Standing up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom by Leslie A. Robertson, and the Kwagu’ł Gixsam (review)

Before the publication of this book, Ga’axsta’las or Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951) was recorded as a leading proponent of the colonial ban on the potlatch, this despite her wide ranging involvement in early-twentieth-century Aboriginal political activism, and her seemingly non-stop involvement in all aspects of community life at ‘Yalis (Alert Bay). For Cook, and especially for her descendant who grew up after the lifting of the potlatch ban, this image of Cook as a “colonial collaborator” weighed heavily on the family, stigmatizing many of Cook’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren and isolating the family from the wider Kwakwaka’wakw community. Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las, a collaboration between anthropologist Leslie Robertson and Cook’s descendants (the Kwagu’ł Gixsam clan), is written to revise the image of Cook, and the place of her family within the Kwakwaka’wakw context. As one descendant and contributor to this book explains, he wants the book to “set the record straight on who she was and what she was about,” so that other children in his family do not have to face the same exclusion from the cultural realm of Kwakwaka’wakw society he felt as a child (p. 27). The resulting text of Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las comprises three interwoven narratives: the story of Jane Cook and her decisions to speak out against the potlatch; the story of Leslie Robertson’s research journey amongst the Kwagu’ł Gixsam clan and through the written archive related to Jane Cook; and the story Robertson’s co-authors, the Kwagu’ł Gixsam clan itself, and their hope of using a written academic monograph as part of a journey towards being more accepted by their community. Teasing apart these narratives is complicated and Robertson’s great strength is her ability to move almost seamlessly between discussion of the present, the past, and her own thinking about the project. The resulting book, although organized chronologically around Jane Cook’s life, retains these three narratives throughout.

Of the three narratives, the story of the Cook’s descendants and their journey towards reconciliation with their community is the most persuasive and comprehensive of the whole book, and, in a sense, this book itself becomes a chapter in this story. Readers are consistently pulled into the lives of the present-day descendants, their memories of being ostracized from their community, and their hope that this new history of Ga’axsta’las/Jane Cook will reconnect them with their community.

The other two narratives are more problematic in their presentation. That of Cook’s life, her decisions and her actions, was the most disappointing. While Robertson and Cook’s descendants do succeed in presenting a revisionist history of Cook that allows her to be a community leader rather than simply an anti-potlatch activist, we do not learn enough about Cook’s complex identities and decisions as a women, a wife, a Christian, an Aboriginal activist, or how these decisions fit within the broader Kwakwaka’wakw context. On her Christian faith, for instance, the book is particularly vague, perhaps relying too much on contemporary memory (and a contemporary context in which many Aboriginal people have a strained relationship with Christianity). We are told that Cook was a devout Christian and committed member of the mission community at ‘Yalis but that she was distinctly different from the European missionary (Alfred Hall) who ran the church. At one point it is suggested that Cook and her family...