TAKING B.C.’S TREASURES
Residents would ‘very much regret their utter inattention’
In August 1899, a Vancouver World reporter came across American anthropologist Harlan Ingersoll Smith “pursuing researches on Vancouver Island.”
Smith was initially “very loath” to speak to a local reporter about his work, but when he was assured “people out here paid little or no attention to such matters,” he opened up.
Smith was part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, which wanted to find if there was any anthropological evidence linking First Nations on the northwest coast with Siberians.
The expedition was conceived by pioneer anthropologist Franz Boas and financed by Morris K. Jesup, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It took place between 1897 and 1902 on the northwest coast and in Siberia.
Smith was the lead archeologist in the British Columbia part of the expedition between 1897 and 1899, toiling at numerous sites in the Interior, on the coast, the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.
The World’s first story on Smith, which ran Aug. 25, 1899, was headlined “Hunting For Relics.”
“A number of good finds in British Columbia,” read an underline. “Articles that should have never left the province — mummies preserved in the same style as the Egyptians — mementoes of a race that preceded the Siwashes.”
The World reporter wrote that Smith “was very plain in saying that the people of British Columbia would very much regret their utter inattention to these matters in years to come.”
He was right. Smith was collecting artifacts like masks, bowls, and house posts, but he was also collecting something much more controversial — human skeletons.
“I have just shipped to New York the remains of a dead Indian chieftain that was found in a cave that was evidently part artificial and part natural, and which has all the characteristics of an Egyptian mummy,” Smith told the World.
The chieftain had been found near Fort Douglas, a now-aban- doned gold rush town at the top of Harrison Lake.
Near Lytton, Smith explored a village site and burial place he dubbed “the Sixth City,” and published an illustrated volume on the find. Smith purchased some of the artifacts he sent back to New York, but seems to have acquired others by subterfuge.
A paper on Smith that you can find online details how Smith tried to purchase a Musqueam house pole, but was rebuffed because the Musqueam didn’t want to sell to someone who would take it out of the country. So he got a local contact to purchase the pole, then bought it off him.
In 1911, Smith moved to Ottawa to become the head of the archeology division of the Geological Survey of Canada, which is now part of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. He continued to do research in B.C. before he retired in 1937, spending several years in the Bella Coola Valley.
In recent years many B.C. First Nations have pressed museums for the repatriation of their ancestors, including some of the skeletons collected by Smith.
Cora Jacks of the Tseycum First Nation spent several years researching what had happened to remains taken away from traditional burial cairns on the Saanich Peninsula. She found evidence that Smith had paid $5 for a skull and $7.50 to $10 for an entire skeleton, and that many of the remains were in storage at the American Museum of Natural History.
In 2008, the museum agreed to repatriate the remains of 55 people from the Tseycum Nation. A delegation from the Tseycum went to New York to pick the remains up, and they were flown and re-buried in their home on Vancouver Island.
Some of the B.C. artifacts the museum collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are still on display in its Northwest Coast Indians gallery.