The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXX: In The House of the Sea Lion

 The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):

(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientist on John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)

Time to say goodbye to migration in history?

This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In  my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade. 

The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology. 

Klix'ken House was torn in 1956 and the massive post-and-beam roof support concealed within the clapboard "modern" structure, by this time at least sixty years old, was sold to the BC Totem Pole Preservation Committee of the MOA, UBC's Department of Anthropology, and the BC Museum, which was then retrieving totem poles thanks to the generosity of H. R. Macmillan, the youthful forester appointed the first Chief Forester of British Columbia at the age of 27 in 1912, who left the civil service directly after WWI to found H. R. MacMillan Export with the backing of the British timber merchant Montague Meyer. Mr. MacMillan may be remembered by British Columbians of my vintage for the predominance of the merged MacMillan-Bloedel timber company, although not by the young ones since at last count the forests of the Pacific Slope and possibly elsewhere --a New Zealand firm is in the line of succession at some point-- are run by Weyerhauser. Instead, we remember MacMillan for all the money he splashed around the province in his latter days, although on the UBC campus he is outshone by the late Walter C. Koerner, who was, I am surprised to learn, Bill Reid's early patron. 

From all of this we perhaps get some sense of the spree of monumental art collecting going on along the coast of British Columbia in the late 1950s. Whatever we might think of the blatant signature of insider trading on MacMillan's early career, he was not loathe to splash money around to the cultural betterment of his province, and his money saved some very impressive wood work from foreign museums. 

At the same time, we should appreciate that there are consequences. A striking canoe, readzed and repainted by Bill Reid in Haida motifs in the MoA collections 

is now the subject of controversy due to photographs of it taken at the time that it was acquired from a Kitimat-area missionary showing its strikingly different and simpler ornamentation featuring what might be the crest of the legendary founder of Old Kitimat as rendered by anonymous artists working in 1935. It is a striking case of artistic appropriation within the Northwest community, although of course your humble blogger forgot to take the money shot, and there is a certain reluctance to comment within the community. 

This striking piece, a portion of a former longhouse front from am abandoned village, is entitled a "Tsimshian cosmology," based on photographs that show it still painted in the traditional pre-trade pigments of red (hematite; female) and magnetite (black; male). Extraordinarily, the designs, if not the original colours, can be picked out under ultraviolent due to years of differential abrasion of the painted and unpainted portions.  As to the content of this Tsimshian cosmology, well, that's as far as we're going, because it is image, and not the written word, in which no original Tsimshian thinker of its time is recorded. This has not, however, stopped modern scholars from trying to put it in words. Indeed, our Haisla tour guide (Old Kitimat having been a bilingual community in the day) gave us a bit of mythology pertaining to the canoe. It's not Euripides, but its probably pretty close to Pratinus of Phlius. (Did you know that there is a proto-historic "first satyr play author"? And as late as 500BC, too!)  

LIke a much more recent piece from Alert Bay, 
the raven on top is detachable. Whcih is about
as much as anyone could say was typical of this
totem pole taken from a Tlingit site in 1899
and recently repatriated to Alaska in 1999. 

The moral of the story is that a great deal of what we think of as Northwest Pacific culture is actually "H.R. MacMillan/Bill Reid/Walter Koerner" because of the ways in which collectors and artist influenced the choices of pieces and themes to emphasise from the more disparate bits of tradition at hand. 

Ultimately, Northwestern culture and art will express itself in English and in "trade paints," and reflect a degree of cultural hegemony that does not seem original. The period in which this transition was made was profoundly colonial. In fact, without colonial collectors and tastemakers, it might have come out rather different. We can also see that it was synthetic.

Children I went to school with would have attended potlaches in which this feasting vessel was rolled out, pragmatically filled with trade gifts of sugar rather than the stew one might imagine. I can't emphasise enough the wheels part, especially since that part is cut from my crappy photograph, which also completely misses the scale --A six-year-old child could easily stand in the bowls. Yet another money shot I somehow missed is exactly that, a six-year-old playing in the bowls set on the walk outside the House of the Seal-Lion with a neat little Victorian four-pane window just to the right of the scene. It would be a fatuous modern commentator who reasserted that the First Nations "hadn't invented the wheel," but leaving the double-headed serpent aside, it's pretty clearly a toy train as much as anything, and I am pretty sure that plate glass is right out. But, especially in the gloomy landscape of a Quatsino winter, why wouldn't you put a window in the side of your house if you could?

The real question is where the glass (and the clapboard) came from. One imagines that Montague Meyer might know. One also imagines that a London timber merchant named "Meyer" might well prefer to  hide behind someone named "MacMillan." Which, oddly enough, is a huge part of the fraught old-time discussion of the role of "Phoenicians" in spreading Eastern Mediterranean way to Iberia. I mean, obviously they didn't colonise. Because they were cosmpolitan, you see. And, uhm, what I mean by "cosmpolitan" and "they" is . . . 

Synthesis! One thing it is good for is obscuring the embarrassing.