At Home with the Bella Coola Indians: T.F. McIlwraith's Field Letters, 1922-4 (review)

Recent studies of field-based disciplines such as anthropology, geography, and (thanks to Donna Haraway) primatology, have problematized the relationship of researchers to 'the field.' Traditional fieldwork evoked strong images of masculine endeavour - tough, heroic activity and character building. The field itself was feminized, a wild place requiring close observation, taming, and mastery. New approaches to fieldwork reveal a more complex web of practices and spatial metaphors, displacing the very meaning of the 'field' itself. In At Home with the Bella Coola Indians, editors John Barker and Douglas Cole explore ethnographic fieldwork - 'anthropology's crucible' - as a traditional social practice moulding both the fieldworker and the products of the fieldworker's labour. The editors present and interpret T.F. McIlwraith's field letters from his two stints with the Bella Coola (Nuxalk) Indians of central coastal British Columbia in 1922-4. They attempt to demystify fieldwork itself, though not necessarily to question it.

Both here and in John Barker's introduction to the 1992 reissue of T.F. McIlwraith's ethnography The Bella Coola Indians (1948), McIlwraith's study is referred to as 'one of the finest ethnographies ever written about a Northwest Coast people.' It is argued that McIlwraith produced a coherent ethnography of a Northwest Coast people, something Franz Boas and his followers could not claim. This is no small compliment. Boas established his international reputation - and the North American field of ethnography - on his late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century studies of Northwest Coast people. The texts the Boasians collected were an end in themselves: recited by Indian informants, preferably in the vernacular, and regarded as a 'means of presenting original culture "as it appears to the Indian himself," free from "contaminating" interpretations on the part of the interpreter' (21). McIlwraith, more casually, recorded the texts in English while still, like Boas, conforming to the established procedures of 'salvage' ethnography: fieldworkers rarely lived among the Indians they studied (McIlwraith lived with a white - a Bella Coola salmon-cannery owner and trader); they observed and recorded cultural practices; they relied primarily upon paid Indian field informants for data and translation; and they 'made sense of the patterning of a culture,' only after leaving the field (18).

McIlwraith is interesting on many levels. Together with Marius Barbeau, he was one of the earliest of the anthropologically trained Canadians to study Canada's Pacific Coast nations. For McIlwraith, then only twenty-three, his Bella Coola study was his single experience with ethnographic research. The publishing history behind The Bella Coola Indians is bizarre. His eleven months with the Bella Coola generated a massive manuscript of 1,800 pages. Its Nuxalk language characters were technically difficult to reproduce, and its explicit descriptions of sexual activities were censored by the supervisor of government publications despite McIlwraith's clever attempts to disguise them within Latin translations. Various obstacles delayed publication for over twenty years. Yet when the manuscript appeared in 1948, it was a fully restored, two-volume publication.

The editors of At Home amassed over one hundred pages of McIlwraith's professional and personal letters from the field. Their introduction expands on previous published collections of field letters, notably by Franz Boas and by Margaret Mead. They explore the fieldwork techniques of the 1920s, including applications of new field recording technology such as wax cylinder recordings; they provide thoughtful explanations of what letters from the field tell us (compared with field notes, reports, or diaries); and they suggest how to read letters today that were originally intended for a different and diverse readership - McIlwraith's parents and sweetheart, his revered Cambridge professors, and his museum bosses in Ottawa. We learn of the triangulation of letter writer, original readers, and contemporary editor(s), and also of the role of the surviving members of the McIlwraith family, who were an indispensable resource. Without the...