From the Beginning:

When Gitxaała Language and Culture staff began the search for Gitxaała cultural heritage in museums, lots of things turned up easily. Usually these treasures were labelled as being from “Kitkatla”. Some had odd spellings, like “Gitrhahla”.  These treasures had clear histories. They will be simple to repatriate when museum policies and laws allow. But there were only around 70 belongings total labeled clearly, and we suspected there was a lot more out there that was mislabeled or missing information altogether.

Piecing together the past

The Gitxaała people have often been incorrectly lumped in with Tsimshian peoples. This is nearly always the case in museum records. So to expand our search for belongings, we began to look at all the things in museums labeled “Tsimshian”. There were several trading areas on the North Coast like Port Simpson where belongings from many Nations passed through. If something “Tsimshian” was purchased at Port Simpson there was a possibility it came from Gitxaała originally. Looking at the dzepk (crests) on these belongings is a good way to find possible Gitxaała cultural treasures. This can be tricky when dzepk were shared between houses of different communities, such as the case with wil’nat’ał, inter-related lineages. Abalone shell is another indicator that a belonging may have come from Gitxaała. Ultimately it may require conversations between Gitxaała and the Ts’msyen communities to determine where a cultural treasure originated. This type of research is just beginning, as we gather all the information and photos of the thousands of Tsimshian-labelled objects.

Gitxaała artists often inlaid abalone shell on belongings for high-ranking people, as seen here on a bowl owned by Gitxaała Sm’ooygit Wak’aas (Amos Collison) of the Ganhada clan. Learn more about this bowl here.

Papering the way

Archives provide guides for their contents called finding aids. If you start with knowledge about people, places, and dates that you are interested in, you can select relevant archival documents from the finding aids. In our case, we know several people - notorious collectors that we will call Takers. We know that they took things from Gitxaała territory in the early 1900s, which is a good starting point for finding cultural treasures. Language and Culture staff have made trips to the provincial archives in Victoria to search through the diaries and receipts of these Takers. Our hope is that they will have written about their trips to Lax Klan and any treasures they may have taken - treasures that may have not made it into museums, or that have since been mislabelled.

Above is a picture of a microfilm reader in the BC Archives. Many publicly available documents have been turned into film to preserve the original paper.

Source code

When there is a museum that has a lot of Gitxaała and Tsimshian treasures, it is worth combing through the museum’s original records. These records many have a lot more information than recent ones. They may also have original research notes from early museum curators. In our case, we found straight-up errors that we were not expecting: Things that were labeled “Kitkatla” in the original records, but were identified as Metlakatla, Nisga’a, or even Tlingit in modern online records.

A series of woodworking wedges from a Gitxaała summer village at Mink Trap Bay on Pitt Island held at the Royal BC Museum. Two wedges were correctly identified as Gitxaała in modern records. When we looked in the original museum record book, the other wedge was right there on the page next to the other two, also labeled Gitxaała. Yet it had been marked as Metlakatla in the online catalogue.

The Gitxaała mask (top right) photographed in 1912 with the Nisga’a masks. This photo is part of the Royal BC Museum’s Ethnology photographs. Catalogue number PN00451.

A yellowed card with the original description for the old photograph of the three masks and a screenshot of the online record for the same photograph. Notice that on the original card, two masks say “Kincolith” (today Gingolx) and one says “Kitkatla”. A common issue with museum documentation is that old information does not fully make it into newer copies of records. The originating locations of the three masks has been left out of the online description of this photograph, meaning that it would be impossible to know that one came from Gitxaała unless you looked at the original paper records.

Photographs: window to the past

Archival images can be the first clue to researchers that a treasure exists. Below is an image of a raven frontlet taken by G.T. Emmons in Kitkatla village on a podium. This photograph is held at the B.C. Archives. Yet there is no trace of this mask at the archives or the associated Royal BC Museum. An internet search brought it up - apparently it is all the way in Texas, USA! We don’t yet know how it got there. The Texas museum has recorded it as being a Tlingit mask. Since this museum does not have an online catalogue, we won’t know any more until they send us their digital records directly.

On the left, the raven frontlet photographed by Taker G.T. Emmons. Image courtesy of B.C. Archives, catalogue number PN04424. On the right, an image from a fashion analysis blog of the same frontlet around a hundred years later at a museum in Texas.

How can you help?

If you are a Gitxaała citizen, we could really use your help! If you find any old photographs or know of any important cultural belongings that went missing over the years that you would like found, let us know. Clues like owner’s names, years that things went missing, and crests and the materials of the belonging can help researchers locate these treasures. If you can recognize Gitxaała crests easily, we also need help sorting out belongings that have been labelled “Tsimshian”, but could be Gitxaała.

T’oyaxs txa’nii nüüsm (thank you all)!