and significance. That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940 (Toronto: Burrows simply paints a portrait of University of Toronto Press, 2001). faith-driven and altruistic missionary 2 See, for example, David B. Marshall, physicians, such as Dr. Horace Wrinch Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant at Port Simpson, who overcame Abori- Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850-1940 ginal opposition and suspicion through (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, perseverance and good works. Nowhere 1992); and Nancy Christie and Michael Gavreau, does Burrows acknowledge the assim- A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare ilationist agenda, convincingly docu- in Canada, 1900-1940 (Montreal and mented by Mary-Ellen Kelm and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Maureen Lux in their recent histories Press, 1996). 126 bc studies significant change had taken place in the history of medical missions and the Bibliography the outlook and priorities both within delivery of rural health care services. the church and within the wider British Columbians with an interest of british columbia society. in local history will find the histories Despite these limitations in analysis, of the United Church’s long-standing Healing in the Wilderness is a well- medical missions on the north coast written work that will be of interest and in the central interior especially to anyone wishing to learn more about informative.

prepared by gail edwards, mls, phd

bc studies, no. , Summer  