These paired volumes are the second dividend of $2.5 million given by Canada to digitize and publish the Franz Boas archive. While the color e-files, done first, provide direct access to these materials, especially Teit’s hard won maps, this book spares struggling with Boas’s scrimped handwriting in German and English or Teit’s panicked pencil. It also reassembles a few badly butchered and scattered letters.
Against crushing crosscurrents, James Teit, an immigrant from the Shetlands, made prime contributions–via Franz Boas and Edward Sapir–to the folklore, ethnography, photography (Tepper 1987), and music (Wickwire 2019) of Native Western Canadians, especially the Interior Salish of southern British Columbia (BC) and northern Washington state. He provided over 2,200 printed pages in forty-three sources and 5,000 pages in manuscripts.
Twenty-eight years span the time from the first letter, Boas to Teit, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 6 October 1894, to the last letter, Boas to Teit, Columbia University, 14 October 1922, just before Teit dies on 30 October. Boas had made a personal farewell visit in late August, then returned to gather up Teit’s manuscripts in November 1923, overseeing their subsequent editing and publication. Some were assigned to favored students, with funding from Homer Sargent, long Teit’s and his family’s benefactor, who first hired him as a big game hunting guide in northern BC in 1904 and 1906. Thus, this correspondence is actually a four-way exchange, with Sargent quoted in footnotes.
At the start of 1884, James Tait left Lerwick, Shetland, for Spence’s Bridge, BC, becoming James Teit, to help and inherit from his mother’s brother, who ran a hotel and store at this Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) stop. His name change honored his Norse ancestry, which he researched in scholarly literature and letters. As storekeeper, Teit mastered Native languages, becoming fluent in several. By 1887, as the store struggled, his income came from trapped furs and odd jobs, such as chopping firewood. He courted Lucy Antko, nineteen and Native, of the nearby Twaal Valley. They married in 1892, but, according to the Indian Act, she immediately lost her Native status, residence, and rights on her reserve. Newlywed Teit worked in a coal mine for money for the couple to buy adjoining land so she could retain her family ties. Twelve years later she died of pneumonia in 1899. Her tombstone includes a phrase in her Nɬeʔkepmxcín Thompson language (Thompsons 1996). Widower Teit left for six months to visit his Shetland family, generating local interest in his life and works that continues. He also spent time with Boas in New York and made a side trip to Norway.
Franz Boas–employed in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History before he moved to Columbia University–had a keen interest in Salish languages of the Northwest because they are a discrete yet internally diverse family. During his own survey, on 6 September 1894, recommended by locals, Boas hiked into the hills to meet “Jimmy Teit,” immediately declaring him a “treasure” and hiring him. In subsequent letters, Boas sent detailed instructions on how to describe what Teit already knew of Nɬeʔkepmxcín Thompson language, customs, culture, and history. Teit set aside a small cottage as an office and, over time, filled it with references, histories, donated books, subscriptions, scattered notes, and drafts on foolscap in pencil. Copies of these redone in ink were sent on to Boas, or eventually Sapir, who consistently called Teit’s reports “interesting” or “very interesting” in high praise.
For the start of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE, 1897-1902) of the AMNH, Boas and two colleagues returned on 4 June 1897 for Teit to guide them on horseback to interview Natives across the interior of BC, arriving at Bella Coola on the coast seven weeks later. Extensive plans were discussed along the way.
Teit had to forcefully set aside writing times, often in conflict with obligations to family, harvest, community, and Native rights. Amazingly, everyone trusted the mails; manuscripts were sent back and forth across the border for editing, adding, or safekeeping. None seem to have been lost, unlike Teit’s missing or butchered archival copies. Teit also sent artifact collections and undeveloped film to Sapir in Ottawa (Geological Survey of Canada, Anthropology Division) to be catalogued and have the images printed in multiples for him to share with those in the photographs. Packages from New York to BC could be subject to duty, especially when overscrupulous agents overcharged and Sapir had to protest an absurd and unjust duty of $17.50 (page 426, 1909).
In 1904, he married Leonie Josephine (Josie) Moran, reporting to Boas (page 271, 1904) “you must excuse me a little, as I have been courting, and have ended up getting married.” The Teits had six children, all with Nordic names. Rolf died in infancy; but, of the other five adults, only the oldest son and daughter could remember him. His in-laws the Morans had emigrated from France and, once their water rights were established, ran a successful farm and ranch that relied on Teit’s jack-of-all-trades abilities. He also continued guiding rich and ennobled hunters to BC big game.
Over time with more instructional aides, fieldwork, and writing, Teit developed his own agenda and orthography (page 353, 1908), seeking detailed boundaries and exceptions, thus diverging from Boas’s strong interests in vocabulary lists and routine ethnography, which Teit also faithfully provided. A skilled storyteller, his first fieldwork gains were usually stories, myths, and anecdotes, often compiled and published separately by Boas as editor of the Journal of American Folklore. Even during huge Native rights meetings, leaders encouraged Teit to collect stories, photos, songs, and ethnography, often from culturally well-informed chiefs and leaders.
Teit’s close working relationship with Boas, always addressed as “My Friend” in letters, became very complicated after 1910 when Edward Sapir (always addressed as Dr Sapir) founded the Anthropology Division (GSC), hiring Teit as an "outside member" expected to keep the same daily office schedule as Ottawa, engage in funded note-filled fieldwork, write a short account of it for the annual division summary, and produce a full ethnographic study by the end of that year. Teit only succeeded with the middle two items, but never with the first and last of these, though he tried valiantly.
Teit wrote from a full outline. His style is narrative and comprehensive, with his understanding well thought out, as shown by his treatment of watercraft/canoes (page 412, 1909) and the mysterious Douglas fir white sugar (page 349, 1907), which Boas and his daughter suggested be commercialized (1918: 849). Mention of it dragged on for years, but the volume editors fail to provide a succinct footnote specifying its organic extruded source, passing the buck to the huge second Thompson ethnobotany (Turner et al., 1990).
Farm work, guiding, odd jobs, and, increasingly, providing his literacy and integrity to BC Native leaders, land claims, and BC justice eroded his time. So too did increasing medical problems and illness in his family (typhoid, le grippe, pneumonia, [1919: 884]), and the sudden deaths of cherished in-laws. He diverted time, money, and effort in seeking out the last few words of the last speaker of a dialect or language. He wrote twice–in pencil, then in ink and better English for Boas to do a final edit. Sapir had no such resources, leaving Teit unsure of his own written efforts, adding further delays. In 1913 (page 598) his writing stalled when, after he helped translate for railroad rights of way through Native reserves, the Canadian Northern Pacific Railroad ran through his house and office. With his RR compensation, Teit rebuilt nearby, starting with his home office.
Hardships continued. His left eye retina detached (1919: 870). At the end of each year, he sent in his duplicate receipts, some signed only by an elder’s X, but Ottawa accountants harried some items. Teit scrupulously paused his Ottawa salary when he often worked for Boas on Sargent funds. Eventually, higher-ups refused him a yearly contract, setting a daily wage when he worked on his Tahltan and Kaska reports. Sapir negotiated a line item to pay Teit for these finished stories, but that never happened; they were finished posthumously.
The axe fell in a letter from Sapir to Teit, explicitly and forcefully stating, “I myself, to be perfectly frank, feel strongly that Dr Boas’ insistence on you doing this basketry work for him is rather impolitic for reasons which I have defined both to him and to you. I do not see why Dr [Herman] Haeberlin or someone else could not take this up later on, and why people seem to think it necessary to have you intermittently taken off of your regular Government work” (1917: 767). In his erroneous reply (editors call it “misapprehension”), Teit (page 769) argued, “For the reasons you state I would certainly refuse to engage in further work for outsiders (viz for Dr Boas and Mr Sargent) except I was asked to do it by yourself as a part of my regular work” (added emphasis). In fact, the agreement from the beginning was that Teit would quickly finish up this earlier work for Boas and dutifully devote full time to his federal salary. Haeberlin had been a Boas star protégé, dedicated to Salish fieldwork before diabetes killed him a year before the Canadian discovery of insulin (Miller 2020). Haeberlin was able to finish a major article on the systematic sound changes in Salish languages which relied on the many tribal vocabularies recorded by Teit.
Teit’s letters mention rare details, such as “during severe thunder & lightning men bit the ear of their dog to make them howl ... to make Thunder go away” (1898: 157). He also crafted gems. Adding to Sapir’s and Boas’s protest against the Anti-Potlatch Law, Teit (1915: 677) cogently defended potlatching, especially in the sedate Plateau non-rivalry version:
No one gives either all or most of his wealth away at a Potlatch. The other Indians would consider any man who did this either a fool or crazy. The fact is a comparatively wealthy man gives or loans to another some of his surplus wealth for a year or so, or exchanges wealth with him. The amount of wealth thus loaned or exchanged is not great, perhaps in most cases two or three hundred to a thousand dollars. This wealth consists chiefly of horses (Indian ponies) which most of the time are unsaleable. Very little cash changes hands.
Of note, a pro-Canadian editorial bias denies Peter Kalama a well-deserved footnote since Teit himself praised Kalama as “well known all over Western Washington because he is a leading man in the Shaker [Church] movement” (1916: 745). Erna Gunther, long a Boasian mainstay in Seattle, appears in the index as Spier, Gunther (page 1010) under her briefly married name. A few typos remain, as “on[e] way or another” (page 597), “sample made by and [an] Indian woman” (page 639).
Teit’s erasure from anthropology has been traced to his lack of wider professional involvement (always mediated by Boas or Sapir), lacking meeting attendance, journal subscriptions, or memberships. But Teit had clearly chosen his affiliations – as a Socialist, expressed to Sapir only once (1916: 754).
Finally, it needs to be borne in mind, letters are not fieldnotes nor final publications. Instead, they indicate daily activities and interior thoughts of the writer about projects, activities, and other matters. Teit’s brief mention of a hundred pithouse depressions near Snoqualmie Falls must lead a researcher to the final publication to gain the names of the site and of eight migrants from across the Cascades. Fieldwork by later professionals and an amateur allow for this migration to be traced back to Coleman Creek in the Kittitas Valley (Miller 2024).
In all, these volumes help restore the original fame and status of this kindly, modest, well-loved man of diverse talents and abilities, who died prematurely (at 58). While these letters leave a reader with Teit’s own impression that he was dying of bladder cancer, a post-mortem indicates a pelvic abscess which is very curable if operated on in time. Another of Teit’s truly lasting contributions has been the willingness of Nɬeʔkepmxcín people to add to academic scholarship, as highlighted by two of the editors of these volumes.
WORKS CITED:
Miller, Jay. 2020. Herman Haeberlin Regained: Anthropology and Artifacts of Puget Sound
1916-17. Amazon.
Miller, Jay. 2024. “Kittitas Crus: Plateau Heartland,” Journal of Northwest Anthropology 58:
138-150.
Tepper, Leslie. 1987. The Interior Salish Tribes of British Columbia: A Photographic Collection.
Canadian Museum of Civilization Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service, Paper
#111.
Thompson, Laurence, and M. Terry Thompson. 1996. Thompson River Salish Nɬeʔkepmxcín
Dictionary. Missoula: University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics #12.
Turner, Nancy, Laurence Thompson, M. Terry Thompson, and Annie York. 1990. Thompson
Ethnobotany: Knowledge and Usage of Plant by the Indians of British Columbia.
Victoria, BC: Royal British Columbia Museum, Memoir #3.
Wendy Wickwire. 2019. At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging.
Vancouver: UBC Press.
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[Review length: 2227 words * Review posted on May 30, 2025