Yakuglas' Legacy: The Art and Times of Charlie James

Yakuglas’ Legacy The Art and Times of Charlie James Table of Contents: Illustrations iii Preface 12 Introduction 15 Chapter One: James’ World 20 Chapter Two: Style 47 Chapter Three: Masks and Ceremonial Objects 91 Chapter Four: Totem Poles 144 Chapter Five: Model Poles and Curio Items 200 Chapter Six: Two Dimensional Art 233 Conclusion: Yakuglas’ Legacy 268 Bibliography 275 Endnotes 279Illustrations Figure 1: Charlie James proudly displays objects he created for Bill Webber in Vancouver around 1928. (VMPA) Figures 1:1-4: The tribal groups, tribes and numayms of the Kwakiutl, Gilford Island (including the Kwitsootainuk), the Nimpkish, and the Lower Knight Inlet groups – all of whom James has been identified as belonging to (after Galois) The specific groups that James was linked with are indicated in yellow. Figure 1:5: The approximate locations of the major tribes of the Kwakwaka’wakw. (After Codere) Figure 1:6: The location of the major winter villages in Kwakwaka’wakw territory. (After Codere) Figure 1:7: Relative location of Beaver Harbor, James’ hometown of Fort Rupert and Port Hardy on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Figure 1:8: This composite photograph from the 1930s combines images of Charlie James working on the Memorial Hall pole on the left, while on the right is his son-in-law Charlie Newman, James’ daughter and Newman’s wife Lucy Lilac, and their daughters, including future carver Ellen Neel. (VCA A26479) Figure 1:9: Alert Bay was located on the main north-south shipping and transportation routes close the rich fisheries at the mouth of the Nimpkish River Figure 1:10: Population by Kwakwaka’wakw tribal groups between 1835 and 1929 (after Galois) Figure 1:11: The McKenna-McBride Indian Reserve Commission in session in Victoria in 1916 (PABC G-00975) Figure 1:12: ceremonial treasures carefully laid out for viewing by the visiting McKenna-McBride Commission, ca. 1914. (PABC AA-00209) Figure 1:13: The pole erected outside of St Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay shows some characteristics of James’ style and was likely done by his students under his tutelage (PABC I 28364). Figure 1:14: This is the last known photograph of James, with his wife Sara Nin, and an elderly visitor in Alert Bay in 1936. (RBCM PN 11551) Figure 1:15: A Selected Family/Artistic Genealogy for Charlie James Figure 2:1: 'Namxxelagayu mask (NMAI 11/5212) Figure 2:2: Echo mask (Thomas Burke Museum 25.0/221) Figure 2:3: Echo mask fitted with sea anemone mouth (Thomas Burke Museum 25.0/221) Figure 2:4: The painted muslin cape worn with the 'Namxxelagayu mask by James with the different formal elements of Northwest Coast art labeled (Vancouver Museum). Figure 2:5: This model pole by James was inspired by his own monumental pole erected in the Memorial Hall at Christ Church in Victoria in 1925. (UBC MOA A17145) Figure 2:6: Wood wedges like these were used to split the pole (RBCM 2063 a/b) Figure 2:7: Much of the rough work was done using an elbow adze with blade. Henry Hunt, who learnt from James’ apprentice, Mungo Martin, decoratively carved the haft of his elbow adze, indicating its significance as a tool. (RBCM 19315) Figure 2:8: The fluted textures of James’ totem pole surfaces was achieved through rhythmic carving using tools like this elaborate carved d-adze from Fort Rupert, collected in 1894. (RBCM 17812) Figure 2:9: This close-up of James’ 1925 pole shows the characteristic “fluted” textures created by using D-adzes of different sizes. Compare for example, the hands at the top of the photograph with the arms and legs. Note as well, James use of two-dimensional form to add another layer of implied texture. Figure 2:10: Precision work was done using knives and small chisels, like Henry Hunt’ curved knife with a carved handle (RBCM 17817) Figure 2:11: Fine chisels were also used for finishing work. (RBCM 17824) Figure 2:12: To achieve a fine, polished surface, the carver utilized a burnisher, like this one belonging to Henry Hunt. (RBCM 17835) Figure 2:13: Final decorative two-dimensional designs were applied using home-made brushes, like this one belonging to Mungo Martin. (RBCM 12611 c) Figure 2:14: Paint was ground and mixed in mortars like this one bought from Mrs. Johnny Hunt, Fort Rupert (RBCM 16433) Figure 2:15: This sun mask by James exemplifies many of the formal characteristics of his mature style. (RBCM 1908) Figure 2: 16: A varnished model pole by James (RBCM 6789) Figure 2:17: Willie Seaweed carved this bumblebee mask used in the Hamatsa rituals in 1948 (UBC MOA Nb3.1363) Figure 2:18: Charlie George, Sr. carved this expressive Komokwa mask with a loon on his head, the bubbles in the face representing air bubbles under the ocean’s surface. (UBC MOA A6239) Figure 2:19: Another mask from the Atlakim representing a salmon attributed to Joe Seaweed, Willie Seaweed’s son, who often worked with his father. (UBC MOA A6215) Figure 2:20: A Dzunukwa mask by Charlie George Jr., who was from Smith Inlet. (MOA A4286) Figure 2:21: George Walkus carved this humorous Sneezey, or asaxagamlh figure, of the Atlhaq!im or Atlakim dancers, “bringing treasures from the forests,” which were typically burnt after use. (MOA A6214) Figure 2:22: Willie Seaweed, photographed in Blunden Harbor in 1955. (PABC D-00005) Figure 2:23: Hamatsa raven mask by Mungo Martin (RBCM) Figure 2:24: This is a headdress representing Sisiutl, the double-headed serpent, carved by Dick Price and owned by Charlie Nowell. (UBC MOA A3790); Figure 2:25: Dick Hawkins carved this mask representing Raven at the north end of the world, Gwaxgwaxwalanuxsiwe', one of the servants of cannibal at the north end of the world, and danced in the ceqa or Winter Ceremonies. (UBC MOA A6127) Figure 2:26-27: Herbert Johnson carved this transformation mask, shown here closed and open. (UBC MOA A4497) Figure 2:28: Arthur Shaughnessy carved this model pole now in the collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. (CMC VII-E-391) Figure 2:29: This potlatch bowl created by Tom Patch Wamiss is described in museum records at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology: “According to Stan Wamiss, Tom's son, loon dishes such as this one were used at potlatches - placed at the entrance to the bighouse for people to put money in, as donations to help with the cost of the potlatch” (UBC MOA A6566) Figure 2:30: This transformation mask by Bob Harris exemplifies Harris’s careful use of hatching and cross-hatching in his two-dimensional decoration. (Museum of the American Indian, 11/5235) Figure 2:31: Whale mask carved by John Davis for the Cranmer family before 1919 (UBC MOA 4506) Figure 2:32: The Wakius pole in Alert Bay carved by Yurhwayu. Figure 2:33: Atlaq!im mask representing Door Keeper of the Woods, Tl!atl!apalagals by Arthur Bondsound. (UBC MOA A3657) Figure 2:34: A model pole by Charlie James (RBCM 6787) Figure 2:35: A model pole by Willie Seaweed (RBCM 15807) Figures: 2:36-38: From left to right, these images represent the variations of an abstracted face form that James used as a kind of visual signature: figure 2:36: model pole (RBCM 14847) figure 2:37: a painting from the Vancouver Museum sketchbook (VM); figure 2:38: a painted tray (VM AA 1019); Figure 2:39: This diagrammatic illustration of a model pole by James shows what to look for in identifying a carving by James. (RBCM ) Figure 2:40: A model pole by Henry Hunt (RBCM 14998) Figure 2:41: wooden drum by Tony Hunt (UBC MOA 863/5 a-c ¾) Figure 2:42: A Dzunukwa mask carved by Willie Seaweed (RBCM 14864) Figure 2:43: A Dzunukwa mask attributed to either Charlie James or Mungo Martin (NMAI ) Figure 2:44: A Qolus headdress by Richard Hunt carved in 1995. (UBC MOA 1673/1) Figure 2:45: An early model pole by Mungo Martin collected between 1929 and 1939. (RBCM 8308) Figure 3:1: 'Namxxelagayu mask (NMAI 11/5212). Figure 3:2: James mask for Mungo Martin, MOA A3653 Figure 3:3: A Galokwudzuwis (Crooked Beak) mask attributed to James at the Portland Art Museum (Portland Art Museum 48.3.407) Figure 3:3: A Hokhokw mask attributed to James at the Portland Art Museum (Portland Art Museum 48.3.409) Figure 3:3: Tsegamis mask, collected 1897, AMNH 16/2344 Figure 3:4: Xwe’xwe mask (AMNH 16/8382) Figure 3:5: A Xwe’xwe dance tunic from Blunden Harbor (Ba’as) (UBC MOA A4181) Figure 3:6: Coast Salish dancing Xwe’xwe masks on the Songhees reserve in Victoria (PABC AA 00101) Figure 3:7: Salamander Arm Decorations, UCC-80.01.142a-b Figure 3:8: Bakwas, or Wild Man of the Woods by Bob Harris, with snake figure attributed to James, UCC-80.01.010 Figure 3:9: Winalagalis prop, Seattle Art Museum 83.241 Figure 3:10: Dzunukwa dagger used in the tuxw’id performances (AMNH ) Figure 3:11: tuxw’id puppet (UBC MOA ) Figure 3:12: tuxw’id boards (NMAI ) Figure 3:13: Modern tuxw’id by Barry Scow (UBC MOA 2607/1) Figure 3:14: Ancestral figure mask, UCC Figure 3:15: Transformational Mask Representing Ancestral Sun, RBCM CN 1908 Figure 3:16: Sun Mask, U’Mista, 80.01.131, dated ca 1915 Figure 3:17: Sisiutl mask, RBCM CPN 1954, made before 1914 Figure 3:18: Sisiutl mask collected by George Hunt in 1899, AMNH 16/678 Figure 3:19: sea monster mask NMAI 100274.000 Figure 3:20: Dzunukwa painting by Mungo Martin, UBC MOA Figures 3:21 and 3:22: Transformation mask, Thomas Burke Museum, U of Washington, 1 1481 Figure 3:23: Eagle Mask, attributed to James, UCC-80.01.016 Figure 3: 24: Sand hill Crane Mask, Thomas Burke Museum, 1 1446, attributed to either Mungo Martin or Charlie James ca 1920 Figure 3:25: Sand Crane Mask, Denver Art Museum, 1953.1402, attributed to either Mungo Martin or Charlie James Figure 3:26: Sand hill Crane Mask, RBCM 9250, Mungo Martin, ca. 1953 Figure 3:27: Komokwa mask, AMNH 1897-43 Figure 3:28: Swan Headdress (RBCM 15068) Figure 3:29: galgyalis (ancestral bird) gigamlh (headdress) (UBC MOA A4162) Figure 3:30: Painting of a loon, attributed to Bob Harris (RBCM 19578) Figure 3:31: Monumental salmon mask (Glenbow) Figure 3:31: Salmon prop, Glenbow Museum A1757 Figures 3:32 and 33: Sisiutl feast dish (UBC A4147) Figure 3:34: Curio mask, Thomas Burke Museum, U of Washington 25.0/440 Figure 4:1: The Kwakwaka’wakw house with its associated elements Figure 4:2: Edward Curtis photograph of Fort Rupert with Hunt pole by James, (Library of Congress, 3b00173r) Figure 4:3: Grizzly Bear holding a seal from the Hunt pole, Glenbow Museum AA442 Figure 4:4: Original “Seattle” pole, marked with a white X above it, in situ on Tongass Island, ASL p208 135 Figure 4:5: Seattle pole in Pioneer Square, ca. 1899, MHIS, 1899_179 Figure 4:6: James’ Tatentsit pole was collected by Marius Barbeau and Arthur Price and relocated to the University of British Columbia in 1947. (UBC MOA A50038) Figure 4:7: The Tatantsit pole was photographed in situ in Fort Rupert in 1914. (RBCM H-07200) Figures 4:8-9: Details of the Tatensit pole. Figure 4:10: James totem pole and two painted copper forms on the far left, Fort Rupert graveyard, VCA A49809 (see pn 7305) Figure 4:11: A photograph of James’ Kalugwis pole in situ Figure 4:12: A still from Curtis’ film In the Land of the Headhunters, with James’ Tsa-wee-nok houseposts in the background (Library of Congress 3a49167r) Figure 4:13: Poles from Alert Bay were relocated to Stanley Park, Vancouver (VCA A36845) Figure 4:14: The Sisaxo’las pole was replaced with a copy and the original installed in Canada Place, Vancouver (Vancouver Museum) Figure 4:15: Sisaxo’las pole, right, in situ in front of Moses Alfred’s house in Alert Bay (NMC) Figure 4:16: A sketch by Wilson Duff of the location of poles in the Alert Bay Cemetery (Wilson Duff, Written Haida field notes, notebook #13, PABC GR-809, Reel B6043); Below, from left to right: figure 4:17: Arthur Shaughnessy pole raised by Dan Cranmer’s family (VCA A26452); figure 4:18: a house post-like monument by Charlie James (RBCM PN 1936a); figure 4:19: grave monument with crest with copper and crest plaques cut from flat wood (PABC H-03985); figure 4:20: a tall pole by James (RBCM pn 1936b); figure 4:21: a cluster of poles, including a monument by Joe and Willie Seaweed (PABC 04868); figure 4:22: Monument by Joe and Willie Seaweed (PABC 00846). Figure 4:23: Alert Bay cemetery 2012 Figure 4:24: Tourists viewing James carving in Alert Bay cemetery (PABC). Both use the same composition and therefore crest as the Tlah go glas house. Figure 4:25: The Tla go glas house was erected in Alert Bay in the 1870s. (VCA A26439). Figure 4:26-27: A painted box for canned salmon by Charlie James (RBCM 17539) Figure 4:28: drawing attributable to Bob Harris (RBCM 19577) Figure 4:29: James gravestone totem pole in the cemetery in Alert Bay. The original wings have been replaced and the spirit horns on the thunderbird are now lost. Figure 4:30: Charlie James pole in Alert Bay cemetery, July 2012. Figure 4:31: Sculpin painting by James (Vancouver Museum) Figure 4:32: Sculpin transformation mask (Thomas Burke Museum, I-1667) Figure 4:33: Grave tableau by James located in the cemetery in Alert Bay, (PABC 00693) Figure 4:34: Grave tableau with main qulos and sisiutl attributable to James (PABC H-03985) Figure 4:35: Ed Whannack pole by James, 1937 (RBCM PN 11838) Figure 4:35: Model pole of the Whannack pole. The University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology records states that this was given to a visitor to the Alert Bay canneries in 1932. (UBC MOA 1489/1) Figure 4:36: Kwi kwis or sea eagle painting by Mungo Martin, 1951, (UBC MOA A9403) Figures 4:37-39: Details of the Tsekame pole. Figure 5:1: A model pole (RBCM 9233) Figure 5:2: single thunderbird figure, UBC MOA A5328 Figure 5:3: The boardwalk sale, like these Tlingit women selling baskets to steamship tourists, became a common sight up and down the north Pacific Coast with the rise of leisure tourism. (ASL Petersburg 01) Figure 5:4: The famous Thunderbird and Bear Mother houseposts in Alert Bay, first erected inside the house of L’arhotlas, the head chief of the Nimpkish tribe, photographed here in 1907 outside a Victorian single family residence. The sign above the door reads “Tlaho glass, Nimpkish Chief.” (PABC HP020238; house identified in VCA A03850, figure 4:27) Figure 5:5: This photograph of the exterior of Bill Webber’s Vancouver store shows the display of model poles in the front window. (VCA A02596) Figure 5:6: One of a series deeply carved model poles in cedar by James (RBCM 6788); Figure 5:7: A rare pole in Northwest Coast art history carved from whale bone. (Vancouver Museum AA_1783) Figure 5:8: An unusual with a carved and painted James model mounted between a set of deer horns (Vancouver Museum AA_693) Figure 5:9: The only piece of silver jewelry attributed to James (RBCM 14145) Figure 5:10: A model of the Thunderbird and Bear mother houseposts. (Glenbow Museum R1915.9) Figure 5:11: Model pole by Arthur Shaughnessy (UBC MOA A6577) Figure 5:12: James’ model pole of a grave monument in the Alert Bay cemetery originally carved by Arthur Shaughnessy (UBC MOA A17139 a-e) Figure 5:13: model of the Anglican Hall pole (RBCM 17525) Figure 5:14: model of the Anglican Hall pole (UBC MOA A7813) Figure 5:15: A carved and painted model pole by James (RBCM 18697) Figure 5:16: carved model pole by James (Vancouver Museum AA_598) Figure 5:17: carved model pole by James UBC MOA Nb3.1449 Figure 5:18: thunderbird and sisiutl figures, RBCM Figure 5:19: thunderbird and sisiutl painting from the Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 5:20: sisiutl plaque (Glenbow Museum AA 240) Figure 5:21: A single figure, likely representing a shaman removing a spell, collected in 1900 (UBC MOA Nb3.1305) Figure 5:22: A two dimensional representation of a feast dish in James’ un-accessioned sketch book at the Vancouver Museum Figure 5:23: A feast dish model by James (UBC MOA A6601) Figure 5:24: A Monumental Wolf dish collected in 1947 by Barbeau and Price, (UBC MOA A6557) Figures 5:25-26: A model of a Dzonoqwa feast dish, with multiple parts, by James (Vancouver Museum AA_706abc) Figures 5:27-28: a general view and a detail of a Dzonoqwa feast dish (Portland Art Museum 48.3.526A,B) Figure 5:28: In 1951, Mungo Martin painted a two dimensional representation of the famous Dzonoqwa feast dish (RBCM 14495) Figure 6:1: A codfish painting by James from his Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:2: Mungo Martin untitled painting of a sea otter with a sea urchin from 1951 (RBCM 14498) Figure 6:3: Gitxsan Judith Morgan’s painting, Bear Mother Story, right, ca. 1948, (UBC MOA), pioneered Western easel style painting among Northwest Coast artists in the late 1940s Figure 6:4: Other Northwest Coast artists, like Nuu-chah-nulth George Clutesi, with his painting, Victory Dance, ca. 1948, on the left (UBC MOA A7349) Figure 6:5: An early serigraph by Ellen Neel (RBCM 14393a) Figure 6:6: a painting from James’ sketchbook with a notation identifying both James and Ellen Newman as the responsible artists (Vancouver Museum) Figure 6:7: an untitled serigraph by Kiowa artist Jack Hokeah, ca. 1929 (MAI 25/3914) Figure 6:8: Henry Speck, drawing ca. 1930 (RBCM 15489) Figure 6:9: Henry Speck, a painting ca.1960 (RBCM 17710) Figure 6:10: Sea Eagle painting by Mungo Martin, 1951, that closely follows the early Speck composition from the 1930s (UBC MOA 14428). Figure 6:11: A painted muslin curtain by James and Martin (VCA A26478) Figure 6:12: Bull-head house front painting by James, ca. 1935 (Vancouver Museum) Figure 6:13: Mungo Martin’s Wa’waditla house opened in Thunderbird Park in 1953 on the grounds of the provincial museum with the first fully public potlatch since the repeal of the ban in 1951 Figure 6:14: A view of New Vancouver showing two monumental house front paintings (PABC AA-00122) Figure 6:15: The painted Chief John Scow house at Gwayasdums on Gilford Island (PABC AA 00099) Figure 6:14: A box for sale by James, ca.1930 (Vancouver Museum 915ab) Figure 6:15: A second box for sale by James (Vancouver Museum AA 265 abcde) Figure 6:16: A painting of a copper from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:17: A narrative image of a Winter Ceremonial from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:18: a masked dancer from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:19: chief in a sisiutl-adorned canoe from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:20: Mungo Martin (RBCM 14475, ca. 1951) Figure 6:21: “Hohhok Raven” from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:22: “Hoghuk” from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:23: Hamatsa mask paintings by Martin, 1951 (UBC MOA) Figure 6:24: A painted wooden panel with an avian figure design by James (VM AA 1019) Figure 6:25: Doug Cranmer, untitled painting, 1974 (UBC MOA 2874/1) Figure 6:25: A painted wooden panel by James of a frog holding a copper (VM AA_1016) Figure 6:26: the same frog and copper composition from James’ Vancouver Museum sketchbook Figure 6:27-28: Two sides of a painted paddle by James, (RBCM 17540) Figure 6:29-30: two sides of a second painted paddle by James (Glenbow Museum AA 17) Figure 6:31: Left: A Mungo Martin Pugwis painting (UBC MOA A9050) Figure 6:32: a Pugwis mask attributed to Martin (UBC MOA A3659) Figure 6:33: A painted tray by James (VM AA 741)  Preface I met Pam Creasy in 2003 in Salem, Massachusetts. We had both been invited to present by the well-known Northwest Coast art scholar, writer, curator and editor, Aldona Jonaitis, for a session on Northwest Coast Art from 1900 to 1960 at the Native American Art Studies Association (NAASA) biannual conference. At that time, Pam was a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was an assistant professor at Zayed University in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It was the first conference on Aboriginal art I had participated in since the publication of my first book, Tales of Ghosts: First Nations Art in British Columbia 1922-1961. While intended as an institutional history, Tales of Ghosts contains tracts on several key Kwakwaka’wakw artists, including Charlie James, his step-son Mungo Martin and his granddaughter Ellen Neel. “I’m Ellen Neel’s daughter,” said Pam somewhat fiercely. “Small world,” I said, trying hard not to appear intimidated. At some point over the next few days, I’m not sure when, Pam and I decided we liked each other after all and kept in touch, maintaining conversations over email and conference appearances. In 2005, Pam invited me to speak on Charlie James for a session she was organizing on the great artists in her family for the next NAASA conference in Tempe, Arizona. I told Pam that I didn’t really feel like I knew anything about James. She replied, “You know more than anyone else.” I never fully bought that response, but her confidence meant everything. Charlotte Townsend-Gault from the University of British Columbia gave a critical introduction. I talked about James. My old friend Les Dawn from the University of Lethbridge spoke about Mungo Martin. Pam presented on her mom and Caroline Butler-Palmer from the University of Victoria delivered a paper on David Neel. The session was entitled Yagluklas’ Legacy. That’s when this project began. I subsequently published a short paper on James in American Indian Art Magazine, but I kept feeling there was much more that could and should be said. James and his generation needed more attention. I started on a wide-ranging research campaign and looked to one of the longstanding works on historic individual artists, Bill Holm’s 1983 Smoky-Top: The Art and Times of Willie Seaweed, as a writing model. Somewhere along the way, the narrative found a different structure. I’m interested in how the Indian Act affects Canadian history at both institutional and personal levels, so I tried to take a different theoretical perspective than Holm, but his work on individual artists and style is still the most important starting point in Northwest Coast art. The Indian Act, however, is the starting point for First Nations-Settler relations and shapes much of the context for events in James’ life. The Indian Act was passed in Canada’s federal parliament in 1869. It was based in part on earlier British imperial policy, particularly the 1857 Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in Canada, which sought to absorb, or enfranchise, indigenous people into the newly emerging nation-state as Canadian citizens. Through the 1870s, the Indian Act was further codified, leading to the establishment of reserves for those tribes who signed treaties Katherine Pettipas, Severing the Ties that Bind: Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994, pp.40-41. and defining a separate legal status for First Nations peoples based on patrilineal blood lines. Lands were held in Crown trust. First Nations could not claim further land through homesteading. Governance was highly controlled Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986, pp.11-15. and group rituals, especially the sun dance (a variable ceremony held in the summer among the Great Plains peoples “…involving of acts of sacrifice in ritual reciprocity with spiritual powers so that the welfare of friends, family and the whole people is enhanced” Dale Stover, “Sun Dance,” in David J. Wishart, editor, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, p.757.) and the potlatch (a generic word for ceremonies on the coast involving the distribution of gifts) were targeted as obstacles to civilization and enfranchisement. In 1884 the “…law prohibiting potlatches was first enacted…as a result of pressure from missionaries and Indian agents, who saw the practice as heavy competition to their goal of ‘civilizing the heathen.’” Gloria Cranmer Webster, “The Dark Years,” in Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, editors, Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013, p.266. While the potlatch had technically been prohibited since 1884, initial prosecution attempts were largely unsuccessful. . The earliest form of the legislated ban was not clear enough in its definition of the potlatch. The first successful prosecution was not until 1896. (Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand Upon the People, pp.36-44.) The Kwakwaka'wakw in particular were perceived as openly resistant to both the ban and the introduction of Christianity and were thus targeted in renewed attempts to stamp out the potlatch following the First World War. . Ibid, p.63. Duncan Campbell Scott rose to the position of Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1913. . Ibid, p.92. He introduced amendments to the Indian Act in 1914 and 1918 to expand the definition of the potlatch and facilitate the successful prosecution of potlatch participants. . The most important of these, tabled in the House of Commons by the Minister of the Interior Arthur Meighen in 1918, made the offence of potlatching a summary offence and thus allowed the Indian Agent to act simultaneously as prosecutor and judge. (Ibid, p.102.) These led directly to the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of participants in a potlatch hosted by Dan Cranmer at Village Island in 1921. The objects seized in the Cranmer potlatch were relocated to the national museum in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. They were repatriated to new museums in Cape Mudge in 1979 and Alert Bay in 1980. Many of the repatriated objects were carved by James. Indeed, James’ art shows up all around North America – the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and several regional museums in British Columbia. Nonetheless, most of my work was done in Dubai, thanks to our great digital revolution and the plethora of excellent museum internet sites that have developed over the last ten years. Through this, Facebook has emerged as a wonderful communication resource. Pam was kind enough to be in contact with selected family members, including her sister, Cora Kwa Xa'latl Beddows, her niece Sue Malley, and her nephew David Neel, all of who read a draft of the manuscript. David Neel, an accomplished artist, is also an informed historian of Kwakwaka’wakw art who frequently emailed attributions and images associated with James and his generation. He always seemed to begin his email with a question – something simple and deceptively tricky, like, “who do you think did this mask at such-and-such museum?” David always shared food for thought. Kwakwaka’wakw/Nuu-chah-nulth artist George Hunt, Jr., another Facebook friend, was kind enough to answer iconographic questions. Summers were spent in archives, libraries, and museums in North America in between family holidays. My wife, Laila, is indulgent enough to let me persuade her that the trip to Cormorant Island is sufficiently pleasant to tolerate my highjacking our time alone for work. I know that what I have here only scratches the surface of who Charlie James really was, both as an individual and as an artist, but it is a sincere attempt at reconstructing his professional career and providing context for his creative achievements.  Introduction Figure 1: Charlie James proudly displays objects he created for Bill Webber in Vancouver around 1928. (VMPA) Charlie James (1867-1938) (figure 1) was the most prolific and widely known totem pole carver of his generation. Also known by his ceremonial name, Yakuglas, he was a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw, or speakers of the Kwakwala language, on the central coast of British Columbia in western Canada. Kwakwaka’wakw art is famous for its extraordinary masked and costumed rituals, dramatic and imposing painted house fronts and its monumental totem poles – all of which climaxed in form and quantity during James’ lifetime. James himself was a popular artist within the ritual life of the Kwakwaka’wakw. The potlatch, a generic term used to describe a diverse set of ceremonial practices incorporating ritual performances and the distribution and exchange of goods, provided the main reason for art in Kwakwaka’wakw society during James’ lifetime. Between approximately 1890 and 1922, James carved masks for the various dances of the potlatch ceremonies, and totem poles that celebrated the transfer of names, positions, and goods through marriage or death. He also produced props for use in the ceremonial re-enactment of ancestral stories and painted images representing the various characters and beings of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology. In 1884, the Canadian government officially banned the potlatch. In 1922, 22 participants in a potlatch held in the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Memkoolish on Village Island were imprisoned. This marked a watershed in James’ artistic career as it did in the cultural history of the Kwakwaka’wakw people as a whole. Despite government oppression of the main source of his commissions, James continued to produce art and his reputation grew among non-Native Canadians. James collaborated with the well-known Vancouver curio dealer, Bill Webber, to sell models to tourists up until his death in 1938 and extended the circulation of his art beyond the borders of Kwakwaka’wakw society. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, James carved a vast array of model poles, canoes, figures, masks, and dishes. His model poles were often done with the same delicacy and precision as his larger works, unlike the “idiot sticks” referred to sardonically later by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Doug Cranmer which “any idiot could carve…” Quoted in Kramer, Kesu’, p.45. Instead, James represented Kwakwaka’wakw mythological figures in his miniatures with the same diligence and sense of purpose that he did for more monumental works. Furthermore, James was an important teacher. He taught in the craft program at the St. Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay and had such notable students as Henry Speck, who was among the earliest Northwest Coast artists to experiment with serigraphy in the 1960s. In addition, James mentored the most influential generation of Kwakwaka’wakw artists, including: his granddaughter Ellen Neel, who both attended classes at St. Michael’s and learnt to carve at his kitchen table; and his step-son Mungo Martin, James’ partner in the production of ceremonial art early in the twentieth century and the first carver in residence at the British Columbia Provincial Museum in Victoria in the early 1950s. This position at the museum was dominated through the 1960s and 1970s by Martin’s own adopted son, Henry Hunt, thereby ensuring James’ artistic legacy well beyond his death. James thus represents one of the most important and curiously understudied of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century artists. He was an important participant in Kwakwaka’wakw ritual life. At the same time, he was a key player in the popularization of Northwest Coast art outside the walls of the ceremonial longhouses. He emerged as one of the first generation of artists known by name among Euro-Canadians and was a teacher and master who passed on his knowledge to his own children and relatives at the time of his culture’s greatest vulnerability. This book reviews James’ art and his contributions as an artist. I begin with the three social phenomena that I believe shaped his art and what he intended to express: the structure of Kwakwaka’wakw society, the development of the Indian Act, and James’ own life experiences. I then discuss James’ own personal style, relating it to other artists active at the same time as a means of demonstrating his unique decisions as an individual. While I reference Kwakwala terms for masks and the mythological figures represented in James’ art, the discussion of form is based primarily on the vocabulary developed by Euro-American scholars Franz Boas and Bill Holm. The danger with focusing exclusively on form using a language foreign to the artists who produced the art is that it contributes to the de-contextualization of the objects from the language, rituals and spaces that give them meaning. In order to counter this, I relate James’ signed or attributed objects from museums across North America back to the published and archival ethnographic sources as a way of determining iconography and thus reconstructing, where possible, the ritual or mythological context for the objects and therefore their meaning. Boas through his collaboration with Kwakwaka’wakw George Hunt left behind an enormous body of literature, including a range of stories simultaneously transcribed in both Kwakwala and English. The Kwakwaka’wakw community does on occasion refer to Boas and Hunt’s notes. Although there are limitations to their work and the dangers of decontextualization are ever present, Boas’ ethnographies represent an important academic achievement. Additional material can be gleaned from both contemporary and subsequent generations of anthropologies and oral histories, people from within the Kwakwaka’wakw community (especially James’ descendants), letters, field notes, art histories, exhibition catalogues, geographies, government correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, and popular explanatory texts. The ancestral stories recorded in these sources are the inspiration for the art. The stories also establish and explain the basis for owned prerogatives attached to the names and their associated positions. Individuals have throughout time released a range of these stories and they are accessible through these publications and archival resources. Boas and Hunt recorded the stories while James’ was alive, and James himself related at least two stories. Others are often from his Kwakwaka’wakw patrons. The images and carvings can be related to these specific versions of the stories. What emerges from this method is the understanding that James and his Kwakwaka’wakw patrons asserted social status and claims to resources through their art in specific historic terms, not only to their kin and immediate neighbors within the Kwakwaka’wakw community, but also to the wider immigrant population. James and his patrons, family and neighbors experienced the allocation of reserve land and the continuing attempted erosion of conventional Kwakwaka’wakw social behavior. When one places the art and the stories as they were recorded by Boas and Hunt within this historical context, new levels of meaning open. While James’ art was elegant in how it looked, it was also pointedly political in intent and played an important role in how the Kwakwaka’wakw struggled to maintain their own lands, resources, and ways of doing things in the face of increasing government interference during James’ lifetime. Chapter One: James’ World Charlie James was born Charles Jameson in Port Townsend in what is now Washington state around 1867. His father, Thomas Jameson, was a white sawmill owner and his mother, Kugwisilaogwa, was from Fort Rupert in British Columbia. Kugwisilaogwa died when James was just ten years old. His maternal grandmother claimed him and his two sisters, but his father refused to let all of them go, choosing instead to raise the girls. James went north with his grandmother first to Victoria and then to Fort Rupert, at which point he is said to have spoken English well but little Kwakwala. Phil Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers: Charlie James, Ellen Neel, Mungo Martin, Vancouver: Panorama, 1982, p.13. Fort Rupert is located in Beaver Harbour on the east coast of Vancouver Island and contained several important Kwakwaka’wakw sites, including Txasis, the winter village of the Kwakiutl tribe. In Fort Rupert, James was immersed in the social world of his mother’s people. His great-granddaughter, Pam Creasy, states that through his mother, James was a member of the Gexsem numaym of the Walas Kwakiutl tribe. Pam Creasy, “Yakuglas’ Legacy,” Unpublished conference presentation, in the Yakuglas’ Legacy Session at the Native American Art Studies Association Conference, co-hosted by Arizona State University, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, October 2005. The twenty-five to thirty Codere cites 25 in Helen Codere, Fighting With Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare 1792-1930, New York: J.J. Augustin, 1951, p.2, and 30 later in Helen Codere, “Kwakiutl: Traditional Culture,” in Wayne Suttles, editor, Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 7: The Northwest Coast, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1990, p.359. historically identified autonomous Kwakwaka’wakw tribes were located on the central British Columbia coast, clustered around the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the adjacent islands and straits (figure 1:5). Each tribe had or shared a primary winter village (figure 1:6) and then utilized a number of seasonal resource sites scattered throughout their traditional tribal territories. Geographer Robert Galois grouped them together spatially as tribal groups: Northern, Gilford Island, Upper and Lower Knight Inlet, Kwakiutl, Nimpkish, Nawitti, Lekwiltok, and Quatsino Sound. Each of the tribal groups contains a set of related tribes. For example, Charlie James belonged through his mother to the Kwakiutl tribe, which included four subtribes: 1. Kwakiutl; 2. Komoyoi (rich in the middle) or Kweeha (murderer); 3.Walas Kwakiutl or Lakwilala (“setting fires here and there”); and 4. Komkiutis (rich side). Robert Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 1775-1920: A Geographical Analysis and Gazetteer, Vancouver and Seattle: University of British Columbia Press and University of Washington Press, 1994, p.197. Franz Boas included the Gweetala as a fifth subtribe, but they absorbed into the Kwakiutl sometime around 1850. Codere, “Kwakiutl,” p.361. Each tribe subdivided further into local or corporate kin groups (figures 1:1-4). The Kwakwala word for the local group, or “corporate kin group,” Ibid, p.359. is numaym, translated by Boas as “one kind” or “people of one kind” Wadsen, p.7 and sometimes spelt as numayma, Codere, “Kwakiutl,” p.3659.numemot, numema, Irving Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven: An Introduction to Kwakiutl Religious Thought, New York: Wiley and Sons, 1975, p.xiii.or namima. Philip Drucker and Robert F. Heizer, To Make My Name Good: A Reexamination of the Southern Kwakiutl Potlatch, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, p.10. Each numaym maintained individual houses and resource sites scattered throughout their respective tribal regions. Many of the resource sites included houses of multiple numayms. The numaym has been compared with the noble or royal house in British or Japanese terms and the various carvings and paintings typical of Kwakwaka’wakw culture are heraldic symbols expressing the history and status of the house. The sense that the numaym is a family unit is useful, as is the idea that the unit contains titles indicating relative status, like the king, prince, duke, and earl of European royal houses. The ranked positions that one might hold through the numaym carried specific privileges and responsibilities that contributed to the social status of the individual. Within the numaym, the head chief was known as the Nuyamtsawe, “Myth Keeper,” who knew all the important legends and histories. He acted as both spiritual and political leader, responsible for breaking coppers and inviting tribes to potlatches. The second chief, known as Winagama’yi, or “War Chief,” protected the people and culture. Trained in war, his responsibilities included village fortifications and infrastructure. He also served an important role in the Winter Ceremonies, the ćέqa, cutting the “sacred red cedar bark ring.” He could also invite tribes for potlatches and feasts. The third and fourth chiefs maintained the numaym’s industries, public relations and arts and held smaller potlatches and hosted feasts. Names in Kwakwaka’wakw society were derived from ancestors and passed on from generation. The names also had ranked potlatch seats, resources and responsibilities attached to them. It’s as if the title, duke or earl, was collapsed into a single name derived from an ancestor, carrying with it the properties and feudal obligations associated with the title. Each name was also ranked according to the status it represented and the responsibilities and privileges it brought with it. James was known by a common Kwakwala name, Da’uma. Pam Creasy, “Yakuglas’ Legacy.” His ceremonial name was Yakuglas, or in English “Always giving things away,” Anonymous, “Yakudlas, “always giving things away” Charlie James,” Alert Bay: U’mista Cultural Center, unpublished pamphlet, 2012, n.p. also cited by Boas in several stories as Yakoglas. Franz Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, Part I: Translations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1935, pp.16, 27. One of the Indian Agents resident in Alert Bay recorded it as the seventh Nimpkish Kwikw (Eagle) name. Wadsen, p.6. A Kwikw was both a name and a position, described by Boas as a new category of class-ascending commoners able to “out-potlatch” traditional high-ranking, tribal chiefs. The establishment of 12 Kwikw seats was a way of integrating this new category of wealthy individuals into the potlatch system. In Kwakwaka’wakw lore, Namugwis, the first ancestor of the Gilgla’gam of the Komoyoi, made the seats. Either way, the ranks were unchanging. Usually the position passed from father to eldest child, son or daughter, although if the eldest died, then it might go to a younger child. Ibid. Sometimes Boas differentiates two Yakoglas, further clarifying one as a Naqemgilisala name. Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, pp.74, p.111-113, 139-143, 168 The Naqemigilisala or Nakomgilisala came from Cape Scott on the northwestern side of Vancouver Island and consisted of two numayms: the Gexsem and the Naenxsa. Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, p.285. In the first story attributed to Yakoglas by Boas, Hadaga, the Gwawaenuk sister of Omal, marries the prince of Komokwa, the chief of the undersea world. Boas, Kwakiutl Tales, p.16. In the second, Yakoglas explains the origins of the Xwexwe dance, a well known dance normally associated with Coast Salish groups from farther south and the Comox (K’omoks), a Salishan-speaking group consisting of the Sathloot, Sasitla, Ieeksun, Puntledge, Cha'chae, and Tat'poos who maintained positive relations with both the Coast Salish and the Kwakwaka’wakw. Ibid, p.27. These two stories are related to the Gilford Island tribes and are therefore likely recorded for Boas by Hunt from James. The geographic context for other stories is northwestern Vancouver Island, hence the need for Boas and Hunt to distinguish between Yakoglas and Yakoglas from the Naqemigilisala. The numaym members laid claim to an array of “crests and titles in a multitude of forms ranging from designs on house fronts, poles, posts, and feast dishes to privileges such as the use of a certain kind of betrothal ceremony, and certain songs, house names, and titles, even to the fixed and particular name for the dog and the canoe that belonged to its head.” Ibid. Artists, like James, produced the material manifestations of these privileges and the supporting regalia and theatrical props for the re-enactment of their related histories. In addition, James, as a participant in the overall system, personally inherited, held and transferred numaym prerogatives, including the rights to the story of the ancestral founder of his wife’s numaym, Tsekame, passed to his own son-in-law, Charlie Newman, on occasion of Newman’s marriage to James’ daughter, Lucy Lilac, and celebrated in a totem pole James carved in 1925 (figure 4:43). In modern thought, there is a popular tendency to think of identity as singular and static. Kwakwaka’wakw identity was historically more fluid, farther ranging, and rooted in an extended understanding of kin. “I come from many places,” states Agnes Alfred, explaining the complexity of her identity as it relates to the numaym and tribe. “My father was Mamalilikulla and my mother was Nimpkish. My mother’s father was Kwikwesutinux. I come from three places. And it became four when I married a Kwakiutl. That’s the way it is.” Martine J. Reid and Daisy Sewid-Smith, editors, Paddling to Where I Stand : Agnes Alfred, Qwiqwasutinuxw Noblewoman, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004, p.77. It is difficult to define an individual’s Kwakwaka’wakw identity rigidly within a single numaym or even tribe and there are contradicting reports of James’, like Alfred’s, affiliation. Nuytten, following notations made by Wilson Duff, Wilson Duff field notes, file 132, PABC B06047. writes that James was related to four tribes, the Kwikwesutinux, Mamalilikulla, Nimpkish and the Tlitlekit (Cle-li-kit-ti or ‘Tlitluket) numaym of the Komkiutis. Nuytten, Totem Pole Carvers, p.132. The Tlitlekit were an older group from Robson Bight on Vancouver Island absorbed into the Komkiutis. Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, p.205. Each of these four tribes, the numaym within them, and the positions and names within the numaym contributed to a network of privileges and responsibilities that James could draw from. Based on the objects identified as carved by James, there is a strong vein of Kwikwesutinux themes in his art. Indeed, his patronage, like his own identity, likely traveled the routes dictated by his different kin relations. Figures 1:1-4: The tribal groups, tribes and numayms of the Kwakiutl, Gilford Island (including the Kwitsootainuk), the Nimpkish, and the Lower Knight Inlet groups – all of whom James has been identified as belonging to (after Galois) The specific groups that James was linked with are indicated in yellow. Figure 1:5: The approximate locations of the major tribes of the Kwakwaka’wakw. (After Codere) Helen Codere, “Kwakiutl,” p.363. Figure 1:6: The location of the major winter villages in Kwakwaka’wakw territory. (After Codere) Ibid. Already fluent in English and able to write, James’ education thus took a different direction in Fort Rupert as he was absorbed into the fabric of his mother’s extended family under the tutelage of his maternal grandmother. Duff recorded in his field notes that James watched the older carvers at work, preferring the Kwikwesutinux in particular, once again emphasizing his connection to the Kwikwesutinux people. He then tried his own hand at carving small objects like fire tongs. He taught himself and became good enough for people to have him carve their ceremonial paraphernalia. Wilson Duff field notes, file 132, PABC B06047. James’ life in Fort Rupert initially revolved around the same seasonal movements that the other families participated in and the evolving inter-connection of traditional economic pursuits with the new wage labor system. Fort Rupert, with its sawmill, proximity to the Nimpkish River and its salmon runs and to the new cannery at Alert Bay, the new school, the government’s new Department of Indian Affairs office, and the Hunt family’s trading post, became a center for Kwakwaka’wakw society. The various Kwakwaka’wakw people, scattered throughout the central coast, began to reorganize their lives, constellated around movement between traditional resource sites, the salmon fishery, other sources of wage labor, and the new schools and commercial centers, like Alert Bay. Figure 1:7: Relative location of Beaver Harbor, James’ hometown of Fort Rupert and Port Hardy on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Whole families traveled to the cannery camps. Wage labor was integrated into the traditional subsistence economy with families continuing to use their ancestral resource sites fish for salmon, eulachon, halibut, herring, shellfish, seal, and seaweed for themselves, supplementing the great bounty of the sea with clover rhizomes, thimbleberry shoots, silverweed roots, fern, salmonberries, stink currants, red huckleberries, and cranberries and blackberries collected from land clear-cut around the logging camps. As Byron Plant records, “…often sea- and land-based collection activities were combined during trips for food or commercial purposes.” Byron King Plant, Hank Snow and Moving On: Tradition and Modernity in Kwakwaka’wakw 20th Century Migration, Victoria: Unpublished Master of Arts Thesis University of Victoria, 2002, p.55. Families from Fort Rupert would pick “…eel grass in May went they went to Deserter’s Island to catch halibut.” Ibid. Shore hunting for deer was conducted from fishing boats during the commercial fishing season. Clams were collected and exchanged for imported butter, Ibid. a product James was said to have been particularly fond of, with his granddaughter, Ellen Neel, claiming he “…could eat butter by the pound!” Nuytten, Totem Carvers, p.36. A firearm injury as a boy left James’ left hand with only the thumb and the major part of the forefinger. For the rest of his life, he kept this “…hidden in the pocket of his coveralls or smock when he worked and in his pants or jacket pocket on other occasions.” Ibid, p.14. He wore a light mitten over it and, in “…the presence of strangers, he acted like a person with only one arm, doing everything one handed. When alone or with his family, he used his damaged hand to hold objects through the cloth of his outer garments, while he carved or painted with his right hand.” Ibid. Rather than either commercial fishing or hand logging, James’ injury led him instead in the production of masks and other ceremonial regalia. Although a commoner, the ruling elite of the Kwakwaka’wakw apparently put his knowledge of reading and writing to good use and his descendants say he produced a detailed ledger recording potlatch activities over decades of his life. Fort Rupert, too, was at the center of this other aspect of Kwakwaka’wakw life. The first appearance of a date for his objects coincide roughly with his marriage to Sara Nina in 1895 at the age of 28, although this may simply coincide with more sustained and professional collecting in the area. Sara Nina, also known as Sara Finlay, was the daughter of Walas Kwakiutl woman, Kasa’las, and a Scottish employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Nuytten, The Totem Pole Carvers, p.75. Her Kwakwala name was ‘Nagedzi, “mountain of wealth,” although she was commonly called Kumiga or Q’omiga. She had previously been married to Yax’nukwala, “no one leaves his home without gifts,” Ibid. from the Kwikwesutinux. Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art, p.256. The Kwikwesutinux consisted of five numayms, the Naxnaxwela, Me’mogents, Gigelgam, Ne’nelbe and Ge’xsem. Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, p.113. Yax’nukwala was from the Me’mogents. Milburn, “Mungo Martin,” p.15. The Kwikwesutinux as a whole occupied the area around Tribune Channel, most of Gilford Island, and the adjacent islands to the north. They wintered at Gwayasdums until around 1856, when a Nuxalk raid destroyed the village and scattered the Kwikwesutinux, with most of the survivors going to the Mamalilikulla village of Memkoomlish, and a few moving to Txasis on Beaver Harbor. Galois, Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, p.113. Yax’nukwala was known to Euro-Canadians as Martin. He and Sara Nina had had four sons. One died in childbirth. The eldest was Spruce Martin, the middle Mungo Martin, and the youngest Herbert Martin. James took all three as stepsons and he and Sara then had two daughters, Emma and Lucy. Lucy later married Charlie Newman and gave birth to Ellen (figure 1:8). Ellen Newman, better known as Ellen Neel after her marriage to Ted Neel in the 1930s, followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and established a successful totem pole carving business in Vancouver in the late 1940s. James’ stepson, Mungo Martin is the best-known Northwest Coast artist active in the 1950s and early 1960s. Mungo, born in 1879, had originally been apprenticed as a carver to a paternal uncle. Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art, p.257. However, James is widely reported to have been his most important influence and the two worked together on a number of important monumental commissions. The numaym system as a whole served as the spiritual backbone of Kwakwaka’wakw society, recorded economic and life passage transactions, organized the distribution of resources, constructed status and hierarchy, and legitimized authority. Its active expression in Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial life through a ritual feast, generically referred to as a potlatch, forged an intersection of authority, resource ownership, and identity and was recognized early on by the new Canadian government as a threat to its own authority and control. Anthropologist Marius Barbeau quoted sources from within Alert Bay and summarized the challenge the potlatch and the numaym system represented in an unpublished manuscript from 1934: “[t]he Kwakiutl will not own allegiance to the government as long as the potlatch prevails: it excludes all other forms of government.” C. M. Barbeau, "The Potlatch among the B.C. Indians and Section 149 of the Indian Act," Ottawa: Unpublished 1934 (Canadian Museum of Civilization 11007.13, B12, F2, VII-X-46M), p.59. The recognition of the potlatch challenge led to a hostile campaign by Ottawa to stamp out the potlatch and to instate British notions of land ownership, identity, religion and economic practice as enshrined in the state’s legal system. The main body of law encapsulating Ottawa’s approach was the Indian Act. Its implementation defined the historical experience of people of James’ generation. One could have a potlatch for a number of different reasons, including the passage of names, weddings, deaths, births, or even celebrating escape from injury or the wiping away of shame. Each kind of potlatch had a specific name. The potlatch also typically involved feasting, the performance of dances and songs and the recitation of stories strictly associated with the names and privileges claimed by the host, and the giving of gifts. The invited guests indicated they accepted the legitimacy of the host’s claims to the names and rights by their acceptance of his or her hospitality and gifts. Since each name or privilege additionally indicated status within the numaym, then the expectation was that these gifts and hospitality matched the quality of the name and privilege claimed. One couldn’t simply have a feast and perform the related stories, the gifts had to be of equal significance in quantity, quality, and value. When James’ daughter Lucy married Charlie Newman, both James and Mungo Martin relocated with their families to Alert Bay around 1915. Nuytten, Totem Carvers, p.15. Alert Bay, with its central location and access to main transportation routes, was immediately recognized as a center for cultural activities, even by those outside of the Kwakwaka’wakw community. By 1910, the Annual Report of Department of the Indian Affairs stated that Alert Bay, now serviced by regular steamships from the Union Steamship Company and thereby eclipsing the central role previously played by Fort Rupert, Elizabeth Healey, History of Alert Bay and District, Comox, B.C.: E.W. Bickle, 1958, p.46. “… is noted the world over for its display of totem poles either in front of, or forming part of the buildings” Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended March 31, 1910, p.268. and the following year reported more effusively that it “…has the largest collection of totem poles probably of any place in the world, and is largely advertised to tourists on this account.” Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended March 31, 1911, p.247. This put James at the heart of both the ceremonial and commercial production of Kwakwaka’wakw art. Figure 1:8: This composite photograph from the 1930s combines images of Charlie James working on the Memorial Hall pole on the left, while on the right is his son-in-law Charlie Newman, James’ daughter and Newman’s wife Lucy Lilac, and their daughters, including future carver Ellen Neel. (VCA A26479) Figure 1:9: Alert Bay was located on the main north-south shipping and transportation routes close the rich fisheries at the mouth of the Nimpkish River James was therefore at the forefront of an expansion of the potlatch system and its need for regalia. Although of the five identified freestanding poles, two are from Fort Rupert and two are from Alert Bay, the fifth is from Kalugwis on Turnour Island. The growing roles of Fort Rupert and Alert Bay as centers of Kwakwaka’wakw inter-group interaction fueled the public assertion of individual and group identities and resource ownership through the poles. For the first time, the potlatches had been expanded beyond the structures of numaym and tribe to include other tribes and even tribal groups. By 1896, individuals in Fort Rupert were holding potlatches in which all Kwakwaka’wakw groups were participating. Drucker and Heizer, To Make My Name Good, p.44. The social pressures experienced by the Kwakwaka’wakw during this time also inspired the expansion of the potlatch. Depopulation (figure 1:10) and relocation were transforming their social landscape, accelerating inter-group marriage and creating conflicting claims to names, potlatch positions, and resource sites. This occurred just as the Canadian government redefined land and resource ownership through the establishment of the reserves limiting Kwakwaka’wakw residence and economic activities to a specific plot of land. Figure 1:10: Population by Kwakwaka’wakw tribal groups between 1835 and 1929 (after Galois) In 1871, when James was around four years old, British Columbia entered Canadian confederation. At that point, the administration of reserve land became a particularly contentious issue between the federal government, who had been assigning reserves at a scale of 160 to 640 acres per family on the Prairies, and the provincial government of British Columbia, who only agreed to a 20 acre standard. Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1992, p.51. The allocation of reserve land was further resisted by Native people throughout the province and there was a growing realization among the various levels of Canadian authorities that the conventional chiefly authority structure asserted, supported, and legitimized on the coast through the ritual potlatch cycle was enabling organized opposition to government policy. Part of the problem in controlling land among the Kwakwaka’wakw, for example, was the numaym system in which a single individual could claim access to sites through multiple kin relations. In this system, someone like Charlie James could in theory use resource sites through his positions in the specific numayms of the Kwikwesutinux, Mamalilikulla, Nimpkish and the Tlitlekit or perhaps through his position as one of the Kwikw inherited through his parents or their siblings, his grandparents, and his wife. The passing of names and their associated prerogatives were administered through the numaym chiefs, the specialist numaym historians who counseled the chiefs, and the potlatches at which the claims were asserted and legitimized. Not only was James subject to this system, he was also a key participant as a specialist artist –a role as integral to its continuity as that of the historians. He was responsible for the appropriate production of the ceremonial paraphernalia that supported the recitation and performance of the histories legitimizing the claims made through the potlatch. In contrast, federal control over all Native peoples in the new state of Canada was legislated through the federal Indian Act, which established and centralized the authority and structure for the administration of Indian Affairs in distant Ottawa. From 1880, a series of legislative amendments targeting conventional Native authority were tabled and passed. The first was an 1880 amendment that allowed the federal cabinet to depose “life chiefs” and where an elected band council had been imposed, limiting the authority of “life chiefs” unless they been elected to the council. In 1884, the federal government banned the potlatch directly. Ibid, p.51. The potlatch ban undermined the way in which James’ Kwakwaka’wakw constructed identity and social status and threatened to destroy the way in which he made a living. Between 1884 and 1922, the vast majority of dateable objects attributable to James are in some way associated with the potlatch, either as masks and other ceremonial paraphernalia used in the performance of owned songs and dances representing or re-enacting the ancestral histories and the consequent prerogatives or as monumental carved poles raised in the openly public spaces in front of houses celebrating and asserting the transfer or acquisition of these prerogatives. It’s not coincidental that totem poles, the most public and permanent assertion of status and associated prerogatives through the re-telling of ancestral histories, emerge as a common artistic monument among the Kwakwaka’wakw during this time. The poles represent a material reminder of historical presence and its accompanying access to land, water and other resources at a time when there were multiple challenges to these rights through depopulation, migration, changes in economic rhythms and seasonal movement, and the external threat of the new levels of Canadian government. Pressure from the government came in several forms: the Indian Act, the potlatch ban, and Indian reserve commissions, like the McKenna-McBride Commission that met from 1913 to 1916 (figure 1:11). A photograph of a house interior with all the numaym treasures carefully laid out for viewing by the visiting McKenna-McBride Commission members In 1914 (figure 1:12, with James’ young step-son, Mungo Martin, second from the left) suggests that the Kwakwaka’wakw expected that the ceremonial art and what it represented serve as evidence for their claims to land and resources with the government as well. In the common Euro-American re-telling of Kwakwaka’wakw stories, the narratives are often scrubbed clean of their geographic references. The tales come across as quaint, harmless and ultimately meaningless to English-speaking audiences. In the Kwakwaka’wakw versions, the names and geographic references are fastidiously detailed. When it is possible to identify the mythological figures on the poles or in the masks, trace them to published accounts of the stories and the numayms they are associated with, and then relate the geographical names in the stories to land claim histories, the totem poles frequently assert ownership over places contested either between individuals, numayms, and tribes or between tribes and the government. Figure 1:11: The McKenna-McBride Indian Reserve Commission in session in Victoria in 1916 (PABC G-00975) Figure 1:12: ceremonial treasures carefully laid out for viewing by the visiting McKenna-McBride Commission, ca. 1914. (PABC AA-00209) So, the government strategically attacked and attempted to dismantle the system. Duncan Campbell Scott was appointed to the position of Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1913 Ibid, p.92. and directed the most effective challenge to the potlatch through the 1920s. He introduced amendments to the Indian Act in 1914 and 1918 to expand the definition of the potlatch and facilitate the successful prosecution of potlatch participants. The most important of these, tabled in 1918, made the offence of potlatching a summary offence and thus allowed the Indian Agent to act simultaneously as prosecutor and judge. Ibid, p.102. These led directly to the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of a number of Kwakwaka’wakw individuals, including Spruce Martin, another of James’ stepsons, at a potlatch hosted by Dan Cranmer at Village Island in 1921. The Cranmer potlatch was part of a marriage ceremony. Although Cranmer was Nimpkish, his wife, Emma, and her family were Mamalilikulla, one of the four tribes James was related to directly, from Village Island. With at least three hundred guests, the festivities lasted five days. Moses Alfred, who commissioned a monumental pole from Charlie James (figures 4:15-16), oversaw the distribution of 3000 sacks of flour. Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin, An Iron Hand Upon the People: The Law Against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast, Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre; and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990, p.121. At one point in the ceremony, Herbert Martin, Charlie James’ youngest step-son, danced the hamatsa, Ibid, p.119. the most prestigious Winter Ceremonial dance. Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Donald Angermann investigated and charged the principals involved. All charged were convicted. In a plea bargain, the majority of participants from the Lekwiltok of Quadra Island, the Mamalilikulla of Village Island and the Nimpkish of Alert Bay surrendered their coppers and dancing gear. “I guess it was like paying a fine so that they would not go to prison,” said Ack-koo (Agnes Alfred). “They paid with their masks.” Quoted in Daisy Sewid-Smith, Persecution or Prosecution, Cape Mudge, B.C.: Nu-yum-balees Society, 1979, p.47. Jim Hall of Kalugwis on Turnour Island and six more from Fort Rupert refused to pay the price. Angermann pressed charges in April against a further seventeen present at the Cranmer potlatch and three active in potlatches on Harbledown Island the previous January and February. Five were given suspended sentences for playing minor roles or signing the agreement. Of the remaining fifteen, all were sent to the Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby. Of the twenty-two total imprisoned in April 1922, twenty-one had been given two month sentences, with Nimpkish Charlie Hunt receiving six months for his second conviction. Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, pp.108-118. Upon his release, Spruce Martin gave a series of grease potlatches intended to wipe away shame and to antagonize rivals, presumably in this case the state, at several villages along the coast as he returned to Alert Bay. The surrendered potlatch regalia and coppers, including several masks by James, were put on exhibit at the Alert Bay parish hall for an admission price of twenty-five cents. Halliday charged admission in order to cover the price of the hall. Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts, Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre Press, 1985, p.71. Some were sent to the Royal Ontario Museum and what is now the Canadian Museum of Civilization. In addition, Halliday sold a portion to American collector George Heye and his Museum of the American Indian. Because of James participation in the manufacture of ceremonial regalia and the role he and his family played in the Cranmer potlatch, a number of his masks can be found in the collections based the Cranmer potlatch seizure, the majority of which have now been returned to the ‘U’Mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay and the Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre in Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. I believe the attributions of objects to James through these two museums is secure, given the still existing detailed knowledge and memory of the owners and the contexts for the production of the objects within the communities. The Cranmer potlatch and the subsequent prosecutions had an enormous impact on Kwakwaka’wakw potlatching and therefore their art. For one, crest poles were no longer raised in the village in front of the house, but rather as grave markers in the local cemetery, although even this was problematic. Charles Nowell was convicted and imprisoned for three months for the funerary potlatch of 1921 at which he both raised a pole and assumed the ceremonial name previously held by his brother Tom. Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand, p.119. Based on legal advice, the Kwakwaka’wakw began to hold potlatch ceremonies, like the funerals, and the requisite gift giving at different times. Potlatch hosts often went door-to-door re-paying participants rather than distributing gifts at a single community meeting. Ibid, p. 139. In this way, the necessary rituals and presentations that accompanied the passing and assumption of names and related prerogatives were hidden to the prying eyes of the authorities behind what the Europeans understood to be the normal rituals of death and mourning. Throughout the 1920s, James was personally responsible for a number of monuments raised in the Fort Rupert and Alert Bay cemeteries. In addition, since potlatches did not stop, but rather were forced behind closed doors, monumental works were completed, although in reduced scale and in new physical contexts. The Cranmer potlatch also changed the nature of Kwakwaka’wakw political interaction with the federal and provincial governments. Prior to 1922, they had taken little interest in the pan-Indian political organizations, like the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia. The Allied Tribes was a pan-Indian political union of 16 tribal groups formed in 1916 to pursue land claims through the Canadian court system. Between 1916 and 1922, the only major tribal groups not represented in the Allied Tribes were the Nuu-chah-Nulth of western Vancouver Island and the Kwakwaka’wakw. Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, pp.94-95. However, ten Kwakwaka’wakw delegates, including artist Bob Harris, joined a total of 45 attendees at a 1922 meeting of the Allied Tribes, aimed directly at addressing land cut-offs implemented by the McKenna-McBride Commission, in the hopes of gaining greater support in their battle against the potlatch ban. When this was unsuccessful, Cole and Chaikin, An Iron Hand,, p.135. and facing a 1924 Indian Act amendment banning the hiring of lawyers without the written consent of the Indian Agent, Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, p.111. the Kwakwaka’wakw were forced to find innovative ways of asserting their political voice. After the founding of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia in 1931 as a successor to the Allied Tribes, Kwakwaka’wakw leaders like James Sewid, Dan Assu, and William Scow played major roles in the Brotherhood’s executive. Ibid, pp.114-119. The Kwakwaka’wakw, often through the Brotherhood, also took advantage of Euro-Canada’s interest in Kwakwaka’wakw art, first manipulating Euro-Canadian audiences to accept and maintain poles and other objects that continued to symbolize the transfer of numaym prerogatives and then presenting high level Euro-Canadian authorities with poles and names, thereby foregrounding Kwakwaka’wakw political concerns in the wider public consciousness. After the Cranmer potlatch, Euro-Canadians ironically took a greater interest in Kwakwaka’wakw art, due in part to the increased value of what was now seen as a “disappearing” art form and in part to the relocation of older poles to the new urban centres. The interest resulted in the growth of a curio The term curio is derived from curiosity – souvenirs that illustrated the cultural differences evident in the newly opened spaces in the world like the Pacific Northwest. Art historian Marvin Cohodas suggests that the mythic position imagined for Native Americans in European nineteenth century theories of cultural evolution contributed to a sense of “nostalgia for the pure and noble Indian past [which] fueled the curio trade…at its height in 1880-1930.” (Marvin Cohodas, “Louisa Keyser and the Cohns: Mythmaking and Basketmaking in the American West,” in Janet Catherine Berlo, editor, The Early Days of Native American Art History, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press; and Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992, p.89.) The term curio is used in reference to this era and the specific ideologies that informed this genre of artistic production and consumption. industry attached to tourism and throughout the remaining part of his career James produced many high-quality models for sale to outsiders. Comparing James’ work across the different media, it is clear that his models and curio paintings followed conventional Kwakwaka’wakw form and iconography. Like the monumental poles, the models carried an additional message – namely, the Kwakwaka’wakw, their stories and what they represented were alive and well. Until the Cranmer potlatch of 1922, the potlatch continued to expand to fill the emptying numaym positions, fueled by wage labor and industrialized fishing and logging. This was clearly the hey-day of James’ patronage and a number of monumental poles and masks were either collected or identified as created during this period. The Cranmer potlatch followed seven years later by the Great Depression affected the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw patronage system. James continued to work on ceremonial art after 1922, albeit on a reduced scale, but his production of objects for sale outside his own community increased substantially. Much of this work has been saved through his relationship with the curio dealer, William L. Webber, who donated his remaining collection to the Vancouver Museum after his retirement in 1952. Many North American museums have considerable numbers of James’ curio art on their shelves. At the same time as James sold his work through Webber’s store, he was encouraged by F. Earl Anfield, one of the teachers in Alert Bay, to teach crafts at St Michael’s Indian Residential School run by the Anglican Church in Canada. Craft training was part of the federal government’s mandate to provide vocational training for Aboriginal people. Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended March 31, 1927, p.13 and p.61. A pole apparently carved by the students at St Michael’s was erected on the school grounds (figure 1:13). Although there are few clear photographs of the carving, stylistically it recalls James’ earlier work, with a combination of projections and an independent qulos figure perched on an angle at the top. While the potlatch ban was still in effect, James found ways of perpetuating the understanding of Kwakwaka’wakw art in the next generation. This had important implications for Kwakwaka’wakw cultural history, with future artists like Neel and Speck, graduating from St. Michael’s. Fellow artist, Arthur Shaughnessy, later replaced James as a teacher there. This was integral to a sense of artistic continuity despite the pressures on the public celebration of Kwakwaka’wakw ceremony. Figure 1:13: The pole erected outside of St Michael’s Residential School ca. 1935 in Alert Bay shows some characteristics of James’ style and was likely done by his students under his tutelage (PABC I 28364). Although James died on January 29, 1938, he played a key role in sustaining the production of Kwakwaka’wakw art through the 1930s and exercised a profound influence on the next generation of artists who made the transition from curio to fine art. Ellen Neel, a dominant artistic figure in Vancouver in the 1950s, learned to draw literally at James’ knee. Henry Speck, also known as Ozistalis, was a student of James at St Michaels and was later among the earliest Northwest Coast artists to experiment with serigraphy, holding a one-man show at the New Design Gallery in 1964. Leslie Dawn, The Northwest Coast Native Print: A Contemporary Tradition Comes of Age, Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1984, p.11. Martin, James’ step-son, was the most famous of the mid-century artists and trained yet another generation of artists, including Haida artist Bill Reid (at least for ten days), his own son-in-law Henry Hunt, and Hunt’s son Tony Hunt, another artist who pioneered serigraphy in the early 1960s, thereby establishing an artistic genealogy that bridged the lean times of the middle third of the twentieth century with the fluorescence of public interest in the 1960s and 1970s. So, while James consistently contributed to the ongoing growth of Kwakwaka’wakw art from the last decade of the nineteenth century through to the 1930s, he also passed on his knowledge and skills to the following generation, ensuring an unbroken continuum deep into the twentieth century. This is Yakuglas’ legacy. Figure 1:14: This is the last known photograph of James, with his wife Sara Nin, and an elderly visitor in Alert Bay in 1936. (RBCM PN 11551) Figure 1:15: A Selected Family/Artistic Genealogy for Charlie James 1