Working in the Woods: Tsimshian Resource Workers and the Forest Industry of British Columbia

In the context of contemporary treaty making and recent Euro-Canadian court decisions reaffirming Aboriginal rights and title, it is more important than ever before to understand the pivotal role played by First Nations in the development of British Columbia's resource-based economy. ¹ Unfortunately, the dominant narratives of North America's settler states continue to ignore the role of First Nations as workers and their participation in building our contemporary economies. It is more common for these "stories"—both popular and academic—to focus instead on the pre- or early contact pasts and cultures of first peoples and, in the process, fetishize their "otherness." ² But, as Littlefield and Knack point out, the involvement of indigenous people in wage labor "has often been essential for the survival of First Nation individuals and communities" for well over a century. ³

The experiences of Aboriginal workers in the forest industry have largely been ignored in favor of research on either the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from resource employment or the historical development of resource industries. With the exception of Rolf Knight's general survey, case studies by Kirk Dombrowski on the Tlingit, James McDonald on the Kitsumkalum, Brian Hosmer on the Metlakatla, and John Pritchard on the Haisla, very little research has examined the experiences of First Nations people as participants in the forest industry. ⁴ Where resource industries are examined, they have been heavily weighted toward commercial fishing and cannery work. McDonald's examination of Kitsumkalum political economy and Pritchard's account of Haisla economic activities constitute the only significant consideration of forestry work in the region. In this article we confront the perplexing lack of attention given to the pivotal role played by First Nations in the industrial history of British Columbia by turning to the work experience of Tsimshian community members in the forest industry. ⁵

Our objective is to make clear through reference to archival and oral sources that the active participation within the industrial wage economy has been an important feature of Tsimshian community members' lives for more than a century and a half. Despite the difficulties and challenges introduced by Euro-American industrialists and colonists, Tsimshian people were not simply passive reactors. As we will discuss below, Tsimshian community members met the challenges and disruptions actively and, especially during the early period of industrialization, were pivotal to the expansion of the resource extraction industry. To deny the agency of Tsimshian people in the colonial encounter is to deny them their humanity and to imply an underlying teleology in which Euro-American domination was a foregone and natural conclusion.

The objective of this study is met through the combination of two separate, though interconnected, approaches: a historical discussion of the emergence of the forest sector and an exploration of twentieth-century forest-related experiences of the Tsimshian. The intent of combining these different approaches is to offer a comprehensive discussion of Tsimshian involvement in the industrial forest industry that realistically reflects Tsimshian experience. Following a brief description of the geographical territories and communities of the Tsimshian, we proceed to a discussion of the historical emergence of the forest industry in the Tsimshian territories. In this historical analysis we pay particular attention to the historical and social events that inform and contextualize the nineteenth-century experience of Tsimshian involvement in the forest sector industry. The final component explores the linkage between Tsimshian community members' stories of working in the woods and the changes within the twentieth-century forest industry. Given the absence of any significant overview of Tsimshian involvement in the forest industry or wage labor in general, this article is necessarily broad in its scope. Ultimately, our underlying argument is that involvement in industrial wage labor has been (and continues to be) a significant, if not defining, experience for Tsimshian people over...