Lelooska: The Life of a Northwest Coast Artist

Note to the Reader

NOTE TO THE READER THROUGHOUT THIS VOLUME, I refer to Don “Lelooska” Smith as “Lelooska” or “Don” rather than as “Smith,” for two reasons. First, the public knew him as Lelooska or Chief Lelooska, and his family and close friends knew him as Don. Second, this is a personal narrative to which I am closely connected. It would be absurd for me to pretend to be objective by referring to him as “Smith.” There is more to be gained from understanding Don’s life on a personal level than from some supposedly objective, abstract, and impersonal academic level. No disrespect to Don is intended by not employing this more formal usage. Translating the spoken word to the written is not an easy task. Aside from the differences between informal and formal usage, capturing the nuances of tone and cadence of a speaker is nearly impossible. This narrative of Don “Lelooska” Smith’s life is no exception. It is not a strictly verbatim transcript of the interviews I conducted with Lelooska. I have edited the transcripts for clarity and have done some limited rearranging of certain sections. I have dropped only those portions of the transcripts that Don indicated he did not want to be public, that might take readers off onto unrelated tangents, or that were repetitive. I do not believe that this editing has undermined the original narrative Lelooska and I created during the many hours of taped interviews. In an effort to help readers get a feeling for his speech patterns, I use punctuation in specific xv ways. I have employed an exclamation mark whenever he laughed. Readers will note many such points in the text. They are signs that the two of us enjoyed the conversations. Words that Lelooska emphasized are in italics . Contemplative pauses are indicated by ellipses ( . . . ). These were unusual and significant moments, for Lelooska seldom lacked words. In no instance does the presence of ellipses indicate that some portion of the text has been cut. Again, the curious may refer to the verbatim transcripts for comparison; I have placed a copy in the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Competing orthographies make translating Native languages difficult, and dealing with numerous tribes in a single volume only compounds the problem. The ways individuals write their names, which sometimes shifts over the years, also presents a dilemma. Most specialists will have some familiarity with the orthographies, but general readers will find it almost impossible to use some. Because this volume is intended for both audiences, on this count I have favored general readers and attempt to render words in forms that can be pronounced. For the names of individuals , I use the forms they most often employed in their own lifetimes. In many instances, I offer alternate spellings in the footnotes. Although a mishmash of orthographies results, I believe the end product remains comprehensible to specialists and general readers alike. Native North American politics and history are fields tied to present concerns and issues, part of which revolve around names and naming. I have used the terms “Native Americans,” “Indians,” and “Native” or “Indigenous peoples” interchangeably. When possible, I have used a tribal designation . Like the orthography, even that is tricky. A modern tribe is a product of many interactions, including relations with other Indian bands, with European American colonizers, and eventually with the U.S. and Canadian governments.1 Those tribes have asserted themselves, often by choosing names more reflective of indigenous languages. One prime example are the Kwakwaka’wakw (meaning “the speakers of Kwak’wala”) of coastal southern British Columbia and northeastern Vancouver Island, with whom Don had significant interaction. Commonly referred to as the Kwakiutl (though with significant spelling variations) in the anthropological and historical literature, the term Kwakwaka’wakw Note to the Reader • xvi better reflects the political and social relations of the many bands that make up the “tribe” and is used as the official label today. The Kwakiutl are in fact one of those bands or tribes that make up the larger group.2 Don knew of this and other changes in designations but, like many people, tended to stick with those terms he had known for decades. I have indicated such “newer” labels in notes and have not made changes in the text of Don’s narrative. I believe this allows readers the opportunity to find familiar “old” terms but to match them up...