At a time when Indigenous rights were being trampled recklessly, often under the feet of the federal government’s Indian agents, James Teit took it upon himself to become the Indians' agent.
Kind and personable, the transplanted Scotsman immersed himself in the Indigenous culture he married into and he gained the respect and trust of the Nlaka’pamux people from the Cooks Ferry Band of B.C.’s Interior near Spences Bridge. Through his work as one of Canada’s most remarkable anthropologists, Teit became their spokesman in land claims discussions and human rights battles with federal and provincial authorities.
Teit’s achievements as a hunting guide, ethnographer and Indigenous advocate are highlighted in Victoria-based author Wendy Wickwire’s enthralling biography At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging, this year’s winner of the Canada Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Wickwire’s riveting words breathe life back into the thousands of pages of descriptive notes Teit recorded in four decades of living and working with B.C.’s Indigenous people in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Her book gives the man his rightful place as a meticulous historian and fearless defender in their uphill struggle for fair treatment.
“I think the most amazing thing about him was he just fell in love with the native people,” said 65-year-old James Teit of Prince George, Teit’s sole surviving grandson. “He spoke six or seven dialects and went to Ottawa to represent them for treaties and he was really well-loved by the natives.
“Wendy’s done so much work around it, it’s exhaustive. I tell all my kids they’re lucky she’s done all that research on him and it’s all there in print in her book.”
The anthropologist Teit was born in the Shetland Islands of northern Scotland and came to Canada at age 19 in 1884 to work at his uncle John Murray’s store in Spences Bridge, near the confluence of the Nicola and Thompson rivers, southwest of Kamloops. Teit befriended the native people who frequented the store and considered the discrimination he witnessed despicable behaviour. In 1892, he married a Nlaka’pamux woman, Susanna Lucy Antko, and they bought a farm on the edge of the Nicoelton reserve where she was raised in the Twaal Valley. To finance the ranch, he spent a couple of seasons trapping in central and northern B.C., followed by two years of work in Nanaimo’s coal mines.
Teit also earned money guiding wealthy Americans on big-game hunting expeditions. Having watched how his native friends tracked animals on hunting and fishing trips, he knew how to safely lead a team of pack horses on treacherous five-week treks from Spences Bridge to the coast at Bella Coola and into northwestern B.C. to the Stikine and Cassiar regions. He was also a staunch conservationist who argued for controls on hunting.
In 1894, Franz Boas, an anthropologist from New York City (who would soon become one of North America’s most distinguished anthropologists) arrived at Spences Bridge to continue his studies of the plateau peoples of south central B.C. Boas met Teit on this trip and hired him to conduct field work on his behalf. Boas considered the local Indigenous peoples to be dying cultures, while Teit had a radically different perspective and used his work to preserve and celebrate native lifestyles and how they made use of their land and traditions to survive and thrive.
Boas encouraged Teit to write down all he had learned about Indigenous people and that continued for 28 years until his death in 1922. Teit left a legacy of 2,000 pages of published monographs in 22 volumes which documented hunting and fishing methods, shelter construction, navigation and mapping, clothing, handcrafts, weaponry and tool making. He also took hundreds of photos of his Indigenous friends and colleagues. Their confidence in Teit showed in their relaxed, often smiling poses. Many of those photos of them wearing mooseskin moccasins and mittens and handmade buckskin shirts, holding blankets and baskets, are now on display in the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
“He was in awe of their highly-advanced skills,” said Wickwire. “When you go through his 1900 monograph, The Thompson Indians of British Columbia, you can see the extent to which he covered every detail, whether it was how to make a fish net, how to construct and use a dip-net, or how to build their underground houses. The reconstructions that you see today are often based on Teit’s sketches and drawings. All the plans are there. It’s just detailed work. Everything was so well-documented.”
Handmade artifacts were highly sought-after by museums around the world but were not readily available until Teit made the suggestion that the local women be paid for their handiwork. That created a mini-industry for the Nlaka’pamux people to produce their creative baskets and buckskin dresses.
Wickwire maintains throughout her book that a level of tension existed between Boas and Teit which stemmed from Boas’s inclination to take much of the credit for Teit’s work. The two men collaborated for close to three decades. From 1908-10, at Boas’s request, Teit extended his fieldwork into Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon.
“The unfortunate thing was that Boas’s name went forward while Teit’s name got sidelined, so bringing him to light now was just a great thing because he did so much amazing work,” said Wickwire. “There’s a lot that didn’t get published (in the book), a lot of detail that’s really valuable to Indigenous people today – maps and place names and ethnobotany. The bulk of the field notes went with Boas’s professional papers to the Library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. That’s where the treasure-trove lies and people are just getting into that now because it’s all being digitized.”
In addition to his familiarity with Indigenous folklore, traditions, superstitions and craftsmanship, Teit had a gift for acquiring languages and became fluent in three native tongues – Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc and Okanagan (Syilx). Once he could converse with them, he began to learn how badly they were oppressed and discriminated against by the authorities. He was a devout socialist, convinced everyone should be treated equally and spent much of his later life championing minority rights and educating native chiefs about the Western legal system.
Spurred by the B.C. chiefs’ political campaign to dispute the provincial and federal governments’ assertion that they had no legal rights to their traditional territories, Teit joined the campaign in 1909 and in 1912 led his first delegation of Interior Salish chiefs to Ottawa to lobby the government. This was the first of three long trips to protest the government’s stand on the land issue. He had the unique ability to translate their statements in meetings with Prime Minister Robert Borden and D.C. Scott, head of the Department of Indian Affairs.
“How many settler Canadians in the 1890s were fluent in Indigenous languages?” asks Wickwire. “You had the missionaries who could run their church services and sort of get by, but hardly any settler in British Columbia learned the languages. It wasn’t just the anthropology he did non-stop from 1894 until his death in 1922. I don’t think we had another non-Indigenous activist in Canada who advocated for their basic rights to the extent that Teit did .”
Teit’s prominence in Indigenous politics and his continual fight against settler colonialism clashed with Scott’s federal bills that pushed for cultural assimilation of native societies. That earned Teit enemies in Ottawa and resulted in some of his later anthropological contributions being marginalized.
Knowing they were denied citizenship and the right to vote, among other basic human rights, Teit was enraged by the Military Services Act of July 1917 which listed Indigenous bachelors and childless widowers as being eligible for conscription in the First World War. He warned the government enforcement of the act would be violently opposed and in January 1918 an Order in Council declared native people would be exempt from conscription.
One of Teit’s greatest contributions to preserving Indigenous culture was the archive of music he produced. He bought an Edison wax cylinder audio recording phonograph and used it to record more than 400 Indigenous songs in Spences Bridge and Telegraph Creek. His wife, Antko, was one of the singers on the first recordings he made with Boas in 1897. After 12 years with Antko, Teit lost her to pneumonia in 1899. A few years later he married Leonie Josephine Morens, the daughter of a French pioneer family. He was 40 and she was just 23 and they went on to have five children – Erik, Inga, Magnus (whose son James lives in Prince George), Sigurd and Thorald.
Teit died at 58 on Oct. 22, 1922 after a lengthy illness caused by a pelvic abscess misdiagnosed as cancer. He left his widow and their children destitute and some of his friends, American ethnologists and big-game hunters he had guided, established a trust fund for the family.
Teit’s knowledge gained by living with native people and his work documenting their ways of life might have been lost if not for Wickwire’s 30 years of devotion to finish her 400-page book. The Nova Scotia native first started digging into Teit’s life when she began studying his song recordings in in the 1980s as a grad student and she finalized the book project after her retirement as a University of Victoria history professor.
Released a year ago by UBC Press, At The Bridge, became a B.C. bestseller this spring. It also won, in addition to the $10,000 Canada Prize, the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio prize for the best regional history and the BC Historical Federation’s Lieutenant Governor’s silver medal for historical writing.
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