and life-history data to the study of native Indian art in British Columbia led the Vancouver Centennial Museum in 1977 to initiate a comprehensive collection of biographical data on British Columbia’s Indian artists.
Two Northwest Coast life-history documents span successive generations of recent Southern Kwakiutl culture history and are particularly valuable for their documentation of continuity and change in that culture. In 1940 Kwakiutl Chief Charlie Nowell dictated his life story to Clellan Ford (1941), and in the 1960s James Sewid related his personal history, with the editorial assistance of anthropologist James Spradley (1969). Aside from Barbeau’s brief biographical sketches in Haida Carvers in Argillite (1957) and the account of Chief Gəniyá (“Cunneah”) in Robinson’s Sea Otter Chiefs (1978), the only Haida life history is that of Peter Kelly of Skidegate (Morley 1967). To date, no life histories of native Northwest Coast women have been published, though as early as 1930 several short life histories of Kwakiutl women were collected by Julia Averkieva, a student of Boas (Rohner 1966:198).
In fact, for native North America as a whole there are more than three times the number of male life histories as female life histories. At least in the case of the life histories authored or collected by anthropologists, this imbalance is in large part due to the fact that male ethnographers, who until recently have greatly outnumbered female ethnographers, understandably came to know and work more closely with the male members of the cultures they studied. Then, too, as Rosaldo (1974) has noted, men live much of their lives in the public arena, as policy makers, warriors, intellectuals, and philosophers in native societies. Given such roles it is not surprising that anthropologists should have found the lives of men more visible, interesting, absorbing, and significant than the lives of women. This viewpoint has often affected even those who do write about native women’s lives. Ruth Underhill, for example, justifies Papago Maria Chona’s narrative by demonstrating her affiliation with important men: “As a woman she could take no active part in the ceremonial life. But her father was a governor and a warrior; her brother and husband were shamans; her second husband was a song leader and composer” (Underhill 1936:4). She does add, however, that a Papago woman’s life is interesting in and of itself “because in this culture, there persists strongly the fear of woman’s impurity with all its consequent social adjustments.”
I suspect that anthropologists are more influenced by their own cultural background than they would like to acknowledge. Perhaps the relative neglect of women’s lives in other cultures stems also from the fact that autobiography in the Western tradition has been primarily a male form. As Pomerleau notes:
The traditional view of women is antithetical to the crucial motive of autobiography—a desire to synthesize, to see one’s life as an organic whole, to look back for a pattern. Women’s lives are fragmented…. the process is not one of growth, of evolution; rather … earlier and more decisively than for a man, the curve of a woman’s life is seen by herself and society to be one of deterioration and degeneration. Men may mature, but women age. [1980:37]
In the same volume Jelinek summarizes, “Insignificance, indeed, expresses the predominant attitude of most [literary] critics towards women’s lives” (Jelinek 1980:4).
Only recently have anthropologists taken the view that, even in the absence of criteria such as a belief in woman’s impurity or relationships to powerful men, women’s lives are inherently worthy of consideration. If we are to understand women and their roles in cross-cultural perspective, it is axiomatic that we know the breadth and depth of their life experiences, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. Margaret Mead has provided us with the latter type of document in her autobiography Blackberry Winter (1972), and in the wake of the women’s movement a number of anthropological monographs that focus on the lives of ordinary women have been published (e.g., Strathern 1972; Jones and Jones 1976; Weiner 1976; Dougherty 1978; Kelley 1978). Accounts of native women’s lives written for a more general audience have also appeared in recent years. In the native North American literature are an overview of the female life cycle in many different tribes (Neithammer 1977), a biography of a well-known Ojibwa woman (Vanderburgh 1977), and autobiographies written by a part-Cree woman (Willis 1973) and a métis woman (Campbell 1973).
Florence Davidson’s life history is the account of one who faithfully fulfilled the expected role of women in her society. For most of her life she has remained outside the public domain; above all else she has participated in her culture as mother and wife, and today she would undoubtedly sum up her identity in the word “Nani.” Despite the social position she has enjoyed as the daughter of high-ranking parents and the esteem that she has earned, Florence Davidson views her life as “ordinary,” in the sense of being uneventful. Once during our taping she sighed and then laughed, “If only I lied, it could be so interesting!” Aside from recounting the life experiences of an octogenarian Haida woman, her narrative presents a picture of an individual operating in a culture neither traditionally Haida nor fully Canadian, a culture undergoing tremendous change, yet intelligible and meaningful to one living in it.
The Haida had been exposed to Christianity for only about twenty years when Florence Davidson was born in 1896, and just fifteen years prior to her birth the Masset Haida had become reserve Indians. A few Haida were still living in cedar-plank houses when she was born. The female puberty seclusion was still practiced during her adolescence, and marriages were, as a rule, arranged. Her life spans the beginning and end of a resident Indian Agency in Masset, the development of schooling from the one-room mission school through the residential boarding schools to the modern public educational system, and the evolution of transportation from the dugout canoe to daily jet service on the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Florence remembers a time when the ceremonial button blankets, devised probably in the 1850s by native people, were disdained and her grandmother cut the small buttons from hers to give to her granddaughters for their babies’ clothes. Today Florence Davidson has become perhaps the foremost Haida button blanket maker, sewing exquisite appliquéd blankets from her grandson Robert’s patterns. She recalls the time in 1932 when William Matthews took his uncle’s place as town chief of Masset without a semblance of a traditional installation ceremony. Forty-four years later when Oliver Adams succeeded his uncle, William Matthews, he hired Florence Davidson to cook for the feast; she sang a Haida song in his honor and was recognized for her efforts at the potlatch marking his chieftaincy.
There were no totem poles carved during Florence’s childhood, save the few commissioned of the last of the old carvers at five dollars per foot by museum collectors. In 1969 Florence and Robert Davidson gave a potlatch honoring the erection of the pole their grandson Robert had carved for the Masset people. In short, Florence Davidson’s life weaves through a significant period of Haida culture history, a time that saw the disappearance of many traditional practices (the puberty ceremony, arranged marriages, most forms of potlatching) and the rebirth of others (such as the visual and performing arts).
RECORDING THE LIFE HISTORY
My only special preparations for the journey to Masset in January of 1977 included packing a wool shirt and rain slicker, a tape recorder and forty hours of tape, a journal, a copy of Murdock’s Our Primitive Contemporaries, which contains a chapter on the Haida, and Clellan Ford’s life history of Charlie Nowell to show to Florence Davidson as an example. I had not given extensive thought as to how we would proceed, confident that the problem would resolve itself once I arrived in Masset. My only worry was that I might have the same experience as anthropologist Nancy Lurie, who secured in her first brief session with Mountain Wolf Woman, the Winnebago woman’s entire life history (Lurie 1961: XIV). Luckily I need not have worried: “I’m full of stories yet,” Nani pronounced about halfway through the project.
The quickest method of getting to Masset is to take a jet from Vancouver to Prince Rupert and from there a float or amphibious plane to New Masset on the islands. No matter how rough the weather, I never fail to enjoy the forty-five minutes from Prince Rupert to Masset. Ten minutes in the air, from a point not far out to sea, one can see in the distance the long dark tongue of Rose Spit licking the waters of Dixon Entrance. Minutes pass; the sand bluffs of the east coast of Graham Island make their appearance and the familiar landmark of Tow Hill rises several hundred feet into the air from the sands of North Beach. Geologists call Tow a volcanic intrusion; the