STORY OF AN UNSUNG HERO
Teit fought for Indigenous rights
At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging has been recognized with awards. For the last couple of months, it has been a constant fixture on the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. bestsellers list, too.
Those nods are nice, author and Victoria-based historian Wendy Wickwire admits. But the bigger honour is getting to tell the story of James Teit (1864-1922) in the first place.
“The kind of exciting thing about this book is that people are discovering this major British Columbian that nobody really knew about,” says the University of Victoria professor emeritus, who was recently awarded the $10,000 Canada Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences plus the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio book prize for an exceptional contribution to B.C. history.
Virtually unsung, Teit — who came to Canada in 1884 from Shetland in Scotland — was a prolific ethnographer, guide and Indigenous rights activist based out of Spences Bridge, a small town located at the confluence of the Thompson and Nicola rivers, northeast of Lytton.
Teit “practised participant-based anthropology” as he recorded songs, stories, history and living cultures of Indigenous people throughout the province and beyond. He produced more than 2,200 printed pages in 43 published sources. There were also close to 5,000 more in unpublished manuscripts.
Through his work, he earned the trust and respect of many Indigenous people. He spoke three Indigenous languages fluently and worked tirelessly for Indigenous rights.
At various times, he acted as a translator and representative of Interior chiefs in various government meetings here in B.C. and in Ottawa.
Wickwire, then a Nova Scotian, stumbled across Teit while researching and transcribing recordings of traditional Indigenous songs during a trip to the B.C. Interior to work on a doctoral thesis.
She learned that Teit, whose first wife was an Nlaka’pamux woman named Antko, had recorded more than 400 songs on wax cylinders in the 1910s.
While other researchers, like famed American anthropologist Franz Boas, had also recorded traditional songs, Wickwire explains that Teit’s work was different — it was lively.
“Because he spoke the language, he could sort of talk to them about their songs. It was a very different, very relaxed kind of recording situation,” says Wickwire, adding that, on those recordings, you can hear the women talking and laughing.
“The photographs that Boas took of people in 1897, they looked like prison mug shots. Then Teit got a camera and people suddenly realized that they could get pictures of their family by visiting Teit,” says Wickwire.
Boas, on a trip west, discovered Teit and hired him to do field research. Interestingly, despite his work, Teit is all but sidelined, mentioned only as an assistant.
But as Wickwire discovered, Teit was often leading the charge when it came to the studying and recording of many of this province’s Indigenous cultures. While he may have been underplayed by white academics he worked for, his legacy lives on with Indigenous people.
His monographs and field notes are used in band offices and band schools.
“His work is invaluable to our communities, not just because of the breadth, but also because of the depth of his connection to the Nlaka’pamux and other Interior Salish people,” says Angie Bain, a Merritt-based researcher for the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.
Bain is a part of the Franz Boas Papers Project, a collaborative project between Western University, University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society. Its mandate is “to digitize correspondence of Boas and to produce annotated documentary volumes around this core collection.”
Bain is part of a team that’s looking specifically at Boas’ correspondence with Teit.
Long before Wickwire took up the Teit mantle, there was one person who recognized Teit’s worth and set out to write about him.
A century ago, veteran and widely revered newspaperman Snowden Dunn Scott witnessed Teit in action at a conference of “British Columbia Indian chiefs.”
He asked for an introduction, and that led to a six-year friendship that ended with Teit’s death from cancer at age 58 in 1922. Dunn Scott, then the managing editor of the Vancouver Daily Province, wrote Teit’s obituary, which would eventually be the archival document that caught Wickwire’s eye.
“His Teit obituary is not just an obituary, but it’s a tirade against Boas. … He said these guys in New York — he named Boas — and elsewhere owed everything that they had to Teit and they never really acknowledged him,” Wickwire says.
“That I save for my last chapter because I really loved it. And he saw the story that I really felt was important to tell and I really felt if he hadn’t died shortly after, that maybe he might have done more.
“Because he died, Teit’s story died.”
When Wickwire talks about Teit, there’s an obvious excitement at the chance to highlight such an interesting character.
That excitement comes across on the pages of the book as lively, solid reportage with a healthy dash of deserved reverence.
At the Bridge is dense without being dry.
“The book masterfully connects local, regional and national history together, and in the process touches on many significant issues, events and people in Indigenous, B.C., and Canadian history,” says Lindsay Gibson, an assistant professor in UBC’S faculty of education.
“James Teit is an inspiring and remarkable person who is a model of settler allyship for contemporary times. It’s amazing that we can learn so much about truth and reconciliation from a man from Shetland who died almost 100 years ago.”
It’s amazing that we can learn so much about truth and reconciliation from a man from Shetland who died almost 100 years ago.