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People of the Saltwater
An Ethnography of Git lax m'oon
By Charles R. Menzies UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0051-8
CHAPTER 1
Git lax m'oon
Gitxaala and the Names Anthropologists Have Given Us
Gitxaala people live in a breathtakingly beautiful place on the north coast of British Columbia. We call ourselves the Git lax m'oon — the people of the saltwater — in recognition of where we have lived since time immemorial: on the islands and inlets of this rugged piece of coastline. Gitxaala people know this is a harsh place to live, but "we choose to live here," Chief Elmer Moody reminded people at a feast in 2008 to affirm and recognize Gitxaala territory in the presence of federal and provincial government representatives. This coastline is the place Gitxaala people call home.
This book tells the story of Gitxaala, an ancient people living on the saltwater. It is also a story being told from the perspective of someone who is both a professional stranger (Agar 1996) and a community member. I have grown up hearing about and living in this place. As a professional stranger, that is, a practicing anthropologist, I have conducted anthropological research on the north coast of British Columbia since 1988 and with the Gitxaala Nation since 1998. My research has been focused on the political economy of Indigenous societies and the subsequent transition to an industrial capitalist economy based on natural resources extraction (Menzies and Butler 2008). As part of this research I have explored the relations between aboriginal and nonaboriginal people (Menzies 1994, 1996) and written about Indigenous ecological knowledge (Menzies 2010, 2012; Menzies and Butler 2007). I have also written about nonaboriginal communities in the commercial fishing industry (Menzies 1993). My love for and abiding interest in this place arises out of my family's personal connection to it. Elsewhere (Menzies 1994) I explore in more detail my personal and familial ties to this place. In the pages that follow I at times make reference to my place in this work, but my focus is on the social and productive world of Gitxaala, and thus my personal story is of note only insofar as is it gives passion and direction to my inquiries, reflections, and commentary. Thus, while in this book I draw upon all of my prior experience, my focus is on Gitxaala, the people and our place in the world.
Gitxaala's main village today, Lach Klan, is located on the edge of Hecate Strait, about thirty miles to the southwest of the town of Prince Rupert. The traditional territory, or laxyuup, of Gitxaala (see chapter 3) extends from about Prince Rupert south 150 miles to Aristazabal Island, taking in most of the coastal islands and the adjoining mainland. This is a rugged marine and terrestrial space. However, one should be cautious in thinking it to be an isolated or pristine space.
Notions of isolation and remoteness are relative and situational. For an urban-based audience the tales and descriptions of the Gitxaala world may well elicit a strong sense of the pristine wilderness or may even evoke a sense of danger or foreboding. It is indeed a hard place to get to and to travel through if one does not own or have access to a boat. Difficulty of access, however, does not make a place remote. It is the lack of familiarity with the place that gives the laxyuup Gitxaala an aura of isolation to those not from this area. A sense of familiarity can also mask real material conditions of isolation and disconnection from a wider social and economic world. Thus even as Gitxaala people remain intimately familiar with our territory and home it is possible that as the wider world globalizes, our connection to place may restrict and then marginalize our capacity to continue living where and how we want to. This is nonetheless the place within which Gitxaala people have lived for millennia. Life is lived out here. Oral histories relate to events and places here. Throughout the laxyuup one can find material evidence of Gitxaala use and history: ancient villages, stone structures built for fishing and the cultivation of bivalves in creeks and along the foreshore, and contemporary camps, cabins, and anchorages.
This is not a strange or pristine place waiting to be found or discovered. This is in fact the mundane everyday world through which Gitxaala people travel as we return generation after generation to fishing camps, hunting grounds, seaweed-picking spots, and fishing grounds far from shore. This is a place within which people are living, shaping, and using on an everyday basis. While this may be a place removed from the centers of today's metropolitan world, for Gitxaala people this is home.
This book, in telling Gitxaala's story, aims to bring forward our world, a world that to us is familiar and friendly (though it is not without peril and dangers). I discuss how Gitxaala society is organized, the nature and extent of Gitxaala territory, and how knowledge is passed along from one generation to the next. I explain how Gitxaala people have made their livelihood from the bounty of the laxyuup historically and into the present. While this world may remain remote to your daily life, I trust that it will have become more familiar and understandable by the end.
Gitxaala people have lived on this coast at least since the last ice age ten thousand years ago. The oral history of Gitxaala contains traces of the ancient past, when large islands existed to the west in the middle of today's Hecate Strait. Other histories tell of a time and place covered in snow and ice. Still other histories document the arrival and emergence within Gitxaala territory of prominent chiefs and families.
Archaeological research that I have conducted reveals continuously inhabited villages dating back many millennia. Stone tools and debris from making these tools found along the foreshore in the southern reaches of Gitxaala territory have been dated through comparison with similar stone tool collections to at least six thousand years ago. Archaeologists working in adjoining territories have found evidence of human occupation going back at least as long as the timeline within Gitxaala territory (Mackie et al. 2011; Martindale et al. 2009; McLaren et al. 2011). This is an ancient place and these are an ancient people whose traditions and society continue into the present.
What's in a Name?
According to anthropologists and linguists, Gitxaala are a Tsimshianic people. Academic researchers have historically used language as a key attribute to classify different peoples. Since Gitxaala shares a common language family, culture, and history with the Nisga'a (who live along the Nass River) and the Gitxsan (who live along the interior reaches of the Skeena River and its tributaries), Gitxaala has been grouped within the wider ethnographical category of Tsimshian. Gitxaala people, however, have always understood ourselves to be a unique people resident on the outer coastal islands, people of the saltwater, people out to sea. We recognize a common connection with our cousins to the north, east, and south, but Gitxaala are the original inhabitants of the coast and thus see ourselves as a different people.
Gitxaala is a matrilineal society; that is, family group membership and descent is reckoned through one's mother. Yet a traditional system of arranged marriage ensured that inheritance of key resources such as hereditary names and associated property actually passed along patrilineal lines from grandfather to grandson. This raises interesting questions about the emergence of patrilineal inheritance in the mid-twentieth century. Given the ancient practice of combining patrilineality with matrilineality, it is likely that what started to occur in terms of the shift to patrilineal inheritance in the early twentieth century was actually rooted in the earlier system, which conserved lineage property through an alternation of ownership between corporate groups from one generation to the next. It may well be that ideas of patrilineality in descent coexisted with ideas of matrilineality in corporate group membership well before Christian missionaries began to attack matrilineal kin groups within the Tsimshianic world.
The coastal Tsimshianic world includes several separate village-based communities, of which Gitxaala is one. Gitxaala people understand our place on the coast quite differently than did early academic commentators or our more acculturated Indigenous cousins who live in Port Simpson, for example. Gitxaala people proudly proclaim that we have remained in our central village, Lach Klan, without interruption for millennia, while other coastal Tsimshianic villages deserted their territories in the face of expanding industrial resource extraction capitalism. Gitxaala people, however, found a way to hold on to tradition and participate in the capitalist economy.
Throughout this book I refer to the people now living in Lax Kw'alaams (Port Simpson) and Metlakatla as Coast Tsimshian. This is a reference to their genesis as a discrete Indigenous people following contact, when they regrouped around the communities formed by the Hudson Bay Company trading post and the Christian missionary William Duncan. Ts'msyen is a term used to refer to those people who identify themselves as living in connection to the Skeena River. Unless otherwise noted, I refer to the people who are part of the Gitxaala Nation as Gitxaala. I also make occasional reference to Tsimshianic peoples, which is a broad anthropological designation that includes the Nisga'a and the Gitxsan within the other coastal and in-river Tsimshianic peoples.
No terms are ever fixed firmly in time, nor are such terms immune to the vicissitudes of political machinations. In recent years, partly in response to ongoing litigation between Gitxaala and other Tsimshian groups and between Gitxaala and the Canadian state, the terms Coast Tsimshian and Southern Tsimshian have become codified in a way that deviates from much earlier anthropological work, in which the primary distinction highlighted was linguistic. The evolution of these terms has also shifted away from a more ecological-political sense deployed by Marsden (2002).
The early twentieth-century references to Coast Tsimshian essentially include all of the Tsimshianic peoples from the Kitselas Canyon on the Skeena River near the contemporary town of Terrace out to the coast, including the communities of Port Simpson, Metlakatla, Kitkatla, Hartley Bay, and Klemtu (where some of the descendents of the former Kitasoo Tsimshian community now reside).
The original anthropological terms for Tsimshianic peoples were rooted in a linguistic and sociocultural system of categorization used by early twentieth-century anthropologists. Three basic Tsimshianic languages were identified: Nisga'a, Gitxsan, and Coast Tsimshian. This linguistic approach allowed anthropologists to systematically compare the various Indigenous peoples they encountered. Language was understood to be closely tied to cultural traits, and together they provided the backbone to a grand anthropological classificatory scheme of Indigenous North Americans. However, this approach to labeling Indigenous societies and peoples tended to ignore the ways local communities self-identified.
The idea that there had been a fourth Tsimshianic language emerged following John Dunn's (1969, 1976) linguistic research with fluent Coast Tsimshian speakers in Lach Klan (Gitxaala's primary nineteenth- and twentieth-century village), Prince Rupert, and Hartley Bay in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing upon his research in Gitxaala and with speakers from Hartley Bay and Klemtu, Dunn suggested that there used to be an older language, now essentially extinct, called Southern Tsimshian (Halpin and Seguin 1990; Miller 1984; Seguin 1984). For Dunn this was a linguistic designation. However, by the time Halpin and Seguin (1990) published their overview essay on the Tsimshian in the Handbook of North American Indians they were distinguishing between Coast and Southern Tsimshian to unproblematically demarcate sociopolitical and historical differences within the peoples formally labeled Coast Tsimshian by anthropologists. It is worthwhile to explore the history of Southern Tsimshian as an anthropological label in a bit more detail as it encapsulates some of the serious difficulties inherent in social science classifications of Indigenous peoples.
In his ethnography, Tsimshian Culture: A Light through the Ages, Jay Miller (1997, 16) says this about the term Southern Tsimshian: "Until a few years ago, the existence of another language on the coast, now called Southern Tsimshian, went unrecognized. It was spoken in three or so villages on the islands and inlets south of the mouth of the Skeena." Earlier Miller (1984, 31) was more circumspect about the geographical extent of the Southern Tsimshian:
The Southern Tsimshian consist of the villages of Klemtu, Hartley Bay, and perhaps Kitkatla at an even earlier period. The major criterion for establishing this grouping is the use of a hitherto unrecognized language, sguan>mk, skuan>xs, still used by a handful of speakers in Klemtu and Hartley Bay. Hartley Bay used the language before members joined Duncan at Old Metlakatla for a short time and switched to the coast language. It is not yet certain that skuan>xs was used in Kitkatla in the past, but the history of intermarriage and feasting among these villages strongly suggests that Kitkatla should be included in the group.
Dunn (1969, 1976), the linguist whose work gave rise to the term Southern Tsimshian, is clear in his initial account that his subject is a linguistic, not a sociopolitical designation. However, like Halpin, Seguin, and others in the small cohort then studying coastal Tsimshianic peoples, Miller came to use the term in a broader ethnographic fashion as he sought to understand and describe ethnographically observable differences within and between the various coastal Tsimshianic communities.
Coastal Tsimshianic peoples did in fact have different experiences of interaction following initial contact with Europeans. Village groups based in the lower Skeena River consolidated around the Hudson Bay trading post staring in the 1830s (Marsden and Galois 1995). Marsden (2002) argues that the Coastal Tsimshian (she prefers the term Northern Tsimshian) were already an integrated regional alliance prior to contact with Europeans and prior to regrouping at the Hudson Bay fort. However, the evidence for Marsden's conclusion is not definitive. What is clear is that through the fur trading and early commercial fishing period what was once an ecological-political integration became a clear residential and political amalgamation in Port Simpson and then a bit later in Metlakatla. Later still in the nineteenth century the entire community of Hartley Bay pulled up stakes and relocated to the mission town of Metlakatla near Prince Rupert. Then, toward the end of the century, the Tsimshianic peoples living at the southern extent of the region around Kitasoo Bay and Higgins Pass deserted their villages and regrouped with Xaisxais people to the south in the cannery town of Klemtu (Miller 1981). Only the Gitxaala people stayed in their primary village site of Lach Klan — though not without suffering the depredation of the diseases that plagued nineteenth-century coastal aboriginal communities (Boyd 1999).
Many of the late twentieth-century ethnographers and researchers who came to this changed social landscape looked for ways to distinguish their particular communities of study from others and to reflect the historical factors that resulted in a reduction to five coastal Tsimshian villages from more than fourteen only a century and a half previously. The five resulting villages are, from south to north, Klemtu, Hartley Bay, Lach Klan, Metlakatla, and Port Simpson. Here we see the central heuristic importance of Marsden's (2002, 101–2) tripartite model of Northern, Southern, and Interior Tsimshian. Marsden's model draws from the internal histories of the people themselves and then locates spheres of social and economic interaction and alliance within functional ecological units such as unique watersheds. The tripartite model tells us more about the historical attributes of interaction than does the more politicized Coast/Southern model that emerged out of struggles in the court system and contemporary political pronouncements by today's Coast Tsimshian leadership.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from People of the Saltwater by Charles R. Menzies. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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