The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian man on the Pacific Northwest coast (review)

Between 1859 and 1909, Arthur Wellington Clah, a Tsimshian man living on the north Pacific Coast of what would eventually become the province of British Columbia in Canada, diligently kept a diary. Written in English rather than in his mother-tongue of Sm’algyax (the Coast Tsimshian language), the journal covers a span of fifty years marked by considerable transformation for the Indigenous people of the region and their societies. Through the expansion of the fur trade into Indigenous territories, gold rushes, the introduction of wage labour and industrial salmon canneries, through to resource and land alienation, missionization and the racialized force of colonial rule, this one man’s journal affords us a glimpse into an exceedingly rare perspective on historical change. Historian Peggy Brock’s The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah illuminates Clah’s physical, cultural and spiritual voyages based on this extraordinary account. In her words, the diary

reveals the complexities of personal interactions between colonizers and the colonized, and the shift from discovery of new knowledge, skills, and possibilities, to the realities of land dispossession, interference by the colonial state in cultural and political matters, and diminishing economic opportunities

(4).

Arthur Wellington Clah was born in 1831 into the hierarchically stratified, maritime-oriented Tsimshian (Ts’msyen) First Nation. He was a chief of the House of T’amks within the then powerful Gispaxlo’ots tribe and connected politically to influential Tsimshian and Nisga’a leaders. He was also among the first generation of north coast residents to be exposed to fur traders, miners, missionaries, settlers, and colonial officials, which makes his diary such a unique gem for historians interested in the Indigenous point of view on those encounters. Only a handful of scholars have used Clah’s writings, and I am excited that this book introduces what is by every measure a remarkable historical record to a broader audience. Brock sees the diary and Clah’s discipline of making daily entries as a method of cross-cultural borrowing, one which enabled him to cope with a period of rapid change. It was a moral account as much as it was a history. “[T]he diary was very much part of Clah’s persona. It marked him as a man of significance and wisdom, a man with a God-given right to make a record for posterity” (33) with aspirations of even publishing it one day.

The sheer size of the diary (650,000 words covering fifty years), Clah’s lack of punctuation or spelling standardization, the culturally-specific references or his occasional use of Sm’algyax present challenges for the non-specialist reader that Brock’s approach of summary over transcription surmounts. Indeed, her decision not to replicate lengthy passages from the journal itself was a conscious one. While it is unfortunate that Clah’s voice is rarely heard directly, one hopes that Brock may eventually make available her transcription (1770 typed pages and counting) of his diary and thus this monograph will serve as an interpretative guide to it. In addition to paraphrasing Clah’s observations, Brock utilizes a plethora of archival sources to contextualize his life within the framework of colonial rule. Herein lies one of the strengths of the book: Brock’s summaries and interpretations of Clah’s journal effectively convey his unique Indigenous perspective on the lived experience of colonialism. Furthermore, she so successfully conveys a sense of his character that readers will come away with a feeling that they know Clah the man, not merely the subject matters upon which he wrote.

And what a notable character he was. Clah began his diary when he was an ambitious young man in his late twenties, eager to embrace new skills, ideas, and technologies imported by Euro-Canadians. He worked for fur traders in the Hudson’s Bay Company who had first opened a post in the region in the year of his birth, 1831, and was able to establish himself as an...