Fighting for rights and culture from Lerwick to Canada
James Teit’s fight to protect culture and rights of the Nlaka’pamaux people was forged in his Shetland homeland, writes Alison Campsie.
He left Shetland more than 100 years ago to start a job in a corner shop in British Columbia but went on to live and hunt with a Canadian First Nation community, marry into their people, learn their language and became a true champion of their culture, history and rights.
Now, the lost story of James Teit, from Lerwick, has finally been told by anthropologist Wendy Wickwire, Emeritus Associate Professor of environmental studies at Victoria University, who first started the massive transatlantic research project into his life more than 40 years ago.
At the Bridge: James Teit, an Anthropology of Belonging, looks at the Shetlander’s life from his radical beginnings on the islands to his deep connection with the people of Spences Bridge.
Teit fully immersed himself in his adopted homeland and within eight years of arriving in 1884, aged 19, he was married to Antoko, a young Thompson River – or Nlaka’pamux – woman.
Teit worked on the ground, collecting place names, drawing maps and recording songs and music from his new community before going on to represent chiefs in disputes over colonial land grabs.
But the work of Teit, who was employed by German-french anthropologist Franz Boas who visited Spence’s Land some 10 years after the Shetlander arrived, has been largely forgotten. Not a scholar, Tait is usually referenced as a research assistant or helper to Boas, despite his input to tens of thousands of pages of research.
Wickwire, in an interview with New Books in Anthropology, said: “To me that is one of the main correctives of this book that I hope people will see what happens when the first chapter I look at who gets into the pantheon of heroes in the anthropological world.
“His name doesn’t exist in histories, you can’t find him. If you do find him, he is cast incorrectly. It gave me a really important hook for this book.”
She said that six First Nation communities in British Columbia had hosted events to mark publication of the Teit biography.
Wickwire added: “They were buying two or three copies and speaking so positively about the importance of Teit. He is known there, but he has never been written up in this way.”
The author argues that it was Teit’s strong sense of identity as a Shetlander that helped form his approach to anthropology.
In a 1901 British Columbia census, Teit described his nationality not as British but as Norse, his language not as English but as Shetlandic and his religion as, not Presbyterian which he was raised in, but as free thinker.
She added: “You can see where his allegiances lie and I think that is a big part of his persona. For an anthropologist of this period, he is a clean slate. He saw Shetlanders as an oppressed Norse, Scandinavian minority so when he hit British Columbia and saw what was being done to indigenous people, he felt he saw the story before.”
Teit was for 15 years politically active in representing the Nlaka’pamux people.
Wickwire said: “These chiefs, who spoke no English but who Teit knew were so articulate, so intelligent, so fired up and had so much to say about land theft. Teit’s 10 years of immersion in the language allowed him to get into their complex history as they understood it, their history of oppression as they understood it.”
Wickwire first encountered the Teit story when, in 1977, she heard some traditional Nlaka’pamux songs which had originally been documented by him. A meeting in 1990 with one of Teit’s sons crystallised her interest in the Shetlander.
Wickwire added: “He said ‘we have got to do something on my father’. Even in 1990, I didn’t know how long it was going to take.”
Teit died on 30 October, 1922 and is buried in Merrit, British Columbia.