Native People: Changing Our Ways of Seeing
JUNE 21, 2019
by MICHAEL WELTON
Haida totem carving, British Columbia. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
In the early 1960s while a student at the University of British Columbia I became fascinated with the study of cultural anthropology. Anthropology, for me, held up a “mirror for man.” It challenged us to see ourselves in the experience of others of different colour, to respect different ways of seeing values, kinship systems and social organization. But, I soon discovered, it was not easy to grasp who Natives were and how they understood themselves in their world of constant change, upheaval and intense traumatic suffering.
Indians had long filled a pathetic imaginative space for the dominant culture. Their cultures had been steadily eroding, at best hanging on in museum-like reservations or, perhaps worse, living only in anthropological displays. Anthropologists rushed out into the field to record the dying languages and capture fragments of once proud, beautiful but now vanishing people. Anthropologists were the saviours of non-western cultures.
I moved out of the schoolbook world of the University of British Columbia in the summers of 1963 and 1964 to travel up the North West Coast to see for myself the magnificent cultures of the Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl and Coast Salish. My teachers (famous scholars like Harry Hawthorn, Wilson Duff and Wayne Suttles) had taught me to appreciate the meaning of majestic totem poles, the wonders of North West Coast mythology and art, the mysteries of the potlatch and the profound native sensitivity to land and sea. They presented me with powerful images of cultures as integrated, meaningful wholes.
But these images sat uneasily with my evangelical Christian beliefs. My anthropology teachers had nurtured respect for beliefs and practices different from my own. My Baptist teachers had encouraged me to see others in need of conversion. So, with these conflicting images of the North West Coast Indian in my imagination I sailed up the coast with twenty other members of the Marine Medical Mission. My assignment was to run youth programs on the island of Kitkatla, a Tsimshian village of about three hundred, located about 40 miles to the west of Prince Rupert, and in Port Edward, a cannery town reminiscent of Steinbeck’s cannery row on the mouth of the Skeena River.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/21/native-people-changing-our-ways-of-seeing/