Once a vibrant social centre and 'capital' of the Kitsumkalum
district, Robin Town was home to a large population living on streets situated
on the terraces above the Kitsumkalum Canyon. Robin Town was a residential
centre but also more than that. Trading routes, roads, and paths passed the
town site going in a north-south direction from the Haisla community of
Kitamaat at the top of Douglas Channel, north through Nisga'a territory and
into Tahltan country. Other roads came from the Zimacord Valley to the
southwest, and crossed the north/south routes near Robin Town; some roads had a
north easterly heading into Gitxsan territory and beyond. The town was an
important settlement in the communication network of overland routes that
linked people in the lower Skeena area to other populations in the Nass River
drainage and in the northerly headwaters of the Skeena.
Robin Town is no longer accessible by traditional overland routes,
and is by-passed by the contemporary commercial transportation network of
gravel logging roads and provincial roadways. Although bush access is possible
from a point on the West Kalum Road, which is an old logging road known locally
as 'the old Nass Road', few people attempt the trek down to the terraces on the
Kitsumkalum Canyon. Old logging trails that are now frequented by snowmobiles
in the winter and ATVs in the summer can be used to visit the reserve but the
routes are often on steep slopes and occasionally through marshy spots. A round
trip to the location of Robin Town is a strenuous, 10-kilometre hike along a
winding, old roadway and is not suitable for children or elders. Walking around
the area is a further difficulty. As an alternative to the land access,
visitors could come by river but there are a number of other types of
impediments to this approach: boats are not as commonly owned as trucks; the
trip up the Kalum River has a certain amount of risk from the condition of the
river; the brush and devils club that has overgrown the site hides its
significance to a casual visitor; and many of those who have boats suitable for
the trip do not have sufficient knowledge and understanding of the site to
attract them there.
Living
Landscapes
There is a need for a fuller and more accurate understanding of
the heritage of the northwest in general and of the Tsimshian of Kitsumkalum in
particular. In 2004, the Royal BC Museum (RBCM) was looking to shift the focus
of its Living Landscapes programme from northeastern BC to the
northwest. In co-operation with Northwestern Community College, they hosted a
regional planning session in Terrace on March 12, 2005. This session provided
an opportunity for Kitsumkalum research the heritage at the Kalum Canyon.
Subsequently, an ethnohistorical study was organized under the umbrella of the
Kitsumkalum Social History Research Projects and called 'The Return to Robin
Town'.
The stated intentions of the project were fourfold:
- To create a detailed record of the cultural heritage of Robin
Town using archival materials from sources such as the Marius Barbeau field
notes that were collected in collaborative research with Tsimshian ethnographer
William Beynon in the first half of the 20th century, and the more recent
Kitsumkalum Social History Research Projects that encompass a series of
collaborative research projects with First Nations in the Terrace area.
- To work with the Kitsumkalum community to review and
elaborate those records.
- To bring members of the Kitsumkalum community to the site and
to reconnect the community with that important element of their heritage and
landscape.
- To explore the role Robin Town had in the regional
communication network and the idea that Robin Town served as a regional centre
long before the present City of Terrace assumed that role.
This list of four goals grew as the project evolved and as it
became clear there was a need to gather additional archival materials and to
re-examine other material for ethnographic information. As the information
began building, it became apparent the Living Landscapes report could
easily become a book that would be valuable for addressing some of the heritage
needs of the community. This report is a precise of the book manuscript.
Once the decision was made to prepare a Living Landscapes
project, there were several steps in preparing the actual research project. The
first involved discussions with the Chief Councillor and Treaty Negotiator. In
2005, the Band Administration held ultimate responsibility for research on
reserve, and the Treaty Office held an important interest in any heritage or
resource related research in the traditional territory. The Chief Councillor
determined this research was under the responsibility of the Treaty Office and
delegated the task to that office. Official permission for the research was
obtained there. During this phase of obtaining research permission, I held
informal discussions with key members of the community who I felt would have an
interest in heritage research and with administrators in the neighbouring
community of Kitselas, in this case as a courtesy because the populations of
the two communities are mixed. Finally, I presented the proposal, formally, to
a meeting of the Band Council which gave an enthusiastic reception to the
project. Such permission is of great ethical importance.
All project materials are stored in a community archive,
currently housed by the Kitsumkalum Treaty Office (KTO), as well as in the
archives of the Kitsumkalum Social History Research Projects (KKSHRP), housed
by the author.
Respect the
Past
Heritage sites, like those at and around Robin Town, are
extremely important to protect and to preserve. They are treasures to be
enjoyed but there are limitations on how visitors can use them. These sites are
fragile and care must be taken not to disturb or otherwise damage them. This
caution is recognized by the Heritage Conservation Act ([RSBC 1996] Chapter
187), a piece of provincial legislation that protects heritage sites. Much
of the area on both sides of the canyon are official heritage sites and,
therefore, explicitly protected. Also, any visitors to the area must be aware
that a large part of the Robin Town area is located on an Indian Reserve and,
therefore, is closed to the general public. If you wish to visit the Reserve,
you must respect the trespassing laws and request permission from the
Kitsumkalum Band Administration. Please respect the past and the laws.
Please be careful with our heritage.
A Note on Archival
Materials
Ethnohistorical research involves archival materials that are
often difficult to access in many ways. The Kitsumkalum Treaty Office is
fortunate to have a set of the field materials collected by Marius Barbeau,
William Beynon, Viola Garfield, and others. This solves the problem of physical
access to the files. Despite their location within the community and their
availability for research purposes, the Barbeau and Beynon materials are very
difficult to read - which is another access problem. The handwriting is not
clear, and the text often consists of three parallel lines: a line of
sm'algyax, a line of literal translation into English, and a line of
grammatically corrected English. These types of problems inhibit the use of the
archive by community members.
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Figure 2: Hand
written pages of 'The Myth of the Robin Woman
and the Blue Bill Duck Woman'
Beynon, Volume 2, P. 57 |
Kitsumkalum in an
Ethnographic Context
Robin Town is the residential centre of a people with a distinct
way of life that is different from the dominant society in Canada. These are
the people of the Kalum, the Kitsumkalum. To understand the story of Robin
Town, it is necessary to understand some of these differences. Their culture is
complex but the community provided an outline of their social organization and
culture in a book called The People of the Robin.2 That book is a comprehensive resource for developing
an understanding of the nature of Robin Town.
The people of Kitsumkalum are part of the Tsimshian Nation in
north-western British Columbia who live near the present City of Terrace. They
are the community who own territories in the valley of the Kitsumkalum River
and in the Zimacord watershed, especially the important area of Erlandsen
Creek. This territory is, basically, the land around Kalum Mountain and the
entire Kitsumkalum watershed, although the Sm'gyigyet (Hereditary Chiefs) of
the 19th century may not have described the geography in terms of valleys and
watersheds. They also have various interests in territories and resources along
the Skeena River and in coastal areas.
Their connection to the land is fundamental to the community.
Kitsumkalum Elder Lucy Hayward was born around 1880. Although I do not know if
she lived at Robin Town herself before it was destroyed, she did live in the
area and remembered the old pattern of economic activities, activities that she
experienced in her youth.3
Now, we are there to get food. When it's time to dry
berries, we dry it. We dry berries, long ones. We pick berries there, then we
cook it. And then dry it. That's why we pack up. I guess there's white people
living there, now. I hear there's white people living there, now. That's where
we used to pick berries, there. That's where my mother and father used to live.
It's hard for me to remember. That's where my mother and father used to live,
to pick what we're going to eat in the winter. And we dry fish there, to eat in
the winter time...
We lived there for the food. That sandy place will never
disappear. They'll find it. I wanted to, I'll find it. If I go up there. I want
to. That's what I wanted from Don [Roberts, Sr., her nephew in Kitsumkalum]. I
want to go up there and show where it is. Maybe it's over grown with bushes,
now. I wonder how it is, where we used to pick berries. They tell me now, that
the cars are running there. We used to catch fish on the lake. We used to eat
right away.
When Lucy was asked if there were many crab apples at Robin
Town, she replied;
It's nice, it's really nice. It's where we used to camp,
to pick berries. The one my sister-in-law is talking about, that's Maude's
mother. You better go up there, she said to me, there's a road leading up
there, now. Where the cars run up. You know where mother used to dry berries,
dry berries, and soapberries. The berry bushes were short.
She said they're all gone, now. The white people are living
there. I don't know which ones the government evicted from there. They said
they were evicted, but this was further up. Where we used to pick
berries.
She went on to describe travelling to those territories.
Yes, it took us one day to pack our things up to where we
were going to camp. We came from here. Then, it takes us one day to carry
everything, pots and pans, and storage boxes to put them in. Cheap, it was real
cheap, they were this thick, you see. For a dollar and a half. But just lately,
when the Gitxsan brings theirs down. They were this small, that they were
selling, for almost ten dollars. The workers on the riverboat used to buy them.
They buy it.
And then, in the winter time, we moved down closer to the
Skeena River. We camped facing the Skeena River [at Kitsumkalum I.R.1]. There
was a lot of houses there. We had a house there.
In this comment, Lucy was referring to Kitsumkalum as the winter
residence because she grew up after the people left Robin Town in favour of the
village at the mouth of the river. Her remembrances of the river boats is a
reference to one of the reasons the community moved to the Skeena.
Other visitors to the area wrote short passages about the
Kitsumkalum. Some are informative with tidbits of information and I discuss
some of these in the historical section below. Many are simply superficial
observations reflecting the chauvinism of the missionaries who thought they
were saving a people from a de-based existence, or the racism of settlers and
travellers. Of the newcomers who wrote about the area, only the two
anthropologists, Franz Boas and Marius Barbeau, took a strong interest in the
complexities of the society and culture. Like their Tsimshian colleague,
William Beynon, they tried to understand and write about the culture and way of
life. A more recent and detailed ethnographic description of Kitsumkalum is the
community collaboration in the book People of the Robin (McDonald 2003).
The Oral History of
Robin Town (Dalk Gyilakyaw)
The history of Robin Town is long and complex.4 The oral history begins with the origin of Robin Town,
followed by explanations of how the other houses moved to Robin Town
transforming it from a Laxsgiik fishing village to a town with all four pteex
(the Laxsgiik, Ganhada, Gisbutwada, and Laxgibuu). A brief
overview of the history is contained in a narrative told by a traditional
hereditary chief (a Sm'oogyet), Sm'oogyet agaax (Arthur Stevens) in
1915. William Beynon recorded it for Marius Barbeau.
Nisgeel was the first to form this village. He was
followed immediately by the Gisbutwada (Killer-Whale), then by the
Ganhada (Raven-Frog). Last of all came the Gunhuut band from the
Gidiâaniitsk [Gyidaganiits] Laxsgiik (Eagle of the
Tlingit)... about the Laxgibuu (Wolf), their hunting territory is still
remembered [and] shows that they must have been among the first there.5
The Tlingit titleholder and professional anthropologist, Louis
Shotridge wrote a slightly longer overview of the history as part of a larger
study of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan people. When he visited Kitsumkalum in 1918,
he spoke with a prominent man, who told him about the community's history.
I gathered from the Indians I met here that the old
Kitsumkalum, or Gitsumkelum as it is now called, was located some few miles up
the Kitsumkalum River. It was built on a narrow plateau from which the town
took its name. It is stated that the site was found by a man named Nisgeel
[Nish-gan], formerly of Nass [Naas] River, and, shortly after this man with his
family settled here, a party of emigrants, who in later years were identified
to be of Alaska Tlingit origin, came from the direction of the Nass [Naas]
River to join them. In still later years, these emigrants became one of the
divisions of this group. In course of time, when other parties from upper
Skeena River came down to join the community, the place gradually grew to a
very large town. It was divided into different section, each section being a
single row of houses arranged on level ledges staged down the embankment, and
occupied by different phratric divisions. The town grew so large that on some
occasions a visitor from one section to another disappeared, and stole and sold
to traders from foreign regions, who frequented the popular town.6
In a much longer report, this outline of the community's early
formation could be filled in with brief accounts of the arrival of each of the
families into Robin Town. I do not intend to tell the histories of those
individual houses - each of those histories are books in themselves.
Early
Written Descriptions of Kitsumkalum
The ethnohistorical record of the People of the Robin, the
Kitsumkalum, also includes a small set of written records. These records have
the colonial bias and a lack of interest on the part of the colonizers in
writing about the people of Kitsumkalum. The observations that were recorded
often had a negative racist commentary or a paternalistic tone. The explorers,
missionaries, government agents, settlers and others who were in the area
during the early days of colonization barely made reference to Kitsumkalum.
Even the professional scholarly literature concerning the Tsimshian Nation
ignored the community, with the notable exception of anthropologist Dr. Franz
Boas. Boas' attention is not surprising. He spent time in Port Essington in
1885 and undoubtedly spoke directly with Kitsumkalum people living on their
Reserve and working at the canneries. The result of this neglect was that,
until the start of the Kitsumkalum Social History Research Projects in 1979,
surprisingly little had been written about the community.
The earliest European reference to the Kitsumkalum people in
colonial archives is an entry in the Hudson Bay Company journal for November
13, 1852, twenty years after the post at Port Simpson had opened. On that date
a canoe of people came to trade who were identified as "Kith lum ki
lum".7 Their arrival merited a special record in
the Company's journal, but nothing more is said about their visit. The trader
was only interested in knowing the origin of his customers, not their customs.
The oldest account of a European visit to the actual lands of the Kitsumkalum
is, significantly, a military report from a Royal Navy surveying expedition
that went up the Skeena River in 1859, seven years after the "Kith lum ki lum"
canoe visited the Bay.8
With the growing European interest in the interior, river
traffic increased and Kitsumkalum's contact increased with the expanding
British Empire and with the early forms of globalization. Along with the
economic interests came the missionaries who started to hold services at
Kitsumkalum in 1881. None of these people report travelling up the river to the
canyon. They simply stayed on the Skeena, as did the Indian Reserve Commission
when it came to establish Indian Reserves in the 1890s. They allotted three
reserves to Kitsumkalum. One allotment recognized the importance of the Robin
Town area and established as a 182 acre Reserve on the west side of the canyon.
How the Commissioners made their decisions is not known but they did not
reserve the other side of the canyon where part of the community had its
houses. The original name of this Reserve was Fisheries Indian Reserve 2, but
the Band wanted the name to reflect the presence of Robin Town, Dałk
Gyilakyaw, and changed the name to Dal-ga-kila-quoeux Indian Reserve 2, i.e.
Dałk Gyilakyaw in today's spelling.
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Figure 3: The
Skinner map of I.R. 2.
Note the location of the “Old Village” and
a trail heading west from there. |
Within a quarter of a century of the Royal Navy expedition,
massive changes had occurred in the lives of the people of Robin Town. The
Skeena River had become a source of colonial activity. Kitsumkalum were
involved in the river freighting business, in supplying wood for the
riverboats, in guiding, and in other economic activities. They were also,
probably, drawn to the cultural activities and social life associated with
colonial society in the 19th century. Schools, missionaries, new stores with
products from around the world, new neighbours settling the area that would
become Terrace, would have provided an attraction that caused them, first, to
leave Robin Town in favour of their current village location at the mouth of
the Kalum River, then drawn them to the fishing industry on the coast or the
logging industry and the neighbouring village of Terrace. This shift in
residential patterns took place gradually over a fairly short period of time of
30 years: between the first documented visit of a Kitsumkalum canoe to Port
Simpson in 1852 and the final abandonment of Robin Town around
1878.
