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NOTES 235 1. Introduction 1. I have tried to be consistent in my use of “Tsimshian” and other ethnonyms in the singular and plural. I try to use “the Tsimshian” when I generalize about the people as a whole and “Tsimshians” when I refer to specific known individuals. For example, “The Tsimshian believe in reincarnation,” and “The Tsimshians that I spoke with yesterday do not believe in reincarnation.” 2. See Sterritt et al. 1998. 3. This is not meant to suggest that it is necessarily permissible or possible under the laws of the nations in question for house-group territories to be alienable by treaty (see, e.g., Duff 1959:36; Roth 2002b). 4. Viola Garfield’s gloss, using William Beynon as an informant, was “people of the hemlock” (Garfield 1939:175). However, Marius Barbeau, quoting Mrs. Able Johnson in 1915, elicited a different translation, of which Garfield may not have been aware (and which Beynon may have forgotten?), “people of the flies”: “Reason for name: (before Flood) the people in this territory were as numerous as flies. [Herbert] Wallace says giək means both housefly and a kind of tree” (Duff n.d.: “Ginaxangiik Houses,” 3). Barbeau’s gloss is more reliable since it acknowledges the homophonous forms but singles out “flies” as the intended meaning. Giik means “mosquito” as well as the common housefly. 5. William Henry Pierce (1933:173) also provides this gloss. However, a perhaps more likely translation, preferred by Beynon and by Kitsumkalum elders today, is of geel or gaal as “riffles along a sandbar” (McDonald and Kitsumkalum Education Committee 2003:33–34). 6. Port Simpson was originally called Fort Simpson and succeeded an earlier , short-lived Hudson’s Bay Company fort of the same name on the Nass. 7. English pronunciations of Tsimshian range from the more common [æsımšiæn] and [ætsımšiæn] to the more faithful [tsimæsyæn] and the less common [ædimšiæn]. See the “Note on the Orthography” for Smalgyax pronunciations. Spellings such as “Tsimpsean,” “Tsimpshian,” and so forth are sometimes used in Alaska. 8. In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, King George III decreed that no Indian land shall be transferred to ownership of the Crown without formal cession by the Indian nations concerned. The proclamation has the force of constitutional law in Canada, where the Dominion of Canada and its constituent provinces govern only on the Crown’s authority. There were no clear formal cessions of land in British Columbia until the Nisgaa Treaty of 2000. 9. Some linguists identify Haida and Tlingit as distantly related Athabascan languages. The classification is controversial and in any case more supported for Tlingit than for Haida. 10. This is a perfectly traditional strategy of lineage maintenance, as described in chapter 2. 2. Names as People 1. Cf. Tlingit at.óow, which for the Tlingit means the whole array of prerogatives in a lineage estate, including the right to tell clan histories (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:21). 2. Most Tsimshians are Christian, and none, to my knowledge, practices the traditional religious systems described by Boas (1916:543–64) and Garfield (1939:293–316). Nevertheless, the adawx—which today can be remembered, retold, and treasured irrespective of doctrinal faith—can be called “sacred” in several respects: they connect individuals to transcendent, supernatural processes and events; their social context is one of strictly observed taboos on who can tell which adawx; and they are regarded as unassailably true in ways that to outsiders resemble faith but which in the Tsimshian context constitute the highest form of knowledge. For summarized understandings of what adawx are and do, see Duff 1959; Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1992; Marsden 1992; Sterritt et al. 1998:11–15; Campbell 2005:7–30. 3. For the Barbeau Northwest Coast Files (Barbeau n.d.), I use the numbering system in Cove 1985. 4. See Robinson 1962:51–52 for Walter Wright’s version of the origin of the name Gamayaam, which Robinson renders as “Um-I-Am.” Other versions of the dispersal from Temlaham include Barbeau 1928; Harris and Robinson 1974; Clifton 1992; and Sterritt et al. 1998:29–30; and elsewhere. 5. Wilnaataa¬ means literally “where they are placed (against a visible background),” probably evoking seating at feasts (B. Rigsby, personal communication , May 14, 2006). Boas (1916:483) tends to call wilnaataa¬ “subdivisions ” in English, a misleading translation since the wilnaat...

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