Edward Sapir’s Sketch of the Social Organization of the Nass River Indians is a short ethnographic report published in 1915 as a bulletin of the Geological Survey of Canada. It records what Sapir could learn in two days in Ottawa from a delegation of four Tsimshian men from the Nass River in northern British Columbia, and it sets out, tribe by tribe and clan by clan, the framework of phratries, crests, house names, personal names, dances, and social classes that organized their world. The result is less a finished monograph than a precise field note on kinship and privilege, valuable both for what it captures and for the candor with which its author marks its limits.
Two Days in Ottawa
The occasion was almost accidental. In February 1915 a deputation of four Nass River men came to Ottawa on business with the Department of Indian Affairs, and through the deputy superintendent, D. C. Scott, their attention was drawn to the Geological Survey’s anthropological collections. Sapir seized the chance and, on the eighteenth and nineteenth of that month, took down a sketch of their social organization, which he himself calls imperfect, for the comparative study of West Coast societies. The four informants were Chief T. L. Derrick of Aiyansh, fifty-nine years old and third in rank of the Gitlanwilks tribe, who spoke good English and supplied nearly all the data; Chief W. J. Lincoln of Kincolith, about forty; Chief A. N. Calder of Greenville, about forty-six, head chief of a tribe of the Wolf phratry; and R. S. Woods of Kincolith, about twenty-two, of mixed parentage and perfect English, who served as interpreter alongside an older man named Woods. Sapir notes that he collected the material without consulting Franz Boas’s 1895 account, so that the correspondences between the two are mutually corroborating rather than derivative.
The Four Tribes of the Nass
The Nass River Tsimshian, who call themselves nisqa’a, share a language and common interests but form no political unit; each tribe is independent and occupies its own villages. Sapir lists four, moving upriver from the coast. At the mouth live the Gitksatla, “people of the fish traps,” at Kincolith—so named, Sapir reports, because enemies’ scalps were dried there—and at Greenville. Further upstream are the Gitgigenik, “people further up stream,” considered the main tribe. Then come the Gitwanktsilk, “people of the home of lizards,” now at Underleaf, a village recently established across the river. Farthest up are the Gitlanwilks, “people moving regularly from and back to their home village,” a name that refers to their periodic descent to the river mouth for the olachen fishery; they live at Gitlakdamix and at Aiyansh, a new village about forty years old to which most of the tribe has moved.
Phratries, Clans, and Crests
Like the southern Tsimshian, the Nass River people are divided into four exogamous phratries with descent traced through the mother, so that a man’s titles and crests pass to his sister’s son and his predecessor in a title is his maternal uncle rather than his father. The phratries are the Wolves, the Eagles, and two whose names Sapir could not translate; Chief Derrick derived the fourth from “frog,” one of its crests, but Sapir suspects a folk etymology. The main crests are the wolf, the eagle, the killer-whale, and the raven. The phratries are not evenly distributed: the Wolves appear in all four tribes and hold first rank in three of them, the Eagles are absent from one tribe, and the fourth phratry is missing from two.
Within each tribe the phratries are ranked and subdivided into ranked clans, and Sapir works through them tribe by tribe. Among the Gitksatla, the Wolf phratry is the head phratry and contains three clans, the second headed by Chief Derrick himself. The crests he lists are a mixture of the heraldic and the ceremonial: the wolf and black bear; a long staff for poking the sky, shown at potlatches with songs; a skull-like mask representing the head chief of the ghosts, worn by an usher seating guests, which Derrick claimed because his legendary ancestor took it from the ghost who first possessed it; doorkeeper posts erected outside the house at potlatches; and, in the third clan, a “roasting a man” crest that recalls a legend in which a Tsimshian chief who mistreated his wife, a princess of that clan’s Wolf phratry, was captured and treated in kind. The Eagle clans carry the stone eagle, a supernatural being living under the water, the humpbacked whale, the beaver, the white marten, and a feast ladle carved like a coffin. The third phratry’s clan takes the moon as its main crest, though the killer-whale belongs to the phratry as a whole and cannot be used by this clan of this tribe; the fourth phratry has the raven, the frog, and the robin.
The Gitwanktsilk have only three phratries represented, with the Wolf phratry reduced to a single clan named after a village in Flathead country to the south, on the mainland roughly halfway between the Nass and the site of Vancouver. Their crests include the prince killer-whale, the owl, the water grizzly, a ceremonial representation of the rainbow, the man of the woods—a solitary supernatural being who flies through the air—the shark, a house name counted as a crest, a pole surmounted by an eagle’s head, and a halibut carved so that one side shows half the fish. The Gitgigenik have only two phratries, each with a single clan, and the Eagles and the fourth phratry seem to be lacking altogether.
House Names and the Logic of Personal Names
A complete survey of names being impossible, Sapir selected typical examples from the Gitlanwilks, keeping the highest-ranking names apart from common ones and sorting them by phratry, clan, and sex, with slave names listed separately. The house names he records are small poems of their own: “fire going through two smoke-holes,” “entrance of which is attended by joy,” “drumming all over in the house,” “where black-bear lies down to sleep,” and, among the Gitksatla, a house “that one gets ashamed in after entering (because it is so long).” Several chiefs are known by names of the form “father of” or “mother of” a slave—names that mark ownership, not kinship, and that need not mean the bearer ever owned such a slave, though an ancestor may have.
The most interesting class of names refers not to the bearer’s own crests but to those of another phratry: Wolf names that mention the eagle, the humpbacked whale, the beaver, or the bullhead, and Eagle names that mention the wolf or the grizzly. Sapir is careful here. Linguistic analysis does not always require the crest reference, and once cross-phratric naming was established, crest interpretations could be read back into names that may have originated quite differently—a process he compares to reinterpretations known among other American tribes. Many names are in fact whole sentences, abbreviated in ordinary use, and probably devised to give an older, simpler name a legendary or crest-bearing context. Chief Derrick explained the cross-phratric custom by the father, who in a matrilineal and exogamous society belongs to a different phratry; he tied it to the child’s being born in his father’s phratry’s house and then sent to be raised in his maternal uncle’s house, a custom Sapir notes matches the Haida.
Dances, Classes, and the Limits of Two Days’ Work
Ceremonial dances belonging to the secret societies were inherited privileges. One involved cannibalism, one the eating of dogs, and one the breaking of objects with a long club followed by the payment of greater value. Derrick held that two of these were the head dances and that one was used only by princes; he claimed rights to two of the three. He also recognized three social classes: nobles or chiefs, common people, and slaves. The word for slave is evidently a reduplicated plural of a word for “people,” which Sapir takes to imply that slaves came mainly from captives taken in war with the Tlingit to the north. Commoners and nobles were represented in all four phratries; commoners could display less important crests at potlatches but not the main ones. A phonetic key closes the sketch, describing the vowels, consonants, and diacritics used to render the Nass River language.
What gives the report its lasting value is its honesty about its own conditions. Sapir knew he had two days, one fluent informant, and a subject of great complexity, and he presents his material as a contribution to comparison rather than a final word. The sketch remains a compact record of how rank, marriage, naming, and ceremony interlocked among the Nass River Tsimshian, and a model of the early twentieth-century anthropologist’s habit of marking exactly where knowledge stops.
