Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan and the author of Reflections on Native-Newcomer
Relations: Selected Essays and Lethal Legacy: Current Native
Controversies in Canada.

Simon Fraser University historian Douglas Cole has written a fascinating and valuable work on the unlikely theme of how individuals and museums systematically extracted artifacts and artworks from the British Columbian and Alaskan homelands of the Northwest Coast Indians. His account traces the way in which Indian household utensils, ceremonial objects, works of art, and even mortal remains were purchased or stolen by a series of traders, scholars, and adventurers to satisfy an almost-insatiable demand that developed in the 50 years after 1875, the golden age of the museum. Although Cole’s research is impressively thorough and his purpose scholarly, Captured Heritage remains always readable and frequently absorbing. The author’s clarity of argument and excellence of style carry the reader along smoothly over the shoals of footnotes. Excellent maps and well-chosen illustrations add to the reader’s enjoyment and enlightenment.

Cole’s study casts valuable light on a number of areas of history. It is a contribution to the history of anthropology, museology, science, popular taste, and Indian-European relations. It reveals Canadians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as largely uninterested in their own aboriginal heritage and resentful of foreigners’ efforts to collect and preserve the record of the first inhabitants. Captured Heritage also introduces as unlikely a cast of colourful figures, egomaniacal researchers, skilful half-caste traders, and bumbling bureaucrats as ever peopled a work of Canadian history. The Indians who traded their goods are accorded at least the dignity of having done so for commercial motives and by highly developed trading tactics. If there is any shortcoming in this examination of the trade in their highly decorated artifacts, it is in sorting out what impact the capture and export of their material culture had on the Indians.

Captured Heritage is that oft-sought but rarely attained goal of the academic historian, a valuable and well-written work of historical explanation that should appeal both to the educated general reader and to the serious student. Douglas Cole has done a first-rate job.