A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend. Ralph Maud
Hill-Tout (1859-1944)” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 39 (1945) Sect. II pp. 89-92, an astute evaluation of early Canadian anthropology. See also Douglas Cole “The Origins of Canadian Anthropology, 1850-1910” Journal of Canadian Studies 8 (February 1973) 33-45.1 am indebted to Douglas Cole for directing my attention to a letter from Hill-Tout to Sapir of 26 February 1912 in the National Museums of Canada (Canadian Ethnological Service), which sums up the feelings of those who were passed over:
Bucklands
Abbotsford, B.C.
Feby 26 1912
Dr. Edward Sapir
Dom Geo Survey
Ottawa
Dear Sir,
I beg to acknowledge and thank you for the copies of your papers which you were kind enough to send me. Permit me to say that I heard of your appointment as ethnologist-in-charge at Ottawa with great interest and pleasure, and I look forward to see the dreams some of us have indulged in during the last twenty years accomplished by your self and colleagues. I see only one thing to regret and that is that your survey of the anthropological problems in your paper in “Science” and the tone there adopted by you may alienate the sympathies of some of the earlier students and associations devoted to the study of the aborigines of the Dominion. You seem to have overlooked the work and efforts, or rather you seem to fail to appreciate the work and efforts of those who have endeavoured to keep alive an interest in anthropological study. I will instance one person’s work only, Father Morice’s. His methods may not be ideal but there is no question of his knowledge of what he writes. I question if there is another student in America with a more perfect and critical knowledge of a native tongue than F. Morice has of Carrier and cognate tongues. Yet your mention of him and his work is only a “patronizing” one in a footnote. I cannot think you are aware of the amount of pioneer work which has been done in this country, and Canadians are very touchy. I could wish you had laid a little more stress upon the value of these efforts as far as they go. You don’t want to alienate any one with anthropological interest. There is so little of it shown in this country, and when you remember it took some of us over 20 years to educate the authorities at Ottawa, even with Dr. G.M. Dawson and his distinguished father Sir William’s assistance, to appreciate the value and importance of anthropological studies, you will see it is indiscrete to start your work by rousing feelings of antagonism to yourself.
You will pardon my freedom in speaking but I have your work at heart and would be sorry to see any obstacles placed in your way. The next time you have an opportunity try and smooth down these ruffled feelings your paper has aroused.
Yours truly,
C. Hill-Tout
Sapir apparently did not reply to this letter. When President Wesbrook of the University of British Columbia asked Sapir’s advice on Hill-Tout as a candidate for the Headship of the Department of Anthropology, Sapir wrote: “To be perfectly frank, I do not think Mr. Hill-Tout would altogether answer the needs of a university”(letter of 29 June 1916, in Museums of Canada, Ethnology Division).
15 “Archaeological Exhibits at the Fair: James Deans and his Company of Indians” American Antiquarian 15 (1893) 185; see James Deans, Introduction to Tales from the Totems of the Hidery, Vol. II of the Archives of the International Folk-Lore Association (Chicago 1899) p. 5.
16 See Derek Pethick James Douglas: Servant of Two Empires (Vancouver: Mitchell Press 1969) pp. 266-273, though there is no mention of Martha’s collection of myths.
17 Melville Jacobs Texts in Chinook Jargon (University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, Vol. 7 No. 1, November 1936) pp. 1-27 includes some stories in Chinook jargon from Thomas Paul of Saanich, collected in Victoria in May 1930.
18 Extracts from this early book were included in Tom McFeat’s paperback compilation, Indians of the North Pacific Coast (Toronto:McClelland and Stewart 1966); but these did not include Sproat’s mythology chapter.
19 Wayne Suttles in a personal communication corrects me on this point. One of Brown’s publications which I have been unable to locate contains a “star-husband” tale.
20 The Norwegian brothers Adrian and Fillip Jacobsen lived on the West Coast for a number of years, especially at Bella Coola, and wrote a few reports for German periodicals in the period 1890-1895. These have been collected and translated by the B.C. Indian Language Project, and await publication. What we have seen in English have been the few myths included by Boas in his Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians (1898). Notable among the material supplied by early explorers and travelers is “Report on the Indian Tribes inhabiting the country in the vicinity of the 49th Parallel of North Latitude” published by Capt. E.E. Wilson of the Boundary Survey in Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 4 (1866) 275-322, which includes one vigorously told Coyote story.
Chapter III Franz Boas: Early Field Work
“There is little on public record or floating in tradition regarding the youth of Boas,” reports A.L. Kroeber in the festschrift published by the American Anthropological Association in the year after Boas’s death in 1942.1 There is no youthful dream which it was his life’s goal to fulfill. His enormous energy and output seem not to have been attached to a single dominating insight, but to have been austerely empirical. Any general statement could only be enunciated when data gave statistical proof. He resisted Hitler propaganda on the racial question with all the power of his mature authority; but the world does not associate the name of Boas with “racial equality,” as it does Darwin’s with “evolution,” Marx’s with “communism,” and Freud’s with “the unconscious.” Even by the end of his long working life, the proofs were not in. “He made no one great summating discovery,” says Kroeber (p. 24). Up to the end he was sifting the materials.
Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia, on 9 July 1858, to Meier Boas, a prosperous businessman, and his wife Sophie, a founder of the first Froebel Kindergarten in Minden and one of a circle of intellectuals “of the Mosaic confession” (as Boas once phrased it). Perhaps the most significant event in his life occurred in the fallow years after his doctorate, when he was waiting for some position. The event is of a personal nature. His aunt’s husband, Dr. Abraham Jacobi of New York City, invited Franz for a holiday in the Hartz mountains. Marie Krackowizer was of the party, one of two daughters accompanied by their mother, the widow of an Austrian doctor who had emigrated to the United States after the troubles of 1848. If Boas was to marry Marie, as he immediately knew he must, he had to have a career, and in the United States to boot. We can see Boas’s early ambition as half scientific thrust and half the securing of a lady’s hand in marriage. His letter-diaries make it quite clear where he would have preferred to be rather than on the S.S. Boskowitz up and down the Northwest Coast. Field work was not an enjoyable way of life, but merely a means of providing the raw materials for linguistic and statistical analysis, which could be conducted in the comfort of his own study at home. This not only explains the rather limited amount of time he spent in the field and the welcome he gave to informants who, when properly trained, could mail to New York quite usable information, but also illuminates Boas’s general moral stance: his life in New York, his editing, his teaching, and his marriage, this was so successful and satisfying that other ways of life, it seems, could only be looked down upon. Crime, casual sexuality, roisterous play, religious anxiety or enthusiasm, pastimes, or any form of unemployment, these were things he did not know much about, didn’t want to know much about. Perhaps one reason why the principle of equality was never powerfully enough enunciated is that he could not really believe that another mode of life might be as good as the one he was fortunate enough to possess.
Franz Boas with Marie Krackowizer during his visit to New York in 1884. Photo kindly made available by Ronald P. Rohner. See his The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969), “Illustrations.” Reproduced courtesy of Franziska Boas, who supplied the correct date for the photo in a personal communication, 1 June 1980.
Indianische