Book Reviews
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BOOK REVIEWS Bill Reid and the Haida Canoe red cedar dugout canoe became a part Martine J. Reid, ed. of Native culture. She does, however, use visual and written evidence Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, from eighteenth-century European 2011. 152 pp. $29.95 paper. explorers, along with models of canoes, to show that the curved bow, vertical Maria Tippett stern, and the painted imagery that Cambridge University we associate with the twenty-first century dugout canoe was in place long ost people identify Northwest before Contact. Moreover, if anyone MCoast Aboriginal culture with wonders if the numerous diseases that the totem pole, most notably with the decimated Native peoples from the late dramatic Thunderbird-winged carvings eighteenth century on put an end to of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. In canoe building, Reid offers nineteenth- Bill Reid and the Haida Canoe, Martine century photographs of canoe-strewn Reid and co-authors James Raffan West Coast villages to show that and Michael Robinson set out to put canoe-making was evident during that the canoe, not the totem pole, at the century. This was not the case, however, forefront of Northwest Coast Native in the next century. While the Peters culture. The canoe was not, of course, family of the Ditdaht peoples, the only a means of transportation. It could Davidson family in Haida Gwaii, and form part of a dowry. It was a tool in the Hunt family in Victoria continued warfare. It represented the owner’s to make canoes during the first half of wealth and abundance. And, among the twentieth century, the canoes they many other things, it was a vehicle for made were less for their own use than connecting Aboriginal peoples to their for sale to private and public collections. myths and rituals. Martine Reid’s introductory essays The book’s editor and principal sets the stage for her discussion of Bill author, Martine Reid, begins her Reid’s now famous canoe, the Lootaas. story in 7000 bce when archaeological More than fifteen metres in length, evidence suggests that Northwest Coast the Lootaas was made during the mid- peoples built sea-faring vessels. Reid 1980s in the village of Skidegate on does not indicate when the western Haida Gwaii. The Lootaas had its bc studies, no. 75, Autumn 113 114 bc studies debut at Expo ’86. Three years later References it was paddled up the Seine from Rouen to Paris to honour the French Maria Tippett, Bill Reid: The Making of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and an Indian. Toronto: Random House, to mark the bicentennial anniversary of 2003. the French Revolution. In 1998 it carried Reid’s ashes to his mother’s village of Tanu. And today the Lootaas is stored in a boathouse in Skidegate. The Cannibal Spirit Martine Reid offers several Harry Whitehead photographs of Reid, adze in hand, Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. carving the Lootaas. Sadly, Reid, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, 295 pp. $32.00 cloth. performed a largely supervisory role. Judith Berman The author also insists that, for Bill Reid, the ovoid, which was derived University of Victoria from the shape of a canoe, formed the basis of Aboriginal art. This does not arry Whitehead’s novel The take into account the artist’s long-held HCannibal Spirit fictionalizes one view that the form line, not the ovoid, of the most important figures in the was the dominant element in Northwest history of BC anthropology, Franz Coast art. Boas’s long-time collaborator George More generally, Martine Reid Hunt. With many points of reference and her co-authors fail to address to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the difficulties that the former cbc the book is a compelling read and a announcer had being accepted into the serious attempt to address issues of Haida community. Part of the problem, colonialism, modernity, and the relation as I argue in my own biography of Bill of ethnography to both. It is at the same Reid, was that Reid was clearly seen time problematic from the standpoint as an outsider. Moreover, he employed of biography, history, ethnography, and, non-Aboriginal artists to carve the ultimately, its own literary purpose. Lootaas. (This prompted the Haida History in several senses is one of its carver Garry Edenshaw [Guujaaw] to themes. Hunt’s viewpoint alternates leave the project in a huff.) Things did with that of Harry Cadwallader, in real not improve when Bill Reid commented life his white brother-in-law but here to a Globe and Mail (29 March 1986) portrayed as his son-in-law. Both men reporter: “Haida time is nobody giving “travel backward” (106) into their pasts a damn about anything.” as they journey into the “darkness” of As Bill Reid well knew, works such the BC wilderness, Cadwallader sent to as the Lootaas were created as a result find Hunt as Marlow was sent to find of the tensions that existed between his Kurtz, each man seeking resolution for Aboriginal and white sensibilities, and his personal crisis. between the white and the Aboriginal The novel addresses history on a larger worlds. Any discussion of his work and scale as well, with Hunt represented as, life should surely take this into account among other things, a man navigating if it wishes to give an objective account between the assumptions of colonialism of the context in which his finest work and anthropology to document was created. the equal and distinct character of Book Reviews 115 indigenous history. As one of the book’s Tlingit principles of matrilineality and Kwakwaka’wakw characters says, Hunt moiety exogamy. It moreover changes put their stories in books “for white Hunt’s principal Tlingit crest from people to see … we is real and forever, Raven to Killer Whale and confuses same as them, important as they in life” the hereditary crest with the shaman’s (55). initiating spirit. If indigenous history Whitehead has made an effort to is as “real” and as “important” as that imagine indigenous characters that of the colonists, these changes are are as “important” and as “real” as his akin to conflating the Tudors and the white ones, and his research has some Bourbons, depicting the Union Jack as depth to it. He has, however, exercised the French flag, or presenting the clan considerable licence with the historical tartan as a Christian symbol. subject matter (noted generally in his Finally, there is Whitehead’s acknowledgments). He did not attempt manufacture of a “darkness” in Hunt to capture the real-life Hunt’s voice that attaches to him the same lurid or, for that matter, the human being, images promoted by the book’s colonial despite the preservation of hundreds antagonists. At the beginning of the of Hunt’s letters to Boas, some of fictional Hunt’s journey he decapitates which Whitehead has clearly read. his son’s corpse and bears the rotting (The obscenities Whitehead puts in head away with him; at the other end, Hunt’s mouth have no place either in deep in the forest, he becomes a killer, traditional Kwak’wala or, according to head-hunter, and “Cannibal Spirit” for descendants who remember him, in his real, “despite [my] half-white blood … English usage.) more savage than … you can know” The story radically alters the (167-68). chronology of Hunt’s life, compressing A fictional protagonist based on into a single year Hunt’s 1900 prosecution Hunt might have served Whitehead under the Indian Act; a 1903 trip to better in some ways, but would leave the New York to work with Boas; Indian book’s contradictions at its core. Taking Agent Halliday’s 1922 confiscation of so much liberty with real indigenous Kwakwaka’wakw dance regalia; and history undermines the proposition last, but in Whitehead’s narrative the that it matters, and capitalizing on precipitating event, the 1925 death of stereotypes that equate Aboriginal life George’s eldest son David. David’s six with savagery and darkness likewise siblings who survived to adulthood ensures that the novel cannot transcend are reduced to a single sister, excising what it attempts to critique. the forebears of many contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw. The treatment of ethnography is similarly cavalier. For example, a central thread that features the real-life Tlingit notable Sheiksh (“Shaiks”), based on Tlingit clan history recorded by Ronald Olson (likely taken from Social Structure and Social Life of the Tlingit in Alaska, 1967), alters Sheiksh’s moiety and clan affiliation as well as his genealogical connection to Hunt, thereby violating 116 bc studies Resilience, Reciprocity and dissecting how First Nations from Ecological Economics: Northwest northern California to southern Alaska exploited a common pool of resources Coast Sustainability for the collective good. Ronald Trosper He devotes over half the book to revealing how First Nations societal London and New York: Routledge, regulations protected their resources 2009. 188 pp. $130.00 cloth. from overexploitation. Generosity and Jude Isabella reciprocity are key protective elements employed by the potlatch, a societal University of Victoria ritual providing rules around land proprietorship. Only good resource n this brief and densely packed managers could keep the wealth Itreatise on why and how the (salmon) flowing to the community. Aboriginal economy of the Northwest For anyone who enjoys economists’ Coast worked so well, Ronald Trosper preoccupation with game theory, dives into science fiction/fantasy Trosper casts the potlatch system into territory: he reimagines the clash of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Through two competing economic systems, the potlatch, First Nations solved with one system focused on the group, the dilemma in the case of fisheries: the other on the individual.