At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging
At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging
By Wendy Wickwire
UBC Press, 2019; 400 pages; $34.95
Reviewed by Marion Benkaiouche
What a difficult read — Wendy Wickwire writes with detail, and yet there is a sense of detachment. Perhaps not from the writer, but the reader, who cannot help but see and despair that the self-same issues are ever-present. Here in early 2020, we face, still, pestilence, land grabs, unstable and precarious labour here at the edge of capitalist ruin. We live at the natural evolution of the old land grabs that began in British Columbia in the nineteenth century. Now we buy stock in facial recognition software and energy projects on still disputed land. In the cities, we quarantine ourselves and hope to avoid the smallpox scenes Wickwire describes outside of Spences bridge (then, Cook’s Ferry). There is fear as we search for meaning through uncertainty and precarity.
At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging is the story of James Teit and those he lived with and near; those he married, those he had children with; travelled with, worked with. It is the story of his friends and their families; it is the story of a member of the precariat through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It is an anthropology of belonging. What does it mean to belong and to dwell somewhere — whither goest the native, the emigrant, the immigrant? Teit is known for his ethnography of the Nlaka’pamux Nation; in Wickwire’s work, we get to know him through his hybridity. There are no dualisms of Indigenous/non-Indigenous, rural/urban, migrant/ settler. He is many things, as are we all. This is the type of work that ennobles one as one reads it — though it is also a difficult history to contend with. Spences bridge, and Wickwire’s book, are microcosms of the whole. The arguments for and against Indigenous self-determination are here, still. Now they have an added layer of complexity; we see this with the Wet’suwet’en and Coastal GasLink project. They say: If you support the project, then you can’t possibly be in support of Indigenous self-determination, or environmental reconciliation. They say: If you don’t support the project, then you yourself are denying the will of the Wet’suwet’en — why should these individual members of the nation be at the mercy of their hereditary leaders? Isn’t this anti-democratic? Are environmentalists using Indigenous resistance for their own gain? Is that colonial? No answers — only discursive arguments, division, and more of the same... And in the back of your mind, you, too, perhaps feel the anxiety that the itinerant labourers of the interior felt with regards to their short-term contracts.
Teit juggled contracts between Franz Boas and Edward Sapir in a way that may feel familiar to many modern consultants and gig-labourers:
“To report progress to one, he had to report delays to the other. It also involved tricky financial negotiations. When he was on Boas’s payroll, he had to drop off Sapir’s.”
Wickwire tells the story of a native Shetlander, who approached the Nlaka’pamux with empathy. He saw the story of Shetland in the Stein Valley. He helped his Indigenous friends the way Faroese scholars contributed to Shetland ethnography — and then some.
I started this book with some surprise; I had just begun They Write their Dreams on the Rock Forever by Annie York, Richard Daly, and Chris Arnett. Wickwire’s name is scattered throughout that great tome, and many of the citations are Teit’s. Slowly, through both works, the Stein and Nicola Valley became more complete pictures for me. It seems like fate that the two books appeared in front of me at the same time. They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever is full of magic, introspection, and secrets. At the Bridge is a reminder that violence and injustice permeate that dreamscape — a difficult read, a difficult experience. These interesting, passionate, and loving souls, suffered through financial instability, poor health, racism.
This book is filled with sickness and death; Teit himself died of bowel cancer, and suffered much throughout his life. One story of Wickwire’s stood out to me. His bowel cancer in remission, Teit’s life took on a renewed energy — a spark to continue writing and finish off the paper mountains he owed Boas and Sapir after years of delay and contract-hopping. This energy was short-lived; seven months later, the cancer returned and he died in October 1922 in Merritt. I like to imagine him in the secret caves of the Stein Valley: dreaming and experiencing the dreams that were written on the rocks, elevated and meditating on the valley that had become his home.
The lesson here is: you create your own meaning. You don’t need permission to do what you want. Boas and Sapir did not give Teit permission to “do” ethnography. Teit didn’t need to go to university. He did it. Plain and simple. If you only read this review, and not this book (though you should, in fact, read the whole thing), I hope you come away with this same conviction: you don’t need permission from a school, an employer, or a friend. Do something. Speak with others. Learn from them. The knowledge and love cannot be taken away. It will be written in dreams forever. »