- William Beynon
William Beynon (1888-1958) was a hereditary chief from the
Tsimshian nation (British Columbia , Canada) and an oral historian who served asethnographer , translator, and linguistic consultant to manyanthropologist s.Beynon was born 1888 in
Victoria, British Columbia , son of a Welsh steamer-captain ("Captain Billy" Beynon) and a Tsimshian woman ofNisga'a ancestry. Although some sources describe Beynon as being himself Nisga'a or as being matrilineally Nisga'a, the truth is slightly more complicated. Beynon's maternal line leads back to members of theLaxgibuu (Wolf clan) of the Nisga'a nation, but members of his line had been moved from theNass River to Port Simpson, British Columbia, the largest Canadian Tsimshian community, to fill a power vacuum there when nearly the entirety of theGitlaan tribe (one of Lax Kw'alaams's "Nine Tribes") migrated toMetlakatla, Alaska , in 1887.Beynon's maternal grandfather was the Tsimshian chief and
Hudson's Bay Company employeeArthur Wellington Clah . Beynon was the only one of six brothers raised fluent in the Tsimshian language. When Mrs. Beynon's only surviving brother, Albert Wellington, died in 1913, William moved to Port Simpson to assume his uncle's hereditary title, Gwisk'aayn, in accordance with Tsimshian rules of matrilineal succession, making him chief of theGitlaan tribe until his death.Beginning in 1914, he was hired as a translator and transcriber by the anthropologist
Marius Barbeau , then in the employ of the Geological Survey of Canada. Barbeau and Beynon's series of interviews with Lax Kw'alaams chiefs and elders in 1914-15 has been called by the anthropologistWilson Duff "one of the most productive field seasons in the history of [North] American anthropology." In 1916 Beynon continued the same type of work, on his own, with the Tsimshians ofKitkatla , B.C., a trip which was marred by a measles epidemic and being shipwrecked for ten days on an uninhabited island with Chief Seeks of the Kitkatla tribe. As Beynon increased his facility with phonetic transcription and with his own people's traditions -- which, as a formerly assimilated urbanite, he was quickly learning -- he began to work more and more under his own direction. In the 1920s he worked with Barbeau with elders from theKitsumkalum andKitselas Tsimshian and theGitksan nation, in and aroundTerrace, British Columbia .From 1918 to 1924, Beynon worked extensively up and down the coast collecting museum artifacts for
Sir Henry Wellcome , executor of the estate of William Duncan, the founder of Metlakatla, Alaska -- where Beynon spent considerable time as Wellcome's local representative.From 1929 until 1956, when he became ill, he continued to send Barbeau his own fieldnotes, covering every conceivable aspect of the culture and traditions of the Tsimshian, Gitksan, and Nisga'a peoples, with a special emphasis on carefully recorded oral narratives. His tour de force was a 200-page description of a four-day
potlatch and totem-pole-raising feast in the Gitksan village ofGitsegukla in 1945. This has recently been issued in book form.Wilson Duff has called the resulting thousands of pages of Barbeau-Beynon fieldnotes, now housed at the
Canadian Museum of Civilization , "the most complete body of information on the social organization of any Indian nation".In 1931, Beynon was one of the four founding members of the
Native Brotherhood of British Columbia , an indigenous-rights organization founded in Port Simpson.From 1932 to 1939 Beynon sent the anthropologist
Franz Boas approximately 250 transcribed narratives which have become the monumental "Beynon Manuscripts," now housed by the American Philosophical Society inPhiladelphia .In the early 1930s Beynon facilitated the immensely productive Port Simpson fieldwork of Boas's student
Viola Garfield . Many pages of Garfield's voluminous field notebooks are actually filled out in Beynon's handwriting.In 1953 Beynon worked with the anthropologist
Philip Drucker , of theSmithsonian Institution . For Drucker Beynon wrote his own, as yet unpublished, synthesis of the complex lineage histories of theTsimshianic -speaking peoples.Beynon died in 1958 in
Prince Rupert , B.C. Although he had spent most of his life earning his living in canning and fishing, like most of his fellow Tsimshians, he made as large and valuable a contribution to Northwest Coast ethnology as any professional anthropologist. His published and unpublished works continue to be an invaluable resource for the Tsimshian, Gitksan, and Nisga'a peoples.Works
*Anderson, Margaret Seguin, and
Marjorie Halpin (eds.) (2000) "Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon's 1945 Field Notebooks." Vancouver: UBC Press.
*Beynon, William (1941) "The Tsimshians of Metlakatla, Alaska." "American Anthropologist" (new series), vol. 43, pp. 83-88.
*Beynon, William (1999) "Nda ckshun Tckaimsom dis Laggabula -- When Tckaimson and Laggabula Gambled." In: "Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers & Orators: The Expanded Edition," ed. by Ronald Spatz, Jeane Breinig, and Patricia H. Partnow, pp. 44-47. Anchorage: University of Alaska.
*MacDonald, George F., andJohn J. Cove (eds.) (1987) "Tsimshian Narratives." Collected by Marius Barbeau and William Beynon. (Canadian Museum of Civilization Mercury Series, Directorate Paper 3.) 2 vols. Ottawa: Directorate, Canadian Museum of Civilization.ources
*"B.C. Indian Authority Dies" (obituary for William Beynon). Vancouver, B.C., "Province",
February 11 ,1958 , p. 28.
*Cove, John J. (1985) "A Detailed Inventory of the Barbeau Northwest Coast Files." (National Museum of Man Mercury Series, Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies, Paper 54.) Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.
*Duff, Wilson (1964) "Contributions of Marius Barbeau to West Coast Ethnology." "Anthropologica" (new series), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 63-96.
*Garfield, Viola E. (1939) "Tsimshian Clan and Society." "University of Washington Publications in Anthropology," vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 167-340.
*Halpin, Marjorie M. (1978) "William Beynon, Ethnographer, Tsimshian, 1888-1958." In "American Indian Intellectuals: 1976 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society," ed. by Margot Liberty, pp. 140-156. St. Paul: West Publishing Company.
*Nowry, Laurence (1995) "Marius Barbeau, Man of Mana: A Biography." Toronto: N.C. Press.
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