Oliver, J. 2014. Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects: A View from the

Northwest Coast'. In N Ferris, R Harrison & M Wilcox (eds.), Rethinking Colonial Pasts

through Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 76-102.

Chapter 3

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency

of Life Projects: A View from

the Northwest Coast

Jeff Oliver

Introduction

If the burgeoning critical literature on colonialism is any indication, one might venture the

point that archaeology is reaching a certain stage of academic sophistication. Taking its cue

from disciplinary shifts across the social sciences and humanities, research priorities have

been moving palpably towards theoretically-informed studies that emphasize how

intercultural relations produced consequences that question the upward swinging plotline of

European expansion. Among indigenous peoples -- the ‘colonized’ of the world’s four

corners -- this has had a marked effect. Whereas ‘the Natives’ were once written out of

history, postcolonial revisionism has made a concerted effort to write them back in. The

‘savage’ dupe, virtually powerless to influence his inevitable decline, has been replaced by

the Indigenous resistance fighter, a potentially shrewd and reflective operator, who

thoughtfully negotiated the unsettling and sometimes violent upheavals of colonialism. In

terms of the history of thought, this represents an important milepost, because it has served to

deconstruct older stereotypes, to elicit a human face, a sense of agency and an embodied form

of encounter; what Neal Ferris (2009) fittingly describes as ‘Native-lived colonialism’.

2

However, taking a step back to view the contours of an emerging postcolonial orthodoxy,

where the pendulum of history writing swings the other way, can sometimes reveal a new set

of creeping essentialisms. With our common commitment to defining aboriginal agency,

particularly with respect to cultural reproduction, we risk an element of superficiality by

placing too much emphasis on the idea that cultural (or ethnic) identity was an inalienable

possession worn on the sleeve (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 22). Yet, bluntly put,

culture and identity are not the same thing – as too many archaeological narratives imply.

Indeed, the knowing subaltern protagonist who intentionally polices ethnic boundaries in the

face of colonial pressures perhaps says more about academic fetishes and the ethnic politics

of contemporary decolonization movements, than it does about the multiple ways in which

people understood their place in the world in the past.

In this essay I argue that Native-lived colonialism is better understood by examining the

variable nature of different modalities of power as well as a more complex understanding of

agency. It begins by reviewing how prominent ideas within postcolonial thought have

influenced archaeological agendas and touches on some the problems that a narrow

conception of agency can produce. I then move on to develop a comparative approach that

better contextualizes power within a distinct colonial region. In particular, the argument

emphasizes how the agency of life projects, arising out of the conditions and affordances in

the colonial landscape, carved out spaces and temporalities of discourse, which challenge

these assumptions. Finally -- moving from theory to practice -- I compare and contrast three

case studies from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Columbia on the

Northwest Coast of North America. Each provides a unique understanding of colonial

entanglements and new insights into the way that different life projects set up points of

3

reference that in turn gave rise to both ties of similarity and lines of distinction, which

emerged and dissolved in different social arenas.

Domination and Resistance in Postcolonial Discourse

The study of colonialism has become one of the most hotly debated issues of recent decades.

Spurred by decolonization movements from the Indian subcontinent to Africa and from the

Americas to Australia, an emerging postcolonial discourse has provided the language and

theoretical toolkit for analyses of, and critical responses to, the cultural legacy of colonialism.

Liebmann (2008: 4) provides a useful overview of the three principle intersections that

archaeology shares with postcolonial studies: as a way of opening up the discipline of

archaeology to a wider range of participants and voices; appreciating the role that

archaeology plays in constructing and deconstructing colonialist discourses; and finally, as

means of interpreting events and processes within the colonial past. It this latter area of

research – interpreting (indeed reinterpreting) the past – which most concerns the arguments

laid out here. Crosscutting all of these intersections, however, are two themes that have been,

and continue to be, influential to a broad spectrum of postcolonial writing: the politics of

domination and resistance.

Postcolonial theory emerged within a vanguard of literary scholars concerned with analyzing

cultural productions connected with the foundation and legitimization of European colonial

territories. Their conclusions made for unsettling reading. Spurred by Edward Said’s (1978)

now classic work, which exposed the unequal power relations bound up with the west’s

representation of the east, postcolonial theorists concluded that western authors portrayed

non-western peoples through the lens of an ethnocentric stereotype. Joined by an increasingly

wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship, deconstruction of a variety of ‘texts’ from

4

maps (Carter 1987; Harley 1988) to ethnographic accounts (Clifford 1986; Crapanzano

1986), revealed these were not neutral accounts of colonized landscapes, but artifacts of

domination, which at best misrepresented Indigenous groups; at worst, erased them from the

landscape all together.

A second major area of research has sought to go beyond critiques of colonial oppression,

and toward an emphasis on the ways in which the ‘colonized’ responded to the challenges

posed. This strand of thinking has become particularly important in former colonies where

Indigenous revitalization movements have taken root, taking shape through what Deleuze and

Guattari (1988) term the ‘deterritorialization’ of colonialist narratives. Whereas earlier

traditions of scholarship assumed that the civilizing forces of European conquest would

disperse or assimilate the culturally inferior Native groups, closer examination of the

evidence suggested that local peoples did not passively accept their fate. When shifting scales

of analysis, from the grand narrative of colonial discourse to the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992)

of cultural entanglement, the central focus has rested on the powers of human agency and the

ability to ‘act back’, despite colonial power structures. According to postcolonial dictum,

there are always spaces for resistance. Reactions to colonial processes may take a variety of

forms, from overt political acts of violence and dissent (Acheson and Delgado 2004; Lutz

2008: 135-136) to more habitualized forms of cultural reproduction.

It is the latter focus of research, on cultural reproduction, which has most concerned

archaeology. Based on the now well-accepted axiom that artifacts are invested with particular

values, attempts at eliciting resistance have focused on teasing out the ‘traditional’ within

hybridized or composite cultural forms as a means of demonstrating how certain cultural

imperatives were essentially sustained, despite assumed pressures to conform. Such

5

arguments have highlighted, for instance, how the enduring patterns of indigenous

architecture, from building materials to internal social organization, served to reinforce the

cultural identity of the group (e.g. Martindale 2006; Lefpofsky et al 2009). Similar

conclusions have been drawn by demonstrating that while Indigenous peoples eventually

became dependent upon mass produced products, their separateness as non-Europeans was

asserted through manipulating commodities in distinctly home-grown ways (Blackman 1976;

Carlson 2006; Lightfoot et al 1998; Jordan 2009; Marshall and Mass 1997; Martindale 2009;

Martindale and Jurakic 2006; Mass 2003). These ideas have served to redress the imbalances

typically embedded within colonial history by demonstrating how the colonial process was

intertwined with an important element of ambiguity.

A Warning about Indiginisms

Though the politics of domination and resistance continue to be important themes in

postcolonial debates, recent years have also seen calls to go beyond it (Gosden 2004;

Harrison 2004; Ortner 2001). In attempting to more clearly situate postcolonial accounts

within the legacy of colonialism, an established critique turns on the notion that the very

cultural categories that revisionist scholarship seeks to rescue from oblivion are themselves,

not uncommonly, distillations created through colonial encounters (Béteille 1998: 189; Kuper

2003; Liebmann 2008). In this context, we cannot ignore the efficacy that different forms of

representing the indigenous subject, notably ethnography and census taking, have had on

establishing the very orderly boundaries of culture and ethnicity (Dirks 1992) universally

employed to inform aboriginality in both the past and the present. This is not to suggest that

pre-colonial societies are unknowable, but rather it is to caution us that throwing lifelines to

the voices of cultural resistance can share a certain romantic naivety, which valorizes the

6

agency of the colonized, at least a particular kind of agency (more on this later), over other

affordances emergent in the colonial landscape.

The implications for archaeologies of colonialism can, therefore, be reductive, to the extent

that the ‘colonized’ becomes primarily defined by a single pole of experience: as a defender

of their cultural integrity. Rather than moving beyond the familiar caricatures of colonialist

history, we let them in again through the back door, only this time recast: while the colonist

raises his familiar sword of progress, the Native fights back with tradition. A bird’s eye view

of the postcolonial landscape is one where subalterns all inhabit the same theoretical space,

not because the structural relations of their oppression are the same, but because they have

been placed there by what Kaplan (1996: 87-88) calls “a kind of generalized poetics of

displacement”. With agency appropriated as a byword for ‘resistance’, a good deal of

emphasis focuses on the policing of boundaries between nativeness and colonial intrusions,

looking for what Jordan (2009) terms ‘indigenisms’; those aspects of Native culture, material

or otherwise, that seem to retain an element of distinctiveness. It is therefore perhaps

unsurprising that narratives of resistance can descend into objectifications about the status of

a group’s potency or viability given the constraints placed upon it by European expansion.

(see Silliman’s discussion of survivance, this volume, for a similar perspective.) As if social

existence could be summed up to a metaphor about health or well-being, words like

‘persistence’ (Lepofsky et al 2009; Tveskov 2007), ‘strength’ (Thornton 2008), ‘vitality’

(Miller 1997) and ‘coherence’ (Prince 2002) provide a new lexicon for measuring the status

of indigenous identities (Oliver 2009: 245) in a way eerily similar to certain nationalist

archaeology projects (see Jones 1997; Trigger 1984). While it is entirely understandable,

indeed justifiable, that contemporary Indigenous communities (or for that matter any

community), should make such affirmations within the shifting upheavals of the present --

7

where selectivity and intentionality can come into play for very good reasons (Clifford 2001;

Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Lydon 2006: 296; for a good example see Schaepe 2007) --

the marshaling of these views to interpret past identities is far more controversial (cf.

Hillerdal 2009: 12-36).

Comparative Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects

How might we move beyond these essentialisms? In this section I draw from two separate

bodies of literature to suggest a way forward. This involves a fine-grained comparative

approach on the structural relations of colonialism combined with a reconsideration of agency

in terms of the varied affordances embedded in the colonial landscape. The objective is to

move from abstract discussions of culture to a lived-sense of the ever-shifting issues and

tensions that gave definition to Native worlds.

Dissatisfied with the potential pitfalls of interpretation as outline above, increasingly calls

advocate a turn towards comparative research frameworks (Gosden 2004; Given 2004; Hall

1992; Lightfoot 2006; Silliman 2005; Webster 1997). Such approaches provide certain

advantages. Most importantly they sharpen our ability to make qualitative distinctions

between different forms of social and cultural interaction, which tend to be overlooked by the

micro-history model advocated by post-colonial discourse analysis. While a focus on the

interstices of colonial surveillance gains resolution on the grand narrative, by zooming in on

one particular (overlooked) contact zone, its downfall is that we learn little about how

colonialism and its consequences varied over time and space.

One approach, which is clearly gaining in appeal, involves separating out different modalities

of power and authority. As Silliman (2005; See also Jordan, this volume) suggests, not all

8

forms of cultural interaction are defined by an even playing field of power relations,

otherwise we risk creating an ‘ideology of harmony’ (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 18). A

plethora of examples within the social milieu of the North American fur trade suggest

relatively short-term encounters where the ability to influence outcomes were more or less on

an equal footing. From an Indigenous perspective this meant that local cultural logics

remained more or less unaffected and continued to shape the way outside worlds were

incorporated (e.g. Hammel 1987; Turgeon 2004; Saunders 1998). In contrast, colonial

regimes tend to be characterized by long-term forms of intercultural domination (Silliman

2005; for an example see Bedford 2004). In these contexts, western influences had more

marked effects. Of course, as Jordan (2009) points out in a helpful synthesis of cultural

entanglements from North America and Ireland, different contours of structural power

produce a what he terms a ‘continuum’ of consequences, from relative freedom, to limited

colonial control to contexts of overwhelming colonial domination.

A comparative methodology that crosscuts significant temporal and spatial scales provides a

degree of analytical purchase often lacking within the micro-history approach concerned with

‘deconstructing’ the local. Nevertheless, working within such broad frames of reference tells

us less about the vicissitudes, textures and ambiguities of Native-lived experience across a

particular region or colony in more restricted temporal frameworks. This is because colonial

power was itself met with certain obstacles from geographical barriers and ‘the struggle with

distance’ (Harris 1997) to the character of structural power, and its inconsistencies, which

hinged upon differing agendas, resources and materialities. Thus if we are to come to grips

with better resolution about the limits of colonial authority, it is towards a nuanced regional

assessment of its precise forms that we must work.

9

Critical appraisal of the developing colonial power structures is an important start; however,

it is not enough on its own. As postcolonial discourse has long advocated, an understanding

of indigenous agency must be central to any project of analysis. Where the approach

promoted here differs from a number of others is in its insistence upon the notion of agency

that is relational, rather than reactive (e.g. Herva 2009; Ingold 2000; Oliver 2011; Robb

2010). Here it is important to note that agency is grounded within the possibilities of place

that in turn informed choices, improvisations and enunciations about a multiplicity of

conversations (cf. Bender 2002). Such a position urges us to reconsider narrower definitions

of agency as resistance – the power to derail pathways to colonization according to freewill –

which all too often dominate our discussions. This is not to suggest that the subaltern was

unable to change things in their favor, only that such capacities are not infinite and are

themselves tied to normative (albeit changeable) structures within the colonial landscape

A number of points lead outward from this perspective if we are to move past a more

narrowly conceived sense of what Native-lived colonialism was all about. Responses toward

outside influences depended on the establishment of contingent sets of relationships among

people, and between people and things. These relationships acted not only to condition or

impact social life, but also served to enable other kinds of associations and other kinds of

meanings. Thinking about the consequences of colonialism in a creative light is not intended

to diminish the destructive power that it had, but doing so urges us to consider that such

transformations also had indelible side effects, which arguably formed the basis for novel

forms of social categorization (Clifford 2001; Comeroff and Comeroff 1997; Gosden 2004).

One of the most important forms of agency for the present discussion is the agency of life

projects (Ortner 2001: 79-80; Robb 2010). This is the kind that gives the ordinary life roles

people play and the careers they adopt a sense of purpose. In place of often short-term

10

rebellious ‘acts’ and spaces of dissent where resistance commonly plays out, the temporal and

spatial frameworks of life projects or social desires unfold as longer term social

responsibilities within routine landscapes of inhabitation. Such genres of activity are crucial

for the maintenance of certain institutions because they specify the boundaries and

obligations of practice defining who could be involved as much as how members should

conduct themselves. Articulated in this way, this conception of agency necessarily transcends

the arena of individuals to include collectives of people and things acting in concert, meaning

that undertaking these kinds of activities is itself a form of discourse (Robb 2010: 507;

compare with Silliman’s development of the idea of residence, this volume).

It follows on from this that agency is not so much a struggle for the maintenance of (a

unique) identity, but rather it describes the contingent emergence of an articulation of

resources (including people, ideas and objects), which in turn sets the stage for creating ties

of similarity and lines of difference (Jenkins 2005; see also Oliver 2010). I will argue that to

better understand the complexity of Native-lived colonialism, we need to examine the way in

which different social projects gave rise to multiple lines of tension and that these were

resolved at different scales of social existence. Keeping in mind my earlier discussion about

the variable effects of colonialism, the task at hand, then, is to see how responses differed

according to the issues that were at stake. As we shall see, the tensions that shaped cultural

(or ethnic) identity were not the only debate.

Comparative Case Studies

To illustrate the ideas raised above, the remainder of this essay compares three separate

contexts of colonial entanglement from coastal British Columbia, a one time colony of the

British Empire and more recently a Canadian province. The temporal frame for this

11

discussion is the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth, a

period commonly viewed as exemplifying increasing colonial control with its assumed

correlate: indigenous submission (e.g. Fisher 1977; Duff 1997). However, as Adams (1981:

382) has noted, it would be a mistake to assume that colonialism was experienced evenly

across the extremely varied physical and human geography of this region, or that responses

towards it were in any way monolithic.

Fig. 3.1. Map of the British Columbia coast, showing places discussed in the text. Map drawn

by Jenny Johnston.

Christianity at Metlakatla

For many newcomers to the coast, the pathway to social advancement was through

establishing a respectable agrarian living; for others colonial labors were considered best

12

spent winning souls for Christ, rather than land for agriculture. The competition for converts

was fierce and by the turn of the century dozens of Catholic and Protestant missions were in

operation along the entire coastline (Duff 1997: 132-146). One site in particular provides

important insights into the agency of life projects arising out of the balancing act of Native-

lived colonialism. Founded in 1862 by the Reverend William Duncan, the Anglican mission

of Metlakatla played a crucial role in proselytizing the Coast Tsimshian. Initially founded

with a group of 50 converts, by 1879 it boasted a population around 1000 Indigenous

Christians and what was said to be the largest church west of San Francisco (Duff: 1997: 138;

Neylan 2000: 57-58).

With other Protestant missions it shared not only the common goal of religious education but

also sweeping transformations intended to inculcate its charges with the merits of European

civilization (Neyland 2000: 57-58). This included rituals appropriate to the strict timing and

spacing of Protestant work habits and a sense of discipline becoming of a working class fit

for an emerging capitalist economy. Transformations were best effected not through words

alone but through disciplinary techniques associated with the control of space. Persuaded by

the doctrine that there was no better education than “the object lesson of a good and well-

ordered Christian home” (Crosby 1914:74), Duncan encouraged his Tsimshian converts to

abandon their vice-filled communal plank houses in favor of hierarchically organized

nuclear-family dwellings (cf. Glassie 1987). The emerging ‘model’ community featured

houses patterned on British workers’ cottages, educational institutions, such as a schoolhouse,

and industrial facilities including a weaving house, blacksmith shop, cannery and sawmill.

However, the ideals of Duncan’s utopian venture were not necessarily replicated in practice.

By 1881, the population was re-housed within eighty-eight uniform semi-detached dwellings

13

organized within geometric blocks, each with fenced gardens. The houses featured three

bedrooms upstairs and two rooms on the ground floor (Duff 1997: 138; Perry 2003: 600).

And yet, if the outward appearance of civility seemed to reflect the success of the mission,

interior alterations to the plan suggested otherwise. Most of the houses had central family

rooms considerably enlarged in size, with only small end rooms for sleeping or storage.

Fireplaces were located ‘Indian Style’ in the centre of the room and in some cases a ‘guest

room’ was constructed connecting two houses and both families would sit around one fire,

leaving the rest of the rooms largely deserted (Neyland 2000: 81; Perry 2003: 604). As Perry

(2003: 603) puts it, “while the row houses…superficially replicated the abodes of the English

working class, their interiors demonstrated the persistence of Tsimshian models of kinship.”

Fig 3.2. Photograph of Metlakatla ‘row houses’ c. 1880s. Image C-08,105, courtesy of Royal

BC Museum, BC Archives.

14

How should we interpret such evidence? Perry’s (2003: 601-604) examination of the

correspondence of occasional visitors shows how the built environment could bring the issue

of cultural identity into sharp relief. For some, Metlakatla’s row houses were “solid evidence

of social transformation and spiritual conversion.” For others, who had witnessed the

continued preference for communal living, they amounted to a “clever scheme” for thwarting

“civilized and sanitary ideas”; objectifications that drew the line between civilized newcomer

and uncouth savage. But a more interesting question is whether such dwellings, as

accommodations of an older cultural logic, were marshaled as ciphers of cultural identity by

the Tsimshian themselves.

Neylan’s (2000) analysis provides an intellectual space for rethinking identity politics at

Metlakatla. A central pivot of her discussion hinges on how the mission encouraged

transformations within established Tsimshian institutions. Nevertheless, as she points out,

aboriginal viewpoints about conversion can only be understood vis-à-vis ‘traditional’ notions

of class. Christianity offered significant social advantages. It opened up new routes of

mobility that contoured prescriptions about how status distinctions might be reinforced and

who could participate in them. In common with other north coast societies, social rank was

typically inherited and pathways to esteem, such as conspicuous forms of gift giving, were

narrowly prescribed. Moreover, with limited access to symbolic capital, it was much more

difficult for commoners to climb the social ladder. What Christianity offered was the chance

to gain new spiritual and material resources.

As with the integration of mass-produced trade goods, at first experimentally, the

consumption of ‘Christianity’ within local cultural frameworks tended to begin with elites

and ended with commoners. Selectively in the beginning, and then more systematically with

15

the establishment of the mission and its disciplinary routines, Tsimshian elites gained

familiarity with the values of the church (albeit one refracted through local cultural logic)

because it provided a means through which to gain social leverage. Encouraged by their head

men, kin groups followed suit. This was more than just about religious authority. An ability

to perform using the knowledge competencies of western society, such as literacy, industrial

training and a capitalist mindset, brought with it important rewards. Notably it enabled entry

to and familiarity with the wage-labor economy (Lutz 2008), a strategy that not only brought

financial benefits and respectability within capitalist society, but was also used to fund

‘traditional’ Indigenous practices, such as the potlatch. In this way, the pursuit of the

respectable Christian life path became tied up with a host of other institutions, some with

older roots, and others with more recent ones.

Examining social distinctions through the prism of the Christian life project allows us to

move away from the tired language of domination and resistance. If the values of Metlakatla

were constituted by its social and material practices then the issue of cultural identity (or

‘Tsimshianess’) was not commonly at stake among the Tsimshian themselves, and would

appear to be the objectification of outsiders trying to make sense of a world they little

understood. Far more important among Metlakatla’s residents were issues that served to reify

older lines of demarcation in novel ways and to create new lines of distinction previously

unseen. For example, although the mission encouraged equality among its converts, not all

were viewed equally. The chief Paul Ligeex lived in a house noticeably larger than the others

(Neylan 2000: 81); an accommodation made by Duncan, which reified Ligeex’s role at the

head of one of Metlakatla’s most powerful kin groups. While its’ prim façade satisfied

protestant ideals of order, its size reproduced the architectural scale of lineage households of

noble birth. Within broader social arenas, the built environment of Metlakatla was mobilized

16

by other concerns as well. Duncan is known to have written home about attempts among the

non-converted to revive ‘heathenism’ among the local ‘Indians’ (Fisher 1977: 140). The

effect of Metlakatla was to divide the Tsimshian into pro- and anti-missionary factions. The

consequent hostilities that arose produced lines of fragmentation that split society in new

ways. This was a conflict between (Native) ‘Christians’ and (Native) ‘heathens’, a fault line

that tore the caricatures of colonizer and colonized from their assumed frame. Indeed, within

certain Indigenous circles, European style houses became “a sign of membership within an

elite cadre of the converted” (Perry 2003: 602). The point here is not to investigate such

material tensions in any detail, but rather to show how the agency of life projects represents a

flexible reworking of older structures, grounded in the improvisational nature of ongoing

relations with a wider world that were only ever temporally stable.

Burial and Treatment of the Dead at Kimsquit

Beyond the islands of colonial settlement and missionary activity, pressure to conform was

more limited. With its labyrinthine archipelagos, long and convoluted fjords and mountainous

terrain, many parts of the coast remained relatively inaccessible until later in the twentieth

century. One such place was Kimsquit, an Indigenous community among the Nuxalk people

located deep within the Dean Channel, over 100 kilometers from the outer coast and principal

routes of navigation. While historical records are thin on the ground, it is known that the

Kimsquit earned a reputation with the colonial government for being backward and stubborn.

Royal Naval vessels intervened in local affairs in the 1870s, once to protect railway

surveyors, and a second time to punish certain residents for allegations of piracy and murder.

In the 1880s, two decades after Metlakatla’s establishment, the Kimsquit Indian reserve was

surveyed and local residents began to participate in the wage labor economy, notably within

commercial fishing and logging (Kennedy and Bouchard 1990: 337). Although the Native

17

community accepted a number of imported conveniences, they were disinclined to alter their

subsistence economy or give up their communal plank-houses, though they did add a number

of frame-built cabins to the settlement. What is more, limited missionary contact meant that

the Kimsquit had an ambivalent relationship with Christianity, a situation which likely

prevailed until the village was abandoned in 1927 (Prince 2002: 51-52).

A recent interpretation of the changing burial traditions at the historic cemetery by Prince

(2002; 2003) provides a complex picture of how the Kimsquit experimented with objects and

ideas initially derived from an ‘outside’ world. However, the site also provides important

insights into the agency of certain life projects operating around the turn of the twentieth

century, which continued to be instrumental to local world views. Mid-nineteenth century

inhumations, the earliest and by far the most numerous, were characterized by placing a

squatting individual into a snug bent-wood box, which was lowered into a large hole and

covered over by earth. After the cedar box decayed and collapsed, burials resulted in a

circular depression. In contrast, late nineteenth and early twentieth century burials were

marked by the rapid integration of ‘European’ materials and methods. Notably, they were

characterized by elongated depressions, the result of a shift towards extended burial and the

use of coffins made of lumber, metal fasteners and nails (Hobler 1972; McIlwraith 1948).

Earlier interpretations put such changes down to acculturation (e.g. Hobler 1986; Fladmark

1973). However, as Prince’s assessment of form indicates, the Kimsquit simply integrated

these materials and ideas into a ‘mortuary system’ with longstanding social and ideological

structures (Prince 2002: 52).

This argument is supported by the range of associated burial features and artifacts, which

approximate in form central coast mortuary traditions. At least ten grave houses, cabin-like

18

dwellings for the ghosts of the dead, were found to incorporate non-traditional materials, such

as milled lumber, hinged doors, and glass windows. The adoption of objects like windows

might outwardly suggest an accommodation of European values, nevertheless, the overall

grave house form respected pre-contact burial architecture derived from their neighbors. In

addition, grave sites were often associated with two broad types of memorials. This included

wooden mortuary posts or planks carved with the crests of the departed, but also tombstones

depicting the name of the deceased with family names. Both were likely related to the status

of the dead and the rights and obligations of the lineage. Beyond these built structures, a wide

range of mass produced grave goods were located inside grave houses or loosely associated

with elongated depressions. This included items as varied as metal basins, ceramic table

wares, iron bed frames and sewing machines. If the large volume of mass-produced goods

suggests at least some degree of dependence on ‘modern’ materials, the fact that they were

treated as burial offerings is indicative of their significance within what might be described as

a non-European burial rite.

19

Fig. 3.3. Photograph of grave house, showing associated memorial. Photograph by John

William Clark. Image I-52,703, courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.

The comparative value of the cemetery at Kimsquit serves to foreground a number of issues.

Beyond problematizing older arguments about the erosion of Native culture, it highlights the

variability of responses to colonialism given the unevenness of colonial power structures.

Unlike at Metlakatla, with its routine disciplinary techniques and more narrowly

accommodated forms of cultural negotiation, at Kimsquit colonial power was limited in

scope meaning that the community was able to experiment with non-local influences

20

according to locally mediated notions of acceptability. While we cannot ignore colonial

authority altogether, such as the infrequent visits by Indian agents and missionaries, who

encouraged western forms of ‘improvement’, their influence was nevertheless restricted. This

is reflected in the peculiar admixture of Indigenous and Christian symbols seen within the

cemetery. Indeed, the most conspicuous grave sites were characterized by grave houses and

western style headstones, suggesting an emphasis on cosmological syncretism (Prince 2002:

61). The fact that grave houses are thought to have been introduced through ties with the

neighboring Heiltsuk around 1900 (Kennedy and Bouchard 1990: 332), well after modes of

colonial surveillance came into practice, helps to confirm this pattern of relative

independence. It is for this reason that we might also cast doubt on Prince’s own conclusions,

which see cultural continuity as an indication of “the assertion and redefinition of native

identity in the face of acculturative pressure” (2002: 63). Ethnographic analogues have a long

history of establishing continuities between prehistoric and historic cultures on the coast (e.g.

Carlson 1983: 198; Ames and Maschner 1999). But, as the old archaeological maxim goes,

pots do not necessarily stand for people -- as if capable of summing up some core

characteristic (cf. Adams 1981: 375). What is more, given the relatively few limitations

imposed on the Kimsquit by this period, and the baggage of the term ‘native’ -- itself a

colonial label that we should not assume was used by local peoples as a means of self-

identification -- one wonders whether intentions were ever as volitional as this. More

convincingly, inferences like this one say more about the working practices of archaeologists

and relations of twentyfirst-century ethnic nationalism than they do about identity politics in

the past.

In place of a narrative of resistance, what the site does provide is an inroad to the agency of

community life projects seen within the social space of the cemetery: the proper burial and

21

treatment of the deceased. As recent arguments within mortuary archaeology advocate, burial

and commemoration were as much about the living as they were about the dead (Parker

Pearson 1999; Tarlow 1999). Indeed a socially efficacious burial and its complex of

associated rites and obligations often served to reaffirm not only the status of the departed

and their ancestry, but also the very cosmological foundations of existence. As far as we can

tell from the imperfect ethnographic record, Nuxalk burial rites at the turn of the twentieth

century afforded services for the underworld while at the same time giving protection and

purification for the living. As the possessions of the deceased were believed to be polluted,

relatives would burn them to prevent sickness. Possessions burned on the first day of the

funeral were distributed among the spirits of the underworld. On the fourth day, a second

burning was exclusively for the use of the deceased and all non-burnable items, such as metal

and ceramic objects were then laid at the grave side where they could be later reclaimed by

the ghost. After the burial, the relatives of the dead and others who had handled the corpse

were purified and payment was made to those who had assisted with the funeral (Kennedy

and Bouchard 1990: 332; McIlwraith 1948). These performances served to mark people out

in conspicuous ways, meaning that social identities would have come into focus over the

course of the funeral, and after, according to the different roles that people adopted (familial

versus non-familial, ritual specialists versus the uninitiated, etc.). The point to emphasize here

is that such activity was communal in nature and served to produce a space of discourse that

satisfied certain desires associated with the lifecycle. From the outside looking in, it is

tempting to acknowledge that traditions born of intercultural relations combine heterogeneous

elements of old and new and that this should have been significant to people in the past. But

from Kimsquit looking out, what had changed and what had stayed the same would have

mattered little – if even registered -- in the context of highly institutionalized practices (cf.

22

Silliman, this volume). Rather, of significance was conducting one’s self in a socially

efficacious manner.

Improvement and Agrarian Discourse in the Fraser Valley

Attracted by its rich agricultural soils and access to early supply centers, European settlement

formed an oasis of colonial interest in the Fraser Valley, on the south coast of British

Columbia. Consequently, the power structures of colonialism, including a land system that

served as a ‘disciplinary appendage’ of the colonial state (Harris 1997), developed more

quickly here than along other parts of the coast. This process commenced with the surveying

of a cadastre, which transformed ‘wilderness’ into parcels of ‘land’ for sale. At the same

time, an Indian reserve system was implemented, corralling local Halkomelem speakers to

the margins of this new colonial space. The first reserves were surveyed in the 1860s and

were soon followed by a government sponsored program of social engineering (Carlson

1996: 94; Harris 2002: 269-270). Among its most important goals was to convert the

‘savages’ from “roaming-about people” (Fisher 1977: 184) to settled agricultural producers.

Therefore it is not difficult to locate the root of tensions that served to mark out Natives as

being different and racialized as ‘Others’. If cultural and linguistic peculiarities were not

enough to draw the line, the fact that Natives lived, for the most part, behind the boundaries

of Indian reserves as wards of the state was certainly sufficient to reinforce their identities as

inferior. Given their systematic exclusion from many parts of colonial society, it is not

surprising that Indigenous peoples participated in different kinds of protest (Carlson 2001;

Harris 2002; Stadfeld 1999) and even novel formulations of ethnic identity, hinging on the

collective experience of colonial oppression (Oliver 2010: Ch 9, 2013).

23

However, as much as Native lives revolved around resistance, they were also concerned with

adapting their situations to make the most of changing circumstances. By the turn of the

twentieth century, many had lived their entire lives within the power structures of the colonial

state and had acquired a certain fluency with which to negotiate its demands. One of the most

important transformations to take place among the Halkomelem was in identifying that land

could be converted to symbolic capital through its improvement. For reserves endowed with

good agricultural soils and an appreciation of the social benefits that an agrarian living could

bring, social desires coalesced around being a good farmer. While social advancement

through agriculture was less accessible than via Christianity, because opportunities to obtain

access to land were far more restricted in the Fraser Valley, nevertheless, a number of

reserves became noted for their agricultural skills (Knight 1978: 175). In fact when

respectability turned on matters of harnessing the soil, Native and settler lifestyles were not

all that different (Kostuchencko 2000: 20). Both struggled to clear stands of old growth

forest, to work the land according to the rhythms of the season and to deal with the instability

of an emerging market. These kinds of comparisons were not usually raised at the broader

scale of race relations. However, in a number of instances Indigenous agricultural

‘prosperity’ helped to create life projects that set the stage for far more ambiguity than the

labels settler and Native normally imply.

One of the most successful Native farmers in this context, regarded highly by Natives and

settlers alike, was ‘Billy’ Sepass, Chief of the Scowkale Indian reserve (see also Oliver 2010:

195-199). Unlike the Tsimshian in the north, high status among the Halkomelem hinged more

upon the possession of particular bodies of cultural knowledge, such ancestral names or an

ability to manipulate important natural resources (Duff 1952: 80-87; see for example Oliver

2007), than it did on right of birth. But by the late nineteenth century access to ‘traditional’

24

forms of symbolic capital became increasingly destabilized. Rather than succumb to these

pressures, certain high ranking individuals appropriated the knowledge systems of

improvement traded upon by white society in order to help cultivate their positions of

authority. This does not mean a simple abandonment of Native values. On the contrary,

Sepass used his knowledge of agricultural practice, gained from experience as a farm hand

for a local white settler, to guide his own people towards agricultural security (Wells 1987:

36). His acquired knowledge would not only reinforce his position as chief, it also helped him

to gain social leverage within white society.

That his knowledge of agrarian discourse was substantial is demonstrated by certain

improvements he made to his land within the Scowkale reserve. For example, he constructed

a frame built house with steep gable ends and dormer windows. Around the house was a

white picket fence that created a zone of exclusion between the domestic space of the home

and the working space of the farm. Most importantly, social respectability was achieved

through the improvement of his land. Transformations here included a large barn, a fruit

orchard and well-tilled fields (Wells 1987: 36).

If Sepass’s role as respected farmer bolstered his stature among Natives, it was also the

medium through which he placed himself within broader social arenas. This is seen in a

biographical map drawn by Sepass in 1918, prepared with the assistance of local white

farmer and past employer, A. C. Wells (Wells 1987: 75). The map depicts a stylized and

exaggerated view of the rivers and sloughs of the upper valley, suggesting places as they

mattered to the lives of these prominent farmers. Among the many features shown are

English and Halkomelem toponyms, farmsteads, graveyards, roads, the Scowkale Indian

reserve and even the site of the Luckukuk Falls first picnic in 1871. A recent interpretation

25

suggests that its juxtaposed Native and English place names “captures the ever escalating

struggle between Natives and newcomers for land, resources and ‘place’” (Schaepe 2001:

126). To be certain, conflict was an important theme of this period. However, for Sepass the

map seems to have served other ends.

Figure 3.4. Billy Sepass’ map of the lower Chilliwack River c. 1918. Source: Oliver (2010).

Adapted from Wells (1987: 79), drawn by Ana Jorge.

Of particular interest is the vision Sepass possessed of his own farm. Tellingly, he chose to

depict his own space within the valley like the farms of white settlers, using the same

rectangular ideograms. Therefore, if the farmer-cartographer chose to make any distinctions

in this agrarian landscape, it was between his ‘property’ and the rest of the Scowkale reserve

village, which was represented by a single homogenous rectangle. A compelling argument is

26

that the separation on the map was linked to a separation in life, a further means through

which Sepass constituted his role as Chief vis-à-vis his lineage and the commoners who

revered him. The ideas portrayed by the map were no doubt ‘of-the-moment’ (Kitchen and

Dodge: 2007) and do not represent the complex relationships that served to define him in

different social arenas. Nevertheless, if we can ‘excavate’ intent from this particular

inscription, then it was more about building social bridges than cultural boundaries, a strategy

which placed him in good company with those who would mobilize agrarianism as a socially

transformative life project. The argument I am making is more akin to Denis Byrne’s

revealing, if unexpected, findings of the Aboriginal colonial experience in New South Wales,

Australia. Against the grain of common expectation, in that context some Aboriginals

developed a ‘tactical’ relationships with white farmers that resulted in the creation of a web

of friendly, or at least not hostile, relations towards them, often resulting in a good deal of

mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s family histories – of present generations,

parents and even grandparents (Byrne 2003: 180). Similar processes seem to have been at

work here. Even if one questions the more conciliatory tone I favor, we cannot ignore the fact

that Sepass had acquired a deep knowledge of the cultural grammar of two different social

worlds, a position that provided him with an important amount of security. So as much as

Native-lived colonialism was about conflict, it was also about compromise, about moving on

and making something with what you had.

Discussion

In this final section, I wish to draw out a number of more general observations and also to

point towards outlooks for future thinking. In place of a view of colonialism linked to the

concept of social inevitabilities, we see that it participated in creating an unanticipated variety

of intercultural ‘traditions’. Where colonial power was concentrated, principally at missions

27

and the few agriculturally productive regions where a settler landscape first achieved its

toehold, a significant portion of the Indigenous population enthusiastically engaged with the

possibilities of life presented by European newcomers (Lutz 2008: 161). This should not

necessarily be taken as evidence of acculturation. Indeed, as I have argued, European

institutions such as Christianity and agrarianism were rationalized and ‘accepted’, at least

initially, through locally mediated cultural frameworks and accordingly incorporated into

ways of living and working.

Of course, there are also some important differences between places like Metlakatla and the

Fraser Valley as well. Mission environments combined disciplinary techniques and close

social monitoring with an ostensibly ‘egalitarian’ experience (Neylan 2000; cf. Harkin 1997;

2005), which, although viewed through local power structures, did provide a certain degree of

social mobility to increasing numbers of individuals. This contrasts with the situation on

reserves, where the compulsion to change was not necessarily as systematic. What is more,

given that land was a finite resource and more easily acquired by newcomers, social

respectability through harnessing the soil was less possible. Indeed, this situation is reflected

to some extent in the fact that 90% of the aboriginal population of the province was

nominally Christian by 1904 (Duff 1997: 128), whereas only about 20% of the land

cultivated by Native peoples had been acquired off reserve by 1910 (Knight 1978: 184), a

process constrained by the significant hurdles Natives had to overcome to compete with

white settlers. Nevertheless, individuals like Billy Sepass remind us that agrarian living

brought people from different walks of life together in ways that cause us to revisit

assumptions about what ‘pioneering’ was all about.

28

Native lifeways at power centers of colonialism tend to be partly defined by the desire of

attaining proficiency with the cultural grammar of colonizers. By contrast in areas where

colonial power was more limited, such as at Kimsquit, life projects were mediated by more

local concerns, although with time, this too was apt to change. The threat of colonial

violence, such as ‘gunboat diplomacy’ (Gough 1984), could be used to soften the attitudes of

even the most recalcitrant Natives, but in terms of actually affecting change over the

conditions of everyday life, colonial power represented “little more than a thin white line

amplified by pomp and bluster” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 104). This situation held at

least into the early twentieth century, when itinerancy encouraged by the opportunities of

wage labor began to tear at the fabric of even more remote communities. As we have seen

from the historic cemetery, non-European institutions continued to govern socially valued

practices, such as burial and the treatment of the dead. Viewed from the outside looking in,

agency in this context, enabled through local power structures, takes a more ‘traditional’ tone.

While objects and ideas that made up the cemetery encouraged people to think externally

about themselves in relation to others, we must be careful in suggesting that they necessarily

indicate a ‘Native’ identity. Such categories are the words of colonizers and would only have

begun to gain efficacy among Indigenous peoples once they had become objectified by the

sharp end of colonialism as a homogenous ‘Other’, and consequently felt the experience of

the label with its racialized overtones (Comeroff and Comeroff 1992: 57; Gosden 2004;

Jenkins 2005). A similar argument can be applied to ethno-linguistic nomenclature. Consider

the fact that older Northwest Coast ethnolinguistic maps never seem to agree on boundaries

or terms of definition (Thom 2009; Suttles 1990: 9-11). This is because the criteria used by

ethnographers and administrators frequently differed and could hardly capture the complex

web of overlapping and relational identities, which served to mark people’s affiliations in

different social contexts (cf. Scott 2009: 254-255). We would thus be wise to consider

29

carefully whether the sanitized ethnic boundaries adopted by many Indigenous peoples today

were the same as those operating in the past (e.g. Carlson 2007: 138; Colson 1953; Oliver

2010: 190).

Finally, the case studies also bring to mind a further question, one that tends to be avoided by

postcolonial discourse at all costs. Given time and the rising intensity of colonial forms of

control and cultural integration, should it be considered taboo to accept that in certain

contexts Native lifeways and the agency of life projects did in fact become more like those of

newcomers, so that being ‘Indian’ became a less important form of social distinction? If we

are to create truly sophisticated accounts of indigenous colonial experience, we must also be

prepared to accept that aboriginality, as a way of life, and as a form of self-identification, is

itself a contingent and existential issue. We should therefore cast serious doubt on its

uncritical and homogenous usage as if colonial society could be summed up by a single fault

line separating Native ancestry from everyone else.

While there were many spaces where the prying eyes of the state could not penetrate and

therefore police (e.g. Amoss 1978; Lutz 2008: 161; Martindale 2006; 2009), equally there

were other spaces, from growing towns to residential schools, which shaped life projects and

experiences of cultural learning according to a new and eclectic mix of social, cultural and

economic realities. How people objectified themselves, or were objectified by others, in these

highly varied spaces of interaction, once again brings us back to context, to power relations,

and what is deemed important and possible in any given place. Where and when the politics

of decolonization ground into gear, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, we

might expect to find a range of ‘indigenous articulations’ (Clifford 2001), from those that

mobilize the ‘old’ (Day 1985; Kennedy and Bouchard 1990: 337-338) to those that

30

appropriate the ‘new’ (Ingold and Kurttila: 2000; Townsend-Gault 2004). And yet, in other

social arenas, where the life projects of Native and Newcomer come together, where cultural

differences begin to blur, the tensions that defined Aboriginality could also dissipate.

Sometime momentarily, sometimes for longer, the relations that once brought cultural

objectification into sharp relief were sidelined by more pressing forms of social distinction,

those which continue to haunt humanity the world over. In these contexts, inequalities of

gender, age grade, employment, political affiliation, religion and the like, formed the

substantive issues that served to draw the line (cf. Silliman 2004). Billy Sepas and his

material articulations represent the thin end of the wedge of this kind of ‘Othering’, meaning

that we have much territory to cover. The archaeology of the recent colonial past must face

these issues head on; otherwise we risk historical revisionisms with only the slightest

relevance to the past landscapes we wish to breathe life into.

Conclusion

Native-lived colonialism was not constitutive of one set of relationships, but many. As John

and Jean Comaroff (1997: 5) put it, “it altered everyone and everything involved, if not all in

the same manner and measure.” While it brought endings to certain facets of Native life, it

also encouraged novel beginnings by reinventing older institutions and pioneering new ones.

The case studies reviewed here demonstrate that, as ever, the devil is in the detail. The

landscape of colonialism in coastal British Columbia represented a complex patchwork of

interests and power structures, phenomena that varied as much across space as through time.

My central argument, a lesson applicable to many colonial contexts, is that Native

experiences of the expanding webs of European power and influence did not produce a

monolithic effect. Rather, their responses were as varied as the different ideas and objects that

they encountered. Attempting to understand this variability, how it altered the way that

31

people made sense of their changing surroundings, requires us to move beyond the narrow

language of domination and resistance and towards an approach that begins to separate out

the different modalities of power and agency. Only by recognizing how the particularities of

place gave rise to agency will we begin to make of sense of the social distinctions that really

mattered. Native-lived colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century was many things, from

struggles for independence to opportunities for social advancement. What it was not was a

battle for cultural identity. That battle belongs to a different day: its time is now.

Acknowledgements

A number of people have provided valuable feedback on earlier incarnations of the present

essay. I would like to thank Ana Jorge for her tireless critical engagement with the entire

organization of the piece; Paul Ewonus for encouraging comments and pointing out certain

inconsistencies; and Neal Ferris and Rodney Harrison for their helpful thoughts and

references on the penultimate draft.

32

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