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Article Excerpt
Introduction
A score of individuals sit huddled in the underbrush, each tightly wrapped in the dye-banded wool of a Hudson Bay Company blanket (Figure 1). Above the blanket hems, attentive faces--some elderly, many quite young--peer at us, unflinchingly meeting our gaze across the historical gulf that separates our time from theirs. In the background their dwellings rise above the twisted thicket of vegetation--large houses of unadorned cedar planks facing the open water just visible in the middle distance along the image's right edge.
The subjects of this provocative image were the Kwakwaka'wakw inhabitants of Forward Inlet, an arm of Quatsino Sound located on Vancouver Island's northwestern coast. The date was 18 September 1878 and the photographer was George Dawson, the Geological Survey of Canada's principal surveyor in British Columbia (BC) during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Following an extensive and productive exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands, (1) Dawson had come to Forward Inlet in search of the rich coal seams that several tantalizing rumours and his own geological instincts told him were there. As was his practice, Dawson occupied himself with a careful reconnaissance of the inlet's coal-bearing rocks throughout the day before visiting the native village with his photographic equipment in the evening, once his official obligations had been met. Dawson's interest in documenting these Kwakwaka'wakw villagers was not unprecedented. In addition to being one of Canada's leading geologists, Dawson had become something of an amateur ethnographer in the course of his BC field work. Whenever circumstances permitted, Dawson recorded myths, collected vocabularies, observed ceremonies and photographed the native villages and peoples he encountered. Indeed, the Forward Inlet photograph was merely one of many ethnographic images that Dawson had produced over the course of the 1878 field season.
Something, however, is not right with this particular image. The figures in the foreground have the blurred features and undefined edges of ghostly apparitions. Fewer than half a dozen faces have discernable expressions and several of the individuals appear as little more than smoky voids against the crisply-rendered vegetation and dwellings in the background. Dawson's field notes offer an explanation: '[I] had endless difficulty in getting them [the villagers] to understand what was wanted, to go to the right place, & finally to sit still. The photo if it turns out visible at all I fear will be a very poor one' (Cole and Lockner 1989, 530). Dawson's pessimism was based on his recognition that late nineteenth century field cameras required subjects to remain absolutely stationary during the long exposures in order for images to be rendered crisply and clearly. Of course, for a native community that was unaccustomed to posing for the camera and was both uninterested in and disconnected from the final product, the inclination to sit completely still for several minutes at a stretch was understandably low.
As unintentional as it was, however, Dawson's photograph nonetheless depicted these villagers as strangely ethereal and decidedly ephemeral. Indeed, looking at the photograph, it is hard to escape the perception that these people are dissipating into the air before our eyes--vanishing, quite literally, into the woodwork that will continue to stand sentinel over Forward Inlet after their passing. It is an arresting effect, creating a melancholic image richly tinged with pathos and loss.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Dawson's photographic 'mis-take' at Forward Inlet thus provides an ideal point of departure for this article because it serves as an especially apposite visual metaphor for his ethnographic vision--a vision that Dawson articulated explicitly not long after his visit to Quatsino Sound:
[T]he ultimate fate of the Red Man of North America is absorption and extinction: just as European animals introduced into Australia and other regions, frequently drive those native of the country from their haunts, and may even exterminate them, and as European wild plants accidentally imported, have become the most sturdy and strong in our North American pastures; so the Indian races seem to diminish and melt away in contact with the civilization of Europe ... (Dawson 1881, 157-58).
For Dawson, BC's hinterlands were populated by a vanishing 'race' whose 'melting away' was simply the most recent manifestation of a process that had been taking place on the North American continent since the arrival of the first Europeans. Such a perspective was not unique. The 'Vanishing Indian', as Daniel Francis reminds us, was an imaginary subject position frequently imposed upon the continent's indigenous populations by settlers, government officials, missionaries and anthropologists alike in the late nineteenth century (Francis 1992). Like many of his contemporaries, then, Dawson felt that the native peoples encountered in the course of his scientific surveying were in an irreversible state of decline and that their 'traditional' customs and material culture should be preserved through texts, photographs and museum-bound artefacts before they completely disappeared.
Yet, the significance of Dawson's ethnographic work went beyond merely preserving traces of the province's 'traditional' indigenous cultures in museum cabinets and in print. Rather, I argue that Dawson's recurring ethnographic vision of the 'Vanishing Indian' made a significant contribution to the larger colonial project of making 'settler space' in BC. Indeed, Dawson's efforts to document what he perceived to be the province's declining native societies served to justify their virtual erasure from the imaginative colonial geographies of Euro-Canadian settlement and resource extraction which he depicted in his various scientific reports and maps. In essence, Dawson 'mapped natives out' (Brealey 1995) of his representations of BC's future resource landscapes by writing them back into a 'primitive' past that was deemed to be in the process of vanishing forever.
Such a claim is best illustrated by focusing on one of Dawson's most significant contributions to nineteenth century anthropology: his extensive ethnography of the Haida. This study was published as an appendix to his official geological report on the Queen Charlotte Islands (Dawson 1880), which was the culmination of fieldwork conducted during the summer of 1878. (2) Thus, while the end-of-season photograph of the Kwakwaka'wakw offers a most poetic metaphor for Dawson's ethnographic vision, his work amongst the Haida earlier that same season yielded a report that illustrates most clearly the colonial significance of his persistent vision of the 'Vanishing Indian'. Indeed, as we shall see, Dawson's ethnographic vision of the 'Vanishing Haida' served to discursively displace this indigenous community to a vanished past from which they could stake few viable claims to the abundant resource landscapes of the Queen Charlotte Islands which Dawson envisioned arising in the near future. Yet, as current struggles over issues such as native land claims and Aboriginal self government in BC make evident, Dawson's persistent vision of the 'Vanishing Indian' was a severely limited, colonialist perspective that failed to countenance the cultural tenacity and adaptability of BC's native communities--an issue I will take up in the paper's conclusion.
'Making Settler Space'
George Dawson (Figure 2) was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia in 1849 but spent most of his youth in Montreal (Winslow-Spragge 1993). He was the eldest son of Sir William Dawson, first principal of McGill University and a renowned geologist and naturalist. At the age of twelve Dawson was stricken with Pott's Disease--a form of tuberculosis--which deformed his spine and impeded his growth, rendering him bed-ridden for much of his adolescence. Unable to attend school regularly, Dawson instead received extensive scientific training from his father. As a result, at the age of twenty, Dawson was admitted to the Royal School of Mines in London, graduating with distinction in 1872. Intent on becoming a field geologist despite his slight build, Dawson returned to Canada and took a position as the British North American Boundary Survey's geologist and naturalist during its surveys of the forty-ninth parallel in 1873-1874. In 1875 Dawson was appointed to the Geological Survey of Canada and was given the primary task of working out the complex geology, topography and natural history of the new province of BC (Zaslow 1975). Over the next two decades, Dawson carried out extensive field work for the Survey, exploring and reporting on the remote regions of BC, Alberta and the Yukon District. In 1895 Dawson withdrew from the field to become the Director of the Survey, a position he held until his sudden death in 1901.
In assessing the nature of his numerous scientific explorations, Dawson preferred to emphasize their practical utility over their inherent romantic allure:
Fortunately, or unfortunately as we may happen to regard it, the tendency of our rime is all in the direction of laying bare to inspection and open to exploitation, all parts, however remote, of this comparatively small world in which we live, and though the explorer himself may be impelled by a certain romanticism in overcoming difficulties or even dangers met with in the execution of his task, his steps are surely and closely followed by the trader, the lumberer, or the agriculturalist, and not long after these comes the builder of railways with his iron road (Dawson 1890, 29).
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
As Dawson saw it, then, the purpose of his scientific fieldwork was to generate a series of official reports, scholarly papers and popular accounts that would make the remote regions of BC legible in ways that both anticipated and facilitated their emergence as resource landscapes (Scott 1998; Braun 2000; Kirsch 2002). This was significant to the colonial project in BC because, as Clayton (2000, 166) reminds us: 'colonialism does not start with occupation alone, and it does not work solely on land; it also works with images and representations, with imaginative geographies that precede, and to a degree anticipate, colonialism'. In effect, Clayton is suggesting that remote and little-known lands often had to be first colonized in the mind--in the imagination--in order to be effectively colonized on the ground. By producing reports and other publications that constructed imaginative colonial geographies of the province's resource landscapes, then, Dawson played an important role in the colonial project of making 'settler space' in BC.
The geographic dimensions of colonialism in BC have already been the subjects of much valuable research. Clayton (2000), for instance, has beautifully illustrated how the BC coast, particularly Vancouver Island, was fashioned as a space of British imperialism in the first half of the nineteenth century--a process that laid the foundations for the settler colonialism that came to shape BC over the course of that century. Moreover, the colonial project of 'making native space' in nineteenth century BC has been thoroughly documented by Harris (2002, 2004) and Brealey (1995, 1997/98). As both Harris and Brealey illustrate so effectively, making native space involved both the discursive adjudication of the contentious 'Indian Land Question' and the material displacement of the province's indigenous inhabitants to a series of tiny, isolated native reserves during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. By establishing reserve space as the only legitimate native space in BC, government officials cleared the vast majority of the province's territory for settlers and resource capitalists to acquire.
Yet BC's 'settler space' was not simply the territory left over once reserve boundaries had been surveyed and legally codified. Like native space, settler space had to be actively called forth through a multitude of discursive and material practices--practices which transformed extensive expanses of undifferentiated 'Crown Lands' into targeted resource localities where Euro-Canadian settlement and resource exploitation could be both encouraged and facilitated. While geographers have produced important research on the settlement of BC (Harris 1997; Koroscil 2000, 2003), this parallel colonial project of 'making settler space' requires more study in order to develop a truly robust understanding of colonial geographies in nineteenth century BC. Indeed, in a recent article, Harris (2004) argues that the material, quotidian and often mundane practices of colonialism need to be identified, untangled and compared in order to reveal the true nature of colonial power. Studying the practices which constituted the making of settler space in BC, then, is a valuable undertaking because such practices comprised 'different weapons in the colonial arsenal' (Harris 2004, 180) than the practices Harris and Brealey associate with the making of 'native space' or the ones Clayton links to the making of 'imperial space'. As such, illuminating Dawson's contributions to the making of settler space responds to Harris's call for a wider and more empirically grounded discussion of the colonial geographies constructed within the 'edge of empire' that was nineteenth century BC (Harris 2004).
Dawson's commitment to constructing imaginative colonial geographies of settler space in BC is particularly apparent with respect to his work on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Having surveyed these islands extensively in 1878, Dawson produced a substantial official report that was imbued with an anticipatory vision of...
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