Distorted facts muddy up telling of a fantastic tale
“My name is George Hunt: Indian Man-eater, Mutilator of Corpses, Cannibal — and Man of Reason. There’s the rub.”
So begins Harry Whitehead’s first novel (yet not a novel — more below), which has been described as a Canadian version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about a clash of values and a crisis of identity between two cultures whose beliefs and practices could not be more alien to each other. This literally fantastic story is worthy to stand with Peter B. Scales’s Mark of the Raven (2000), Muriel Gray’s The Trickster (1995) and Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear, winner of the 1973 Governor General’s Award for fiction.
George Hunt (1854-1933) was a real person caught between two worlds — one of magic, the other of reason — and eventually mistrusted by both.
He was a Metis born of a white Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader based at Fort Rupert, a village at the north end of Vancouver Island, and a Tlingit noblewoman from Alaska. At 18, he married into the Kwakiutl (or Kwakwaka’wakw) people of coastal British Columbia and became both a chieftain and a shaman with the name Quesalid. In the early 1880s he was hired as a boatman, guide and interpreter for Adrian Jacobsen of the Jessup North Pacific Expedition.
In 1886, he met world-renowned German-american anthropologist Franz Boas, who was fascinated by West Coast First Nations culture. Hunt worked with Boas for many decades as a translator, researcher, artifact collector and collaborator. Hunt told Boas in great detail about shamanistic practices, particularly a cannibalistic ritual called hamatsa, which forms the centre of this story. Hunt was ambiguous as to whether this ritual involved actual cannibalism or was simply a piece of shamanistic showbiz — he both believed in it and scoffed at it at the same time.
Because of his half-aboriginal heritage, Hunt was widely suspected of being a cannibal himself and was actually tried on such a charge in a sensational courtroom drama.
Whitehead includes a chilling quotation at the very end of the book, taken from William Halliday’s Potlatch and Totem: The Recollections of an Indian Agent (1935): “In 1900 a man (George Hunt) was committed for trial at the Vancouver assizes for cannibalism, and although there was no doubt of his guilt, the jury acquitted him on the ground that they thought it was impossible for the evidence to be true.”
That this quote appears at the end of the story instead of as an epigraph at the beginning illustrates a major problem with Whitehead’s book. The author states in his acknowledgments that he has “chosen to play merry havoc with the facts of (Hunt’s) life to come at the truth of this fiction of mine.” Whitehead adds that he has been “more reckless still with others who appear in the novel — Harry Cadwallader (Hunt’s sonin-law) in particular.”
What Whitehead means when he says such things is he’s aiming for some sort of meta-truth, meta-emotion or meta-history. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I like my facts to be facts, and Hunt’s life is a powerful, fantastical enough tale on its own. If only Halliday’s quote had come at the beginning instead of at the end, it might have enhanced this reader’s understanding and appreciation of the storytelling.
(Some facts: George Hunt’s descendants include the filmmaker Barbara Cranmer and a dynasty of traditional Northwest Coast artists including Henry, Richard, Stanley, Tony and Calvin Hunt. Another descendant is Corrine Hunt, who designed the medals given out at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. In 1986, members of the Boas and Hunt families held a reunion at the former Fort Rupert, now a historic Kwakwaka’wakw village and seat of band government of Kwakiutl First Nation.)