Recent Work on the Northwest Coast

Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Resource Center. By Patricia Pierce Erikson, with Helma Ward and Kirk Wachendorf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx + 264 pp., foreword, introduction, maps, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth.)

Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. By Cole Harris. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002. xxxii + 416 pp., introduction, maps, appendix, bibliography, index. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.)

At Home with the Bella Coola Indians: T. F. McIlwraith's Field Letters, 1922–4. Edited by John Barker and Douglas Cole. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003. xvi + 206 pp., foreword, preface, introduction, map, index. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.)

The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. By Susan Neylan. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. xviii + 401 pp., introduction, maps, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.)

Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are. By the Olympic Peninsula Intertribal Cultural Advisory Committee. Edited by Jacilee Wray. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. xxiv + 185 pp., foreword, preface, introduction, maps, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.)

A raft of new books reminds us that the Northwest Coast boasts not only an unrivaled concentration of ethnolinguistic diversity but also a contact history sufficiently recent that data from the entire historical period seem, compared to other North American regions, almost unbelievably condensed and well recorded. The benefit of this to anthropology and ethnohistory is the rich documentation of historical complexity.

The Boasian tradition was preadapted to this complexity and developed with it. Edward Sapir wrote in a letter in 1938, "I'm not particularly interested in 'smoothed-over' versions of native culture. I like the stuff in the raw, the genuine, difficult, confusing, primary sources. These must be presented, whatever else is done. There are too many glib monographs, most of which time will show to be highly subjected performance" (quoted in Darnell 1992: 42). Out of British Columbia come three compelling books of which Sapir would have approved, and from Washington State come two that might have disappointed him.

Making Native Space is Cole Harris's magnum opus on the political and symbolic geography of British Columbian colonialism, with emphasis on the laying out of Indian reserves. A geographer, Harris has written here the definitive history of his subject, in many ways an expansion of the story first told in Robin Fisher's influential Contact and Conflict (1977).

Highly professional maps punctuate a compelling narrative of the debates, strategies, and day-to-day surveying practices of reserve allotment, with a careful assessment of the responses to and consequences of what was—and is—essentially a Canadian apartheid. To his credit, Harris does not use any moral sledgehammers to make his point. The facts and maps tell their own story and are damning enough.

My only complaint has to do with the final chapter, "Toward a Postcolonial Land Policy," which could have been, and seemingly tried to be, a comprehensive assessment of where British Columbia could and should be going. It is marred by the exclusion of any real discussion of the 1997 Delgamuukw ruling—which allows First Nations to prove unextinguished aboriginal title in the terms of their own legal systems—and developments in the wake of this, including First Nations land-holding lineages building sovereign relationships with industrial, ministerial, and other organizations apart from any treaty framework or band system. Instead, Harris lodges his forlorn hope in the province's moribund treaty process.

Susan Neylan's The Heavens Are Changing examines in unprecedented detail the complex interaction between missions and First Nations among the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples of northwestern British Columbia (Tsimshian, Nisga'a, Gitxsan), focusing on sites such as Fort (later Port) Simpson (Lax Kw'alaams), British Columbia, and the Metlakatlas. Earlier treatments of this topic focused on individual charismatic missionaries such as Thomas Crosby and William Duncan, but Neylan, a historian, provides ethnographically informed insights, portraits of individual First Nations...