Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon's 1945 Field Notebooks (review)

Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon’s 1945 Field Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Anderson and Marjorie Halpin. (Vancouver:UBV Press, 2000. xii + 284 pp., preface, introduction, map, glossaries, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.)

This volume can be seen as a first step in bringing into print the thousands of pages of unpublished field materials by William Beynon (1888–1958), the Tsimshian chief, ethnologist, and linguist whose collaboration with Marius Barbeau constitutes one of the most-thorough ethnographic surveys of a North American people. In this, it sets a high standard. The main body of the book directly transcribes four field notebooks Beynon filled while attending and participating in a five-day potlatch at Gitsegukla, a Gitksan village in northern British Columbia. This kind of nearly verbatim record of a real-life event is underrepresented in the Barbeau-Beynon corpus, most of which is in the form of memory ethnography. This contribution is significant and long overdue.

Beynon’s own family was Nisga'a but was adopted into the Tsimshian to fill a vacant chieftainship. Starting in 1914, he worked with Barbeau on a decades-long ethnographic survey that was eventually to cover the Tsimshian as well as their upriver neighbors and linguistic cousins the Nisga'a and Gitksan. Beynon collected materials in all three languages.

Potlatch at Gitsegukla presents for the first time ethnographic material including orations, heraldic and social-organizational intricacies, an invaluable taxonomy of potlatch exchanges (125–26, 249–50), and vivid descriptions of naxnox (name-spirit) and halaayt (dancing guild) performances that a short while later would have been difficult if not impossible to record. Much of this material is contextualized in the introduction and summarized in orderly appendices and glossaries. Fortunately, Beynon was unswayed by any “salvage ethnography” agenda: interspersed in the notebooks are references to land seizures, interviews reflecting generational attitudes toward the traditions, and an incident of drunkenness for which the offender atoned through a ceremonial distribution of cigarettes and apples (83, 133–34). The 1945 potlatch was a conscious act of cultural revival: the object was to re-erect totem poles destroyed in a 1936 flood, but the process of planning the potlatch, which Beynon also describes, resolved disagreements over how closely to follow tradition. (The traditionalists won.)

In transcribing the texts, the editors surely take the least-bad route, presenting Beynon’s orthography (he was trained in phonetic transcription) as directly as possible, variants and all, rather than standardizing the forms into current Gitksan spelling. This preserves many nuances, but Beynon’s velar and postvelar stop series is still smoothed over, with his markings for the now-accepted palatalization distinction not presented. And both syllabicization (subscript vertical line) and “backness” (underline or subscript dot) are reproduced as a subscript circle, which, properly, means unvoiced. Through all of this, the book’s sans serif font does the reader’s eye no favors. But these are quibbles. Having transcribed much of Beynon’s notes myself, I am aware of the difficulties, and this volume admirably brings to life Beynon’s rich transcriptional style.

The editors’ insightful and thoughtful introduction engages their decades of experience with the Tsimshianic cultures, augmented by fresh interviews with Gitksans from one of the key families involved in the 1945 events—one of whom, Joan Ryan, also contributes the preface. The Beynon texts are followed by a long, informative essay, “Key Events in the Gitksan Encounter with the Colonial World,” by James A. McDonald and Jennifer Joseph (193–214). But McDonald and Joseph’s tendency to focus on early white settlement and trade is sometimes out of place here; they bother to name, for example, the first postmaster of Hazelton, bc (200), but omit entirely the most-significant calamity in the recent land-claims struggle: the unauthorized cession to the Crown of 85 percent of the territory of one Gitksan village, Gitanyow, in the Nisga'a treaty. Similarly, the volume’s index leads us to every anthropologist cited...