Research was funded by an Urgent Ethnology contract from the National Museums of Canada, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Fellowship, and a grant from the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society.
Many people from the Queen Charlottes have contributed to my research. Lola Dixon first introduced me to Florence Davidson in 1970; Howard Phillips lent photographs for inclusion in the manuscript; Dixie and Howard Post provided hospitality and friendship during the seasons of my field research. Nani’s nine children and their spouses (Alfred and Rose Davidson, Virginia and Dave Hunter, Claude and Vivian Davidson, Sarah Davidson, Primrose and Victor Adams, Emily and Dave Goertzen, Myrtle and Sid Kerrigan, Aggie and Sam Davis, Merle and Knud Andersen, Clara and Brian Hugo) have provided many kindnesses during the years of my comings and goings to the Queen Charlottes. Others from Haida Masset, some now deceased, have shaped my image of the islands, and I acknowledge in particular the assistance of William and Flora Russ, June and Reno Russ, Percy Brown, Amanda Edgars, William and Emma Matthews, and Peter Hill. I am grateful to Nani’s grandson Robert for the use of his dogfish design in chapters 4–9.
More than anyone else, Florence Davidson has given substance to my image of the Queen Charlotte Islands and their people. As teacher, friend, and grandmother she has enriched my life, and I thank her for sharing her life history with me and with readers of this book.
Royalties accruing to the author from publication of this book will go to Florence Davidson.
MARGARET B. BLACKMAN
July 1981
ORTHOGRAPHY
Haida words are spelled phonetically throughout the text. Although there are several works on the Haida language (see Levine 1973 and Lawrence 1977 for works written for a general audience), there is no standard orthography for Haida. Vowels and consonants not listed are pronounced the same as their English equivalents. Haida place names are Anglicized to conform to current map usage.
| a | as in father |
| ae | as in at |
| E | as in let |
| e | as in late |
| i | as in beet |
| ɨ | as in it |
| ə | as in accompany |
| ay | as in light |
| u | as in tune |
| U | as in put |
| o | as in oat |
| ł | unvoiced 1, made by placing the tongue in the 1 position and blowing air out laterally |
| z | as in dogs |
| c | as in church |
| x | as in the German ich (“I”) |
| q | made like k only farther back in the throat |
| ? | glottal stop; the sound or “pause” that occurs in “oh oh” |
| ′ | all sounds followed by an apostrophe are made with a constricted glottis |
| ؟ | a sound produced by constriction of the pharyngeal cavity; similar to the sound one makes when blowing on eyeglasses prior to cleaning them |
DURING MY TIME
Florence Edenshaw Davidson
A HAIDA WOMAN
CHAPTER 1
The Life-History Project
… the life history is still the most cognitively rich and humanly understandable way of getting at an inner view of culture. [No other type of study] can equal the life history in demonstrating what the native himself considers to be important in his own experience and how he thinks and feels about that experience. [Phillips 1973:201]
THE LIFE HISTORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY
The writing of native life histories has long been regarded by anthropologists as a legitimate as well as popular approach to understanding and describing other cultures.1 In 1922, for example, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons wrote in the preface to her biography of a Zuni woman: “In our own complex culture biography may be a clarifying form of description. Might it not avail at Zuni?” (Parsons 1922:158). Alfred Kroeber, who wrote the introduction to American Indian Life, in which Parsons’ article appears, believed that the unique contribution of this collection of biographical sketches was their insight into the social psychology of the American Indian. Unfortunately, most of the contributors to this volume found it necessary to fictionalize the life histories, inventing characters for the ethnographic data on the individual life cycle.
While it is fortunate that fictionalized life histories have been the exception in anthropological research, their very existence points to the significance of the medium for presenting the cultural record. The utility and success of the life-history approach in anthropology can be attributed to a number of factors. In the first place, the basic fabric of ethnology is woven from the scraps of individuals’ lives, from the experiences and knowledge of individual informants. Many ethnographic accounts of subsistence activities, marriage, and ritual observances, for example, are derived directly from the personal experiences of members of a culture, and as anthropologists work closely with selected informants, the presentation of ethnographic data from the longitudinal perspective of the individual life is not surprising. “Culture” as lived by the individual represents the ultimate inside view, and the life history thus serves as a useful complement to the standard ethnography.
The life history also complements the ethnographic account by adding to the descriptive an affective or experiential dimension. We know, for example, from early ethnographic accounts of Haida culture the form and function of the girl’s puberty ritual and the structure of Haida marriage, and from more recent ethnohistoric studies we know the changes wrought in Haida culture following contact. But these sources do not really address the question of meaning: What was the puberty seclusion really like? What did it mean to the individual to have his or her marriage arranged at an early age? How did individuals respond to various cultural changes? The life history is uniquely suited to addressing this kind of question.
The life history is also an appropriate medium for the study of acculturation. In many cultures the lives of natives span periods of critical and rapid culture change; the life history affords a personalized, longitudinal view of these changes.
Kluckhohn (1945), in a now classic article on the use of personal documents in anthropology, adds that life histories can be avenues to understanding status and role, individual variation within cultural patterns of behavior, personality structure, deviance, and idiosyncratic variation.
Native Americans have been by far the most popular subject material for life histories. Interest in the lives of American Indians began in the nineteenth century as famous and notorious Indian leaders commanded the attention of the public and sparked the writing of romantic and sentimental biographies. Langness (1965), for example, lists thirty-six American Indian life histories published between 1825 and 1900. A more recent and comprehensive accounting of Native American life histories (Brumble 1981), which brings the list up to the 1980s, contains over five hundred entries. Were one to include the numerous non-first-person accounts of Native American lives, which Brumble does not, this total would be considerably larger. The earliest anthropological life histories were also of American Indians (Kroeber 1908; Radin 1913). The recently published biographical sketches in American Indian Intellectuals (Liberty 1978) point to a still-current interest in the “great men”2 of native society, though simultaneously there has been a growing interest in recording the lives of ordinary Native Americans.
Inspired in part by Franz Boas’ early interest in the individual and his field research on the Northwest Coast, a number of life histories of Northwest Coast natives have been published over the years.3 Edward Sapir included a fictionalized life history of a Nootka trader in American Indian Life (Parsons 1922); Diamond Jenness (1955) relied upon the personal reminiscences of “Old Pierre” to compile his treatise on Katzie supernatural beliefs; and Marius Barbeau’s discussion of Haida argillite carvings (1957) included data on the artistic