Pennsylvania. The two men got along quite well. 12 After his work with the Haida and Tlingit, Swanton went on to study the Muskogean peoples of the Southeastern United States (the Houma are included in this linguistic group).
Itâs a fanciful stretch, but I like to think that maybe Swanton inspired Newcombe to plant his live oak when the latter built his house on Dallas Road. Maybe he even sent a root, an acorn, a small sapling, knowing that the species could withstand the salt-laden wind off the Juan de Fuca Strait. Potatoes, turnips, and the broom which so drastically changed the face of Victoria, graveposts and houseposts and the entire regalia for winter ceremonials travelling by train across America to the Chicago Worldâs Fair in 1893, gambling sticks of crabapple wood destined for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. . . In such ways cultural and botanical knowledge travel the well-worn roads and rivers of human experience, participating in exchange, small acts of mercy and theft, and larger ones of kindness and exploitation.
The Salvage Paradigm
I read whatever I can about Wawaditâla. The late Wilson Duff, the anthropology curator at the Provincial Museum who encouraged the construction of Wawaditâla, said:
This is an authentic replica of a Kwakiutl house of the nineteenth century. More exactly, it is Mungo Martinâs house, bearing on its houseposts some of the hereditary crests of his family. This is a copy of a house built at Fort Rupert about a century ago by a chief whose position and name Mungo Martin had inherited and assumed â N ak apâ a nk a m. 13
According to Wilson Duff, Wawaditâla was one of two names that Martin had the right to choose from for his creation; it means âhe orders them to come inside.â Yet it seems there was no single house on which Mungo Martin modelled his Thunderbird Park version. Rather, there are several.
The house where Mungo Martin was born was the home of his motherâs uncle, the old chief N ak apâ a nk a m. 14 It appears this house was never finished â it had no frontal painting. In what seems to be an homage to his father, who had come from Gwayasdums on Gilford Island, Martin uses an image from a house there for the frontal painting of the Thunderbird Park Wawaditâla, though with some stylistic changes. Martin reverses figures on the houseposts from those on N ak apâ a nk a mâs house, and synthesizes other design elements. In a paper given at the 1987 annual general meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Ira Jacknis considers the various sources informing Mungo Martinâs concept for Wawaditâla and the way the house both reflects the ideal and the pragmatic in terms of its influences: âthe non-native context of Martinâs house may have encouraged the artist to synthesize diverse Kwakiutl forms into a kind of âsuper-artifact.ââ 15
And what is a copy, what is authentic? Can the house of a Kwakwakaâwakw chief, built in Lekwungen territory on southern Vancouver Island, far from the village of its origins, built with the sense that everything it represented must be commemorated because so much of that culture was disappearing, can this house truly be called a copy? Houses, like songs and stories and other aspects of culture, exist across time and place, in a moment that is ever-present. When I saw that old man, who might have been Mungo Martin, working in Thunderbird Park, it did not occur to me that he had not always worked there, had not always lived in the house with some sort of sea creature painted on its facade. A child leaning her blue bike against a rock and watching was taken into that moment. The ravens in the trees knew this, their vocabulary unchanged over the centuries, in a city where the bodies of Native children and the young passenger from the Prince Alfred who died in the pesthouse at Holland Point lie under the ground in
Itâs a fanciful stretch, but I like to think that maybe Swanton inspired Newcombe to plant his live oak when the latter built his house on Dallas Road. Maybe he even sent a root, an acorn, a small sapling, knowing that the species could withstand the salt-laden wind off the Juan de Fuca Strait. Potatoes, turnips, and the broom which so drastically changed the face of Victoria, graveposts and houseposts and the entire regalia for winter ceremonials travelling by train across America to the Chicago Worldâs Fair in 1893, gambling sticks of crabapple wood destined for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. . . In such ways cultural and botanical knowledge travel the well-worn roads and rivers of human experience, participating in exchange, small acts of mercy and theft, and larger ones of kindness and exploitation.
The Salvage Paradigm
I read whatever I can about Wawaditâla. The late Wilson Duff, the anthropology curator at the Provincial Museum who encouraged the construction of Wawaditâla, said:
This is an authentic replica of a Kwakiutl house of the nineteenth century. More exactly, it is Mungo Martinâs house, bearing on its houseposts some of the hereditary crests of his family. This is a copy of a house built at Fort Rupert about a century ago by a chief whose position and name Mungo Martin had inherited and assumed â N ak apâ a nk a m. 13
According to Wilson Duff, Wawaditâla was one of two names that Martin had the right to choose from for his creation; it means âhe orders them to come inside.â Yet it seems there was no single house on which Mungo Martin modelled his Thunderbird Park version. Rather, there are several.
The house where Mungo Martin was born was the home of his motherâs uncle, the old chief N ak apâ a nk a m. 14 It appears this house was never finished â it had no frontal painting. In what seems to be an homage to his father, who had come from Gwayasdums on Gilford Island, Martin uses an image from a house there for the frontal painting of the Thunderbird Park Wawaditâla, though with some stylistic changes. Martin reverses figures on the houseposts from those on N ak apâ a nk a mâs house, and synthesizes other design elements. In a paper given at the 1987 annual general meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Ira Jacknis considers the various sources informing Mungo Martinâs concept for Wawaditâla and the way the house both reflects the ideal and the pragmatic in terms of its influences: âthe non-native context of Martinâs house may have encouraged the artist to synthesize diverse Kwakiutl forms into a kind of âsuper-artifact.ââ 15
And what is a copy, what is authentic? Can the house of a Kwakwakaâwakw chief, built in Lekwungen territory on southern Vancouver Island, far from the village of its origins, built with the sense that everything it represented must be commemorated because so much of that culture was disappearing, can this house truly be called a copy? Houses, like songs and stories and other aspects of culture, exist across time and place, in a moment that is ever-present. When I saw that old man, who might have been Mungo Martin, working in Thunderbird Park, it did not occur to me that he had not always worked there, had not always lived in the house with some sort of sea creature painted on its facade. A child leaning her blue bike against a rock and watching was taken into that moment. The ravens in the trees knew this, their vocabulary unchanged over the centuries, in a city where the bodies of Native children and the young passenger from the Prince Alfred who died in the pesthouse at Holland Point lie under the ground in
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