The Salish People: Volume III

The Mainland Halkomaelem

by Charles Hill-Tout, edited by Ralph Maud

tagged: cultural, native americans, native american, indigenous studies, british columbia (bc)

Description

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada and as a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In The Salish People, his field reports are collected for the first time.

In The Salish People each volums serves as a useful guide to a specific geographic area, bringing the past to the present. The four volumes, rich in stories and factual details about the old customs of the Coast and Interior Salish, are each edited with an introduction by Ralph Maud, who lives in the Fraser Valley and who teaches a course on the B.C. Indian Oral Tradition at Simon Fraser University.

Volume III of The Salish People deals with the Mainland Halkomelem, the people of the Fraser River from Vancouver to Chilliwack, and includes the earliest account of B.C. archaeological sites. The road to connect Vancouver to Sea Island (the present Vancouver International Airport) had already opened up part of the Fraser midden in 1889, two years before Hill-Tout’s arrival in British Columbia. He got into the midden right away and surveyed the area with Mr. F. Monkton, a mining engineer well-known in Vancouver’s early days and one of the founders of the Art, Historical and Scientific Association. By 1895, Hill-Tout was able to write an extensive report to the Royal Society of Canada, which, in the words of Harlan I. Smith, constituted “the first resume of British Columbia archaeology.”

About the Authors

Charles Hill-Tout

Born in England and educated at Oxford University, Charles Hill-Tout was a pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, 70 kilometers east of Vancouver. He devoted many years to ethnographic and anthropological field work among the Salish people of the west coast recording their customs, stories and art. His scholarly articles were published in the periodicals of the day and he also spent time popularizing the stories and information he amassed in a way that only a local resident ethnographer could do. He was at one time president of the Anthropological section of The Royal Society of Canada and was a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain. The Salish People is a four volume collection of all the field work done by Charles Hill-Tout in the period 1895-1911, divided by specific geographical and cultural areas: The Salish People Volume I: The Thompson and the Okanagan, The Salish People Volume II: The Squamish and the Lillooet, The Salish People Volume III: The Mainland Halkomelem, The Salish People Volume IV: The Sechelt and the South Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island.

Ralph Maud (1928–2014), a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Paciﬁc Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He was the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996), the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen (2003), Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008), and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010), and the co-editor of After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereﬀ (2014). He edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and was co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud was also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. He was a contributing editor to Coast Salish Essays by Wayne Suttles and The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbours by Oliver Wells, and authored A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend and The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories — a collection of Henry W. Tate’s stories in Tate’s original English, which grew out of his survey of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian work, published as an article: “The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology” in American Ethnologist. Maud’s subsequently published book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.

Contributor Notes

Charles Hill-Tout
Charles Hill-Tout devoted many years to ethnographic and anthropological field work among the Salish people of the west coast recording their customs, stories and art. The Salish People is a four volume collection of all the field work done by Charles Hill-Tout in the period 1895 to 1911, divided by specific geographical and cultural areas.

Ralph Maud
Ralph Maud is the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996) and the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000). He has edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems, 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and is co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud is also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III and IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. In addition, he has done extensive work on the translation collaboration between Henry W. Tate and Franz Boas, including the book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology.

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Librarian review

The Salish People: Volume III

by [ABPBC]

This is the third volume of the collected anthropological work of the settler turned self-educated anthropologist Charles Hill-Tout. His field studies of the Aboriginal peoples of the Lower Fraser River were carried out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His interest was initially piqued by the discovery of a huge midden at the foot of the present location of Oak St. in Vancouver. From here he read extensively and spent extended periods living with the Halkomelem people, learning their language, engaging in various archaeological investigations, and collecting myths and myriad other ethnographic details. Despite being outside the academic mainstream, he was widely accepted as an important source for studies of the Salish peoples. This volume also contains his essay on later prehistoric man in BC. Ralph Maud introduced these volumes to help put them in their historical context.

Source: The Association of Book Publishers of BC. Canadian Aboriginal Books for Schools. 2008-2009.