Three Athapaskan Ethnographies: Diamond Jenness on the Sekani, Tsuu T'ina and Wet'suwet'en, 1921-1924

343 Pages·2015·59.302 MB·English

by  Diamond Jenness, Barnett Richling

Three
Athapaskan
Ethnographies
Diamond Jenness on the
Sekani, Tsuu T’ina and
Wet'suwet’en, 1921-1924
Three Athapaskan Ethnographies
Diamond Jenness on the Sekani, Tsuu T’ina and Wet’suweVen,
1921-1924
Diamond Jenness
With a new Introduction by
Barnett Richling
Rock’s
k Mills
JB Press
Copyright © 2015 Rock’s Mills Press
Introduction © 2015 Barnett Richling
All rights reserved.
For ordering information, visit our website at
www.rocksmillspress.com or email us at
[email protected].
ISBN-13: 978-1-77244-010-2
Contents
Three Northern Alhapaskan Ethnographies: Diamond Jenness on the
Sekani, Tsuu T’ina and Wet’suwet’en, 1921-1924
Barnett Richling iv
The Sekani Indians of British Columbia
Preface 3
Chapter 1. Introduction 1 5
Chapter 2. History and subdivisions of the Sekani 8
Chapter 3. Conflicts with neighbouring tribes 20
Chapter 4. Physical appearance and material culture 30
Chapter 5. Social organization 47
Chapter 6. Marriage, childhood, and burial 55
Chapter 7. Religion 68
Appendix 85
Plates
1. Fort McLeod in 1924 6
2. Corner of Fort Grahame in 1924 15
3. Old Davie and other men of the Long Grass band 18
4. Sekani women and children at Fort Grahame 25
5. Sekani robe of groundhog skins 32
6 Sekani mittens and moccasins, beaded 34
7. Rude dwelling of poles and spruce bark, Fort McLeod 36
8. Wooden spoon and a skin scraper made from the shoulder­
bone of a moose 37
9. Sekani bags of moose-hide, the upper beaded 39
10. A babiche hunting bag, and a babiche net for catching
beaver 42
11. A dugout canoe at Fort McLeod 46
12. Sekani family at Fort McLeod 57
13. Sekani drum, birch-bark basket, and snow-shoes 61
14. Old Davie and some of the women of the Long Grass band 71
Figures
1. Sketch map of Sekani territory 4
2. Sketch of a Sekani beaver spear 41
3. Sketch of a fish-weir 43
The Sarcee Indians of Alberta
Preface 90
Chapter 1: History and Numbers 91
Chapter 2: Social Organization 102
Chapter 3: The Cycle of Sarcee Life 111
iii
iv Contents
The Sarcee Indians of Alberta, con’t
Chapter 4: The Cycle of Sarcee Life (continued) 121
134
Chapter 5: Societies
Chapter 6: The Sun Dance 142
Chapter 7: Grass Dances 154
Chapter 8: Religion 163
Chapter 9: Medicine-bundles 172
Chapter 10: Other Medicine-objects 189
Plates
1. The buffalo tent, from painting by L.G. Russell 88
2. Old Knife inside his tipi 100
3a. Woman drying meat 108
3b. Woman scraping a skin 108
4a. The four-pole foundation of a tent 113
5. The tent-cover removed, showing interior arrangement 114
6. The door of the bee tent 114
7. The wolf tent 114
8. Old Sarcee’s blanket, with the record of his war deeds 127
9. The beaded stick carried by the leader of the dog-feast
society 157
10. “Medicine” objects 167
11. Medicine-pipe bundle 177
Figures
1. Buffalo pound 109
2. Gambling sticks 112
3. Head-plume as war memorial 129
4. Conventional war signs 130
5. Sketch Plan of the Sun Dance 151
6. Arrangement at the combined dog-feast and Grass
Circle Dance 160
7. Arrangement at the Medicine-pipe Dance 183
8. Sketch plan of the designs on the bee tent 191
The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River
197
Preface
Location and relations with neighboring peoples 198
199
Earlier history
Relations with surrounding peoples 201
206
Political organization
206
Phratries
207
Clans
213
Titles of nobles
Tables of peerage, or titles and seating arrangements 215
221
Crests, clan and personal
Clan crests 221
Contents v
The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River, con’t
Table of personal crests 223
Chiefs 244
The cycle of life 250
Terms of kinship and relationship 256
Religion 269
Medicine men 293
Appendix 1. Hunting territories 315
Gitamtanyu phratry 315
Gilserhyu phratry 316
Laksilyu phratry 317
Laksamshu phratry 317
Tsayu phratry 318
Appendix 2. Phratric organization of other Carrier subtribes 319
Fraser Lake subtribe (Nattlewitenne) 319
Endako River subtribe (Nu’tseni) 320
Cheslatta Lake Indians (Tatchatotenne) 320
Stony Creek subtribe (Yuta’wotenne) 321
Literature cited 322
Plates
1. Modern village of Hagwilgate 198
2a. Canyon in the Bulkley River showing the modern high-
level bridge and the ruins of the old village of Hagwilgate below
the cliff 199
2b. A Fort Fraser family outside its house 201
3. A Fort Fraser Indian wearing a cloth replica of the ancient
costume, that shows his clan crest on the back 221
4. Hagwilgate Carrier dramatizing his personal crest 228
5. Scenes at a potlatch held by the Laksilyu phratry at
Hagwilgate 232
6a. A Hagwilgate Indian’s tombstone, depicting his crest 243
b. The four totem poles at Hagwilgate 244
7. A Carrier family at Alkatcho 251
8. Carrier girl dressing a hide 255
9. Fish-traps in the canyon at Hagwilgate 262
10a. Village of Fort Fraser, on Fraser Lake 274
10b. Grave of Bini at Hagwilgate 285
Ila. Old Paul wearing his top hat and purple sash 290
1 lb. Hagwilgate Indian in KalulHm costume, viz., cedar-bark
head band and neck-ring; leather coat with pearl buttons; cloth
apron with pendants of beads, thimbles, and deer hoofs; and
cloth leggings 314
vi Contents
The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River, con’t
Figures
1. Subdivisions of the Carrier Indians, British Columbia
(map) 200
2. Diagrammatic plan of old Carrier village, tse’kya, “Rock-foot,”
beside the Hagwilgate Canyon on the Bulkley River, British
Columbia; a-g mark the fishing places of the various
phratries 210
Three Northern Athapaskan Ethnographies:
Diamond Jenness on the Sekani, Tsuu T’ina and
Wet’suwet’en, 1921-1924
History is the essence of innumerable biogr aphies
-Carlyle
“If I could divide myself into two persons,” Diamond Jenness once confessed,
“one of them would give his whole time to Eskimo archaeology and ethnology.”
And what of his other self, the one who didn’t write the landmark ethnography
Life of the Copper Eskimos (1922) or expand the temporal horizons of Arctic
culture history by identifying Dorset and Old Bering Sea cultures? That would
be the Jenness whose twenty-year* career with the anthropological branch of
Canada’s Geological Survey turned him into one of the top rank generalists of
his day, one whose investigations of indigenous peoples outside the Arctic—
including intensive fieldwork among a half-dozen First Nations groups—con­
tinued to expand until they encompassed all of the country’s culture areas.
His synoptic Indians of Canada, pitched to a general readership and never
out of print since the first edition appeared in 1932, testifies to the scope of
these researches. As for depth, the trio of ethnographies reprinted here, each
a foundational contribution to the field of northern Athapaskan studies, each
an illustration of the day’s disciplinary priorities, offer ample proof.
By way of introduction, the following pages roughly situate these seminal
works in disciplinary and institutional context, explaining how Jenness, an
Oxford-educated ex-pat New Zealander (1886-1969), came to undertake the
pioneering researches on which his studies of the Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee) of Al­
berta, and of the Wet’suwet’en (Bulkley River Carrier) and Sekani in British
Columbia, are based.
Domestic and foreign scholar s and learned societies, notable among them the
venerable British Association for the Advancement of Science, began calling
on Ottawa to create an agency devoted to researching and preserving knowl­
edge of the languages and cultures of first peoples in Canada in the 1880s.1
It was not until an upsurge in nationalist sentiment accompanying the new
century’s dawn, however, that government finally took action. Passage of The
Geology and Mines Act in 1907 set the stage, turning the formerly quasi-in-
1. For example, E.B. Tylor, "Opening Address [Section Hl,” Nature 31 (September, 1884), 453.
vii
viii Barnett Rickling
dependent Geological Survey, together with its affiliated natural history mu­
seum, into a branch of the newly organized Department of Mines, and broad­
ening its research and curatorial functions to include building “complete and
exact knowledge” of the dominion’s anthropological and biological heritage.2
Accordingly, the survey spawned two new divisions in 1910, each with a staff
of specialists, a budget for field research and subsidiary activities, and an al­
lotment of exhibition space in what was familiarly known as “the castle,” the
cavernous building, still standing on McLeod Street, housing the Victoria Me­
morial Museum, opened to the public one year later.
Having recently initialed a campaign to upgrade the survey’s employment
standaids and do away with patronage, its director, Reginald Brock, sought to
recruit a “scientific, [academically] trained ethnologist” to head up the new
anthropological unit, oversee its collections, and implement comprehensive
investigations across Canada.3 Turning for guidance to Columbia Universi­
ty’s Franz Boas, the reigning doyen of the American profession, the direc­
tor was politely if pointedly informed that no Canadian fit the bill. Indeed,
not one member of the country’s small circle of anthropologists, avocational
practitioners all, possessed the qualifications Boas believed the position, and
the modern discipline, demanded: in brief, “firm grasp of the problems of
comparative ethnology, of the method of linguistic inquiry ... [and] an intelli­
gent appreciation of archaeological methods.” In the circumstances. Brock’s
best bet was to look for candidates south of the border where a smattering
of universities had been turning out graduates with advanced degrees, and
research experience, since the 1890s. The most promising of them, in Boas’s
opinion, was his own protege, Edward Sapir. To the dismay of home-grown
anthropologists who firmly believed that “birth right [conferred] automatic
entitlement” to the prestigious post, the newly minted PhD, then twenty-six
and a rising star in the field of linguistics, took up duties as founding chief of
the Anthropological Division. Sapir would hold the position for fifteen years
before decamping for the University of Chicago, in 1925.5
At its inception, the section’s objectives were underscored by a sense of
urgency, a reflection of the widely held belief that indigenous peoples and
cultures in Canada (and globally) were fast disappearing under the relentless
press of Western ideas and institutions, to say nothing of malnutrition and dis­
ease. “If ... information concerning the native races is ever to be secured and
preserved,” Brock wrote of the moment, “action must be taken very soon, or it
wall be too late.”6 Echoing that sentiment, Sapir cautioned his new employer
2. M. Zaslow, Reading the Rocks: The Story of the Geological Survey of Canada 1842-1972
(Toronto: MacMillan, 1975), 257.
3. Geological Survey of Canada, Summary Report of the Geological Survey for the Calendar Year
1909 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1910), 8.
4. Boas to Brock, 9 May, 1910, cited in G. Avrith, “Science at the Margins: The British Association
and the Foundations of Canadian Anthropolog}', 1884-1910." PhD Diss. (Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms, 1986), 271.
5. Ibid, 271-72.
6. Geological Survey of Canada, Summary Report of the Geological Survey for ... 1908 (Ottawa:
Three Athapaskan Ethnographies ix
against allowing any “shortsighted policy of economy ... [to] interfere with
the thorough and rapid prosecution of the anthropological problems of the
dominion. What is lost now,” he warned, “will never be recovered again.” With
upwards of fifty groups identified for detailed study, many whose exposure
to forces of assimilation—above all, the Indian Act, reserves, and residential
schools—was already one or more generations deep, the new chief set about
launching the program in his charge “hammer and longs.”7
In keeping with the research program Boas and his students implemented
continent-wide after 1900, the new division’s work had both descriptive and
historical objectives, on the one hand, filling in the many gaps in knowledge
of the cultures, languages, and physical traits of indigenous peoples within
the dominion, and on the other, tracing their origins and affinities, and in the
light of archaeological and ethnological evidence, reconstructing their devel­
opment over time.8 To these ambitious ends, a mix of academically trained
and self-taught anthropologists, primarily from Canada and the United States,
were recruited to conduct fieldwork. By the outbreak of World War I, the per­
manent staff had grown to six, with a seventh member on “outside service” in
British Columbia. Twice that number were hired on temporary contracts. In­
dicative of the division’s early success, in one year-—1914—nine ethnologists
and three archaeologists were engaged in as many projects. Equally telling,
twenty monographs and papers were already published in a newly established
anthropological series, and hundreds upon hundreds of artefacts had been
accessioned into the Victoria Memorial’s holdings.9
Detailed studies of Athapaskans rated high among the division’s original
priorities. A geographically far-flung ethno-linguistic family, their Canadian
(i.e. northern) branch—Dene, in contemporary parlance—have deep roots in
the continent’s sprawling western subarctic, a region stretching from the low­
lands west of Hudson Bay to the mountainous interiors of Yukon and northern
British Columbia. Judging by the sparse entries on them in the compendious
Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, issued in 1907, they were
one of the least well-known anthropologically of indigenous peoples anywhere
in the country.10 Available sources often drew attention to the seeming ease
with which they borrowed elements of culture (other than language, toward
which they were stalwartly conservative), from non-Athapaskan neighbours,
sometimes fully remaking the cast of their societies in the process. Nowadays,
King’s Printer, 1909), 9.
7. E. Sapir, “An Anthropological Survey of Canada,” Science 34, no. 884 (1911), 793; “The Work
of the Division of Anthropology of the Dominion Government,” Queen’s Quarterly 20, no. 1
(1912), 63-64.
8. Sapir, “Anthropological Survey,” 791-93; see also E Boas, “Ethnological Problems in Canada,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 40 (1910), 529-39.
9. B. Richling, “Archaeology, Ethnolog}', and Canada’s Public Purse, 1910-1921,” In R Smith
and D. Mitchell, eds., Bringing Back the Past: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Archaeology
(Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1998), 106-7.
10. F.W. Hodge, ed. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1907), 109-10.