Nass River Indians (Reconstruction)

Once the urgent need to salvage the remnants of this seemingly pre-modern culture was established, it can be assumed the audience was meant to appreciate the efforts of the two protagonists to do so; prefacing a sequence of shots of ethnographic record-making, an intertitle informs viewers: “Mr. Barbeau and Dr. MacMillan record the songs and chants fading away with the advance of the white man” [SS 33]. And they were doing so, the audience was shown, not only in writing and musical notation, but also on wax cylinders and, as an introductory shot to the film implies, with the movie camera they brought along on the deck of their boat [SS 34-38, SS 4-5, Figure 4]. In a reflexive turn, the implication continues, the camera was now being used to shoot these scenes of ethnographic record-making, the audience’s momentary awareness of its presence again stress- ing the role of the film itself as an ethnographic text. Western technology, harbinger of assimilation, was the tool of the “modern” ethnographer, that custodian (in this case, along with the National Museum of Canada) of an otherwise fading cultural essence.

ln other words, the film is celluloid celebration of “salvage” ethnography, which makes it difficult at this point to argue that it was counter-hegemonic. Even though it depicts ethnographic text-making, it was not criticizing dominant ideology and the ways in which it was formulated; it was devoted to naturalizing and reproducing racial, gender and class preconceptions and hierarchies. On one level, it was performing this function in the interests of the Canadian nationstate. At a time when the federal government was pursuing a policy of aggressive assimilation, the film presented the ethnographer, the National Museum and, through them, ultimately the state itself not only as guardian of a fragile cultural essence fading in its natural environment, but also as custodian of what appeared in the light of its involvement as the nation’s cultural heritage. This was the message as well when the footage and intertitles used in Saving the Sagas existed in their original form as part of a longer, now-lost film entitled Nass River Indians.

Figure 4 Frame enlargement from Saving the Sagas (SS 5). The movie camera on the deck of Marius Barbeau’s rented boat. (Reproduced by permission of Astral Tech Inc.).

Produced by Associated Screen News specifically for use by the National Museum, the latter film was shot in the summer of 1927 and then edited in the fall and early winter with intertitles written by Barbeau.¹ Existing as a single, 35mm print, it then became part of the museum’s collection of anthropological films where it circulated to educational institutions, clubs and societies for many years after its production, its subsequent disappearance being marked by its omission from a 1974 publication dealing with the museum’s ethnographic films.² Fortunately, the footage and intertitles survive in the form of two shorter films Associated Screen News later recut from Nass River Indians for commercial release, Saving the Sagas being one of them. The other film is Fish and Medicine Men, which survives as prints of a badly damaged negative suffering most severely from the extensive excision and fading of the intertitles.³ Badly deteriorated, its introductory intertitle would have been added at this time. Like the introductory intertitles in Saving the Sagas, it serves to locate the film’s action on “the Canadian Pacific Coast… north of Vancouver,” in this case where “a race of red fishermen lives” [Appendix 2, FM 1]. This film also begins with the original opening sequence of Nass River Indians and perhaps the most emphatic representation of “the Indian” as having been absorbed into the fabric of so-called modern life. Presented with a series of shots of young Nisga’a women packing cans of salmon for a conveyer belt at an Arrandale cannery, the film’s audience was told that at Fishery Bay, where “the Indians come to catch salmon for the white man’s canneries,” “… machinery now speeds the Indian’s fish on the way to civilization’s dinner table” [FM 5-15].

This representation is significant, given the Canadian government’s active efforts into the 1920s to criminalize corresponding Aboriginal resource activity by denying, through fisheries legislation, Aboriginal claims to this resource; by restricting, through heavy regulation, Aboriginal access to salmon and the technology used to exploit it; and by curtailing, through an increasingly narrow defi- nition of what constituted “subsistence” fishing, the Aboriginal food fishery the Canadian government itself had invented as a concept in 1888 in its initial attempts to restrict Aboriginal fishing rights. As Diane Newell [1993: 66-97, 98-109] has pointed out in her study of Canada’s Pacific coast fisheries, in so doing, the government effectively became the resource management arm of the fishing industry, guaranteeing a pool of Native labor—mostly female and consistently cheap—for the white-owned canning industry in a period when labor was scarce. In fact, cannery operators placed such high value on Aboriginal village and family labor that they applied and paid for the required fishing licenses under Native fishers’ names and then hired the men to fish in their gillnet fleets in order to ensure Native women and children would arrive at the bay each season to work in their processing plants [Newell 1993: 75-76, 85-86,109].

In light of this, it becomes apparent that the film’s representation of contemporary Nisga’a culture as being of an evolutionary past attests to the vitality in the 1920s of the political dimension of such temporal dislocation, what Johannes Fabian [1983: 144] succinctly describes as the chronopolitics of colonial expansion. In the film these were expressed in a variety of ways, among them the conveyer belt sequence representing cannery technology as contemporary, efficient, developed and White—that which “now speeds the Indian’s fish on the way to civilization’s dinner table” [FM 5-34]. The culminating intertitle of this sequence, “Tin cans and machinery—both symbols of the white man’s culture” [FM 27], is key in this respect. In contrast to such mechanization, Aboriginal labor was manual, “the Indian boss [calling] the workers ‘by hand”‘ [FM 19], and the women cleaning the fish and filling the cans in what was to remain a manual operation until after 1945. Utilizing the still-familiar notion of progress as something manifest in the relationship of capitalist and technological advancement also meant that contemporary Nisga’a practices of the non-conveyer-belt type—its so-called “traditional” fishing technology—were understood to be an earlier, premodern stage in the development of capitalism—part of “the old color of Indian life in British Columbia” [SS 6]. As such, it was also that of a culture whose disappearance marked the advancement of the Canadian nation-state.

Whether this was received by contemporary audiences as bad, good or inevitable, the film effectively rationalized and naturalized a process of assimilation that was then being implemented by the Department of Indian Affairs and by Euro-Canadian institutions through policies and programs of coercive tutelage [Titley 1986]. Operating in the areas of culture, education, religion and land use, Brian Titley observes [1986: 75-93], the latter were designed to “save” the Aboriginal population of Canada by “cleansing” it of Aboriginality. So, where Saving the Sagas presented the idea that “purification through cleaning” [Sibley 1995: 64], and thus the attainment of whiteness, were inevitable because “the ways of the white man… [were] sweeping away the old color of Indian life,” Deputy Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott stated flatly, “I want to get rid of the Indian problem.”⁴ A well-known Canadian poet, and in that capacity in 1928 co-editor with Barbeau and MacMillan of a book of three of the Nisga’a songs that the latter had collected on their trip the year before, Scott saw assimilation as a means of advancing the aims of the Department, which by the second decade of the century was facing increasingly organized efforts on the part of Aboriginal peoples in Canada to secure rights, lands, and resources. “Our objective,” he maintained at the time, “is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department….”⁵

Not surprisingly, this policy met with active opposition on the part of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, among them most notably the Nisga’a. Of the Aboriginal population in British Columbia, they were (and remain today) the most politically engaged with the state, having organized themselves earlier in the century in response to the refusal of both federal and provincial governments to deal with the gradual pre-emption of their land and resources by Euro-Canadian settlement. Their first political organization, the Nisga’a Land Committee, marked the beginning both of the intertribal political organization that flourished in British Columbia in the first two decades of the century, and of formalized political activity among the province’s Aboriginal population today.⁶ According to Paul Tennant [1990: 86], whose study of Aboriginal peoples and politics rests squarely on his identification of Native land as the source of what is still an ongoing dispute in the province, the formation of the Committee among the Nisga’a constitutes what he describes as the first “planned political restructuring” among British Columbian Aboriginal peoples to make them more effective in dealing with the Euro-Canadian political system. It was followed, perhaps most significantly in 1916, by the organization of the Allied Tribes of British Columbia. The latter’s subsequent efforts in the 1920s to advance Aboriginal claims to land, fishing, hunting and water rights, to compensation, and to medical and education rights, however, culminated in defeat. In 1927, the year Nass River Indians was shot, the federal government passed Scott’s recommended amendment to the Indian Act effectively prohibiting claim-related activity among the Aboriginal population of Canada [Titley 1986: 135-61; Tennant 1990: 84-113].⁷

None of this is apparent in the film, however; the “modern” factory is presented as the Aboriginal woman’s new domestic setting. There, she is defined through her work, first in relation to the activities of the mostly unseen Native fishermen who both deliver the catch to her and end the filmic sequence related to her work on the conveyer belt; its conclusion is marked when the fleet puts out to the fishing grounds again, an intertitle and distant shot of what was clearly a company-owned oar- and sailboat-powered gillnet fleet establishing that fact for the viewer [FM 33-34]. However, the fishermen do not disappear from thought; the Indian woman is also situated, along with those who catch the fish, in rela- tion to distant “civilization.” Working as unskilled labor, she prepares what is identified as traditional Indian food for its dinner table. If we take into account what Gail Bederman [1995: 1-44] has most recently argued, that civilization was understood by Euro-Americans at the time not only as Western, but as specifically White, male, and middle-class, then the Indian woman acts here not only as a domestic in civilization’s household, but also as the one who defines the film’s ideal viewer as a White, middle-class, Euro-Canadian male. Now a domesticated Indian—and unskilled labor—the Aboriginal woman takes the place assigned her in the capitalist structure of the modern nation-state.

It is tempting to suggest that this sequence in the film originally found a counterpart in the shots (now in Saving the Sagas) of women demonstrating what are described in an intertitle as “old potlatch dances” [SS 27]. Positioned later in the original Nass River Indians as an event recorded further upstream and therefore, it seems, back in time, the three potlatch-dance scenes on the beach at Geetiks may have been used in contrast to the opening sequence of the film to represent the Aboriginal woman in a state closer to nature, a state in which passion and desire ruled reason. One of the intertitles suggests as much when it links what would have been seen by Euro-Canadian audiences as base, if not degenerate, behavior with her essential “Indianness,” introducing a shot of one of the women dancing with the provocative words: “if we understand Indian—and we do—this little beauty is signalling for a kiss—or maybe a drink” [SS 27-32].

The possibility that the shot actually functioned this way, of course, is linked to the suggestion that the footage and intertitles of Saving the Sagas and Fish and Medicine Men can still be seen in relation to one another as indicative of the structure of the earlier Nass River Indians. This suggestion in turn is supported by the fact that the original sequence of shots and intertitles constituting Nass River Indians can be reconstructed based on a description of the film in the National Museum’s 1933 Catalogue of Motion Picture Films [Appendix 3]. In the catalogue, the film is listed as consisting of three reels, which are then described briefly as follows:

The fishing industry provides the chief occupation of the Indians of the Nass River region of British Columbia. In the first reel we are taken to a native village, which is one of the centres of the salmon industry, and operations from the "catch" through the stages of canning are shown. There are also views of the cannery bungalows for the native families and life at the cannery during the summer. An Indian chief is shown dancing in his old-time regalia. Reel 2 opens with a peace dance. Several totem pole villages of former days are shown, and there are excellent views of totem poles of the wolf, eagle, and other clans. An Indian is seen carving a mask, and one of the old potlatch dances is depicted. On this expedition Mr. Marius Barbeau, of the National Museum, and Dr. Ernest MacMillan, of the Toronto Conservatory of Music, collected native songs, and a series of views show them in the act of recording the songs and music. Reel 3 shows pictures of the games and many other favourite pastimes of these Indians, and a medicine-man performing a cure. [Canada, Department of Mines, National Museum of Canada, 1933: 6, no. 15]

Immediately striking is the fact that the sequence of shots described above confirms what the organization of Saving the Sagas still suggests: the film’s narrative was structured around movement upstream. It begins with footage shot at Arrandale, including scenes of life in the cannery bungalows: the foreman calling the women to work “by hand” [FM 20-22], the young Nisga’a men at the radio [SS 7], children playing [FM 36, 38-39], a young woman playing a keyboard upon which rests the sheet music for “Thank you for the Buggy Ride” [FM 41, 43]. In all of them the cannery bungalow setting is evident. The scene then shifts from Arrandale to Kincolith, which is located on the other side of the Nass River, slightly further inland. The village can be identified in the footage that corresponds to the scene described next in the catalogue: “an Indian chief … dancing in his old-time regalia.” Now part of Fish and Medicine Men, it is a shot of the man Barbeau identified in his photographs of that summer as Frank Bolton (Txaa Laxhatkw of Gwinwok), chief of the Eagle clan of Gwinwok, performing his amhalayt dance with Robert Pearl (Wii Xha’a of Gitanyow) assisting on a frying-pan drum, the accompanying intertitle reading, “But the old chief remembers some pagan dances” [FM 51-55].⁸ In Fish and Medicine Men, it still precedes the shots of the peace dance the catalogue describes as beginning reel two of Nass River Indians [FM 56-59]. The latter shots show Pearl throwing eagle-down into the air as he and Bolton dance, “a sign of peace and goodwill to all except maybe the eagle” [FM 58]. In all these shots, the men stand on what is clearly the boardwalk that distinguished contemporary Kincolith; as an intertitle now in Fish and Medicine Men put it, “Kincolith sports more boardwalk than Atlantic City” [FM 49].

There is also an intertitle in Fish and Medicine Men indicating the original order of the shots in Nass River Indians by citing the town’s location in relation to Arrandale, the first sequence of shots in the film: “Nearby is Kincolith,” it states, as though indicating the second stop in a filmic journey, “it means ‘the place-of-scalps’—but it is a church town now” [FM 46]. Having played on the old fishing station’s former association with piles of fish heads (or “scalps”) to suggest the past existence of what would have been seen by Euro-Canadian audiences as a barbaric Indian practice, the intertitle gave way to shots illustrating missionary activity in the village, the same scenes that now accompany the intertitle in Fish and Medicine Men [FM 47-48]. These would have preceded the shots of Bolton and Pearl performing the amhalayt and peace dances; not only because the reference to Kincolith as “a church town now” is included in the introductory intertitle to this sequence, but also because the scene of Frank Bolton dancing in what the catalogue describes as “old-time regalia” is introduced in the film with the intertitle, “But the old chief remembers some pagan dances” [FM 51], as though to suggest that he does so in the face of this missionary work.

The suggestion was probably confirmed for viewers by another set of shots of missionary activity at Kincolith—specifically, the shots of a Christian band now included in Saving the Sagas with the intertitle, “But the Church Army now spreads Christian salvation along the Coast” [SS 48]. Clearly made at the same time as the shots of missionary work in Fish and Medicine Men, they seem designed to follow this “pagan” dancing, bracketing it with yet another reminder of its anachronistic place in contemporary life.

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