Nass River Indians (Reconstruction)

The story itself centers on the filming of what can be identified as the scene now in Saving the Sagas showing Bolton “chanting his glories on the site for his grave” [SS 24].¹ As in the film, it is used here to suggest the tension between two states of being, and between Primitive past and Modern present, Barbeau writing at the outset that what they “witnessed in front of the lens [was] the awakening of a people from its accustomed lethargy. The old chief, instead of a fisherman’s soiled overalls, now donned kingly regalia that made of him a grandee of the earth…” [Barbeau 1932: 97]. With this, he introduces another story, based on the lyrics of the chief’s song. Remembered seemingly word for word by Barbeau, it conjures up the mythic Thunderbird’s triumphant return to the heights of the mountain, its presence, suddenly felt in the figure of the chief, inspiring the performers and enthralling the audience, until “[t]ransfigured, the Indians rose in their dance from the depths to spectacular heights. Dispirited and slovenly in ordinary life,” he writes, “they were now lifted to a higher plane, like spirits swaying their exalted selves over the shrubbery or living gods in a bespangled pantheon” [Barbeau 1932: 98]. Only then was “[t]he spell of the mystic past” bro- ken by a real thunderstorm [Barbeau 1932:100]. The song, which concluded with reference to the Otter and its subsequent seduction of the chief, is left unexplained to Barbeau until that night in camp, when groping in the darkness for understanding of it all, he is inspired:

I know! Those Indians had been lured away from their own path in life, and they had gone astray into the bogs. And who was to blame if not the Otter, the charmer? But the Otter, who was she if not a symbol? What did the native syren stand for? Civilization, no doubt, our own gift to them, the Indians. Civilization, our Christianity, our trade goods, our tools, our worship of the machine—in a word, the White Man, parcel and all! Fifty years after the native had adopted our devices wholesale, they had become a wasted lot with nothing truly their own either new or ancient. This night they were drifting with their cannery nets to the whirlpools. They were dragged down by the feet one by one. Indeed they were almost extinct now, extinct in many ways. Civilization, the great Killer, was engulfing them. [Barbeau 1932:107]

Coming as the climax of the story, his revelation also confirms the increasingly apparent fact that his tale of life on the Nass is as much a parable loosely fashioned on experience as it is an account of his fieldwork. In a note to Beynon, which he included with an offprint of the article, he says as much, telling his interpreter, “The story of the Thunder Bird of the Mountains is not meant to be strictly accurate as to the facts but merely to drive home a point which is the definition of Civilization and Culture.”² To that end, he included in the party one of his former fieldwork companions, the American artist Langdon Kihn, who although discouraged by Barbeau from making a trip to the Nass that summer,³ appears in the story as arbiter of Indian artistic merit. Championing the sculptural quality of the last Aboriginal wood carvings in the same way MacMillan asserts the Natives’ former musical worth, he also completes the story’s ensemble of artist, musician and filmmaker, all of whom are ultimately so inspired by the vanishing culture they witness on the Nass that they are raised to heights of creativity in turn. Fired that night in the camp by talk of Native art, music, and life to create canvas, composition and film respectively, they illustrate Barbeau’s central contention that culture “comes unheralded to the pure-hearted whose path lies on the heights, whoever they are, primitive or civilized” [Barbeau 1932:110].

Kihn and the others also set the stage for Barbeau’s new reading of the lyrics to the chief’s song, itself an elaborate embellishment of what was in reality a relatively modest song of potlach hospitality.⁴ Seemingly inspired by the chief’s story in the same way MacMillan is inspired by Native music and Kihn by Native art, Barbeau suggests that he saw his role as the ethnologist in the party as one devoted, at least in part, to this popular formulation of a contemporary, Western lore stimulated by its Native counterpart.⁵ What is more, his interpretation of the song, which presents his view of the Nisga’a people and their culture, is striking in the degree to which it echoes the portrayal of Nisga’a life in the film. Both express what Nicholas Thomas [1994: 15] describes as a competing colonial- ist agenda—in this instance, one that counters what was generally accepted by Euro-Canadians as the civilizing mission of the church and the progressive impulse of technology with a romantic narrative full of regretful nostalgia for the idealized precolonial society they have destroyed. In Barbeau’s narrative, civilization corrupts, resulting in what he sees as the degenerate state of the present-day Indian. Already “hushed” by civilization (and, in this case, confined to the lowest level of the capitalist class structure), Indians cease to exist in his present as anything but a people “almost extinct,” the lesson of the story for Westerners lying in his warning of the dangers of civilization to other primitive cultures [Barbeau 1932: 107-110].⁶ Politically an act of opposition to contemporary views, on another level it simply reproduced supremacist thinking based on the idea that the Indian was not only unable to function successfully in the modern world, but also that this inability was the result of predisposition rather than colonial encounter.

Of course, his position, and his efforts to popularize it, were also tied to his belief in the mission of the Museum and the value of the material it collected and housed. So it is not surprising perhaps that Barbeau’s efforts to define and record the “vanishing culture” of the Canadian West Coast were also part of a campaign by Associated Screen News’s major stock-holder, the Canadian Pacific Railway, to market the area to tourists. In fact, by the time the film was made, both the CPR and Canadian National Railways had been working with Barbeau and the National Museum for a number of years, hoping to increase tourist traffic to their western regions by promoting the idea that their lines offered access to a national landscape steeped in cultural heritage [Jessup 1992: 64-73]. The National Museum’s activities in this respect were bathed in an aura of legitimacy that advanced the interests of the railways in what might otherwise have been dismissed by the public as crass commercial promotion. With this in mind, the general tourist agents of both railways routinely gave free passes over their lines to Barbeau and his parties [Jessup 1992: 31-35, 64-73]. In the summer of 1927, it was CPR agent John Murray Gibbon who provided passage, arranging rail trips to Vancouver where Barbeau and his group, bearing cameras and phonograph, caught a boat north along the coast to the Nass River.⁷

For Gibbon and the CPR, this was also part of the company’s ongoing support of Barbeau’s more recent involvement in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that promised to benefit its western traffic. The show, eventually entitled “The Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern,” would combine west-coast Aboriginal material drawn from the collections of the National Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and McGill University with paintings and sculptures of west-coast subject matter by prominent Euro-Canadian artists, many of whom had visited the region at Barbeau’s request, and on passes from either the CPR or CNR [Ottawa 1927]. Prominent among them were Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson and his friend, Montreal artist and future Group member Edwin Holgate, both of whom visited Tsimshian and Gitskan communities on the Skeena River in the summer of 1926; Montreal painter Anne Savage and Toronto sculptor Florence Wyle, who made the same trip west from central Canada the next summer; and Vancouver artist Emily Carr, who had visited Native communities to paint many years before, with Barbeau’s support of the travel involved in her work first coming into play on her trip to the Nass River in 1928. Touted by National Gallery director Eric Brown as the first exhibition of North American Aboriginal work to be, as he put it, “artistic first and ethnological after,”⁸ the show was intended to establish the place of this material in the world of art, and to claim it both as a treasured national possession and, by suggesting its origins in an indeterminate national past, as the touchstone of what was presented in contrast as the nation’s new “modern” art [Jessup 1992: 62-98].

Figure 8 Photograph of the Art Gallery of Toronto installation of “Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern,” 1928. (Photo courtesy of Edward P. Taylor Research Library, Art Gallery of Ontario.).

What is perhaps more important in this context is the fact that the film was actually made to be shown in conjunction with the exhibition, which finally opened on 20 November 1927 [Figure 8]. This is one reason Barbeau’s caption to a photograph of the project’s filmmaker James Sibley Watson and his assistant reads, “Dr. Watson and Mr. Gunn taking moving pictures of Indian life ancient and modern” [Figure 9].⁹ Not only did it describe a photograph of the two portraying the conversion of the Nisga’a to Christianity from their so-called “pagan” existence but, describing the subject of the moving pictures as “Indian life ancient and modern,” it identified what was in effect the movie’s working title. The film also reiterates the exhibition’s theme on another level by portraying Barbeau at work on the nation’s musical past with one of Canada’s musical talents of the day, composer and professor Ernest MacMillan. By the time the exhibition opened, this reiteration had been reiterated in turn by the CPR, which had also completed its own film for the show, the Associated Screen News production Totem Land.¹⁰ Portraying the Kwakwaka‘wakw people of Vancouver Island in the process of becoming the past, this film featured what it described as “the famous Canadian soprano,” Juliette Gaultier de la Verendrye learning Kwakwaka‘wakw songs as “a modern student of the ancient art.” It was this art she demonstrated in a recital held in connection with the first showing of Nass River Indians, her performance and the film becoming part of a special evening of entertainment held in January 1928 in conjunction with the exhibition’s run at the then Art Gallery of Toronto. Clad in Aboriginal dress lent by the National Museum, she sang arrangements of Native songs, some of them prepared for performance by MacMillan from the Nisga’a pieces collected by Barbeau and him the previous summer.¹¹

Figure 9 “Dr. Watson and Mr. Gunn taking moving pictures of Indian life ancient and modern”. Caption by Marius Barbeau, ethnologist, National Museum of Canada, 1927. (Canadian Museum of Civilization, image no. 69611.)

Like Saving the Sagas and Nass River Indians, the special evening echoed the theme of the exhibition that inspired it. It represented Aboriginal cultures of the Canadian West Coast as being the touchstone of contemporary cultural life in Canada—part of the nation’s past, rather than its present or future. In fact, the developmental aspect of the project was so strongly valued by the exhibition’s architects that Barbeau secretly criticized Gaultier to MacMillan because she refused “to do very much” with the songs they gave her, insisting instead on presenting them in “a semi-primitive form.”¹² In contrast, the exhibition and its programming, ostensibly designed to celebrate West Coast Native culture, operated smoothly in a now familiar way to represent Aboriginal peoples as Indians firmly of the Primitive past and thus lost in the Modern present. The problem with this, of course, lay not only in the way this affected audience understanding of the objects on display, but also in the way this representation worked to normalize Euro-Canadian views of contemporary Aboriginal peoples that facilitated government legislation aimed at aggressive assimilation and paternalistic control. Simply put, art history in its public forum—that is, in the museum—was ultimately as complicit in internal practices of colonialism in Canada as we now know anthropology was in imperialist expansion. In this case, the convergence of the two also worked effectively to create a complex “cultural event” as rare in its time as a film of the ethnographer at work “saving the sagas.”

Grants from the Queen’s University Advisory Research Committee, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported research for this article and two others forthcoming. I am grateful to Greg Eamon, Dale Gervais and Bill O’Farrell of the National Archives of Canada, and Benoit Thériault of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Originally published, “Tin Cans and Machinery: Saving the Sagas and Other Stuff,” Visual Anthropology, 12 (1999): 49–86.

Note on new digital reconstruction

Almost 22 years since it was first restored in 2000, new improvements in digital film scanning technology has encouraged us to revisit the current reconstruction process of Nass River Indians. At the time, the restoration was based on creating new motion picture film elements off the originals, which were then assembled to create a new negative.

The aim in 2023, is to revisit the originals and instead of film copies, create new digital masters in the hopes of sharing a much more improved viewing experience.

Dale Gervais

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