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proximity. Charred stones from the pits where springbank clover was steamed can be found in the sand. The buried streams remember their routes to the Inner Harbour, under what’s now the Empress Hotel, and where the old lodges at the original Songhees village site, though vanished, still give off the faint scent of cedar if the wind is right.
    Anthropologists might disagree about what is authentic and what isn’t, made anxious by preoccupations of contact and culture and the “salvage paradigm.” 16 This isn’t surprising: careers are built on fine distinctions. There is evidence that Mungo Martin felt that he was the last of his kind in some respects, working against time and oblivion. Wilson Duff wrote to a friend, “Mungo is convinced: (a) that this will be the last ‘house-warming’ potlatch and (b) that nobody else but him knows exactly how to do the whole thing properly.” 17 This house recreated and adapted and given new meaning, then: a repository of both memory and history, those duelling conspirators.
    What is particularly interesting is that anthropologists can engage in considerations of authenticity so many years after the plundering of the Kwakwaka’wakw villages and the loss of so much of their material culture, in part because Charles Newcombe took hundreds of precise photographs documenting the villages. One can look at them, a single degree of separation, and approach something of the experience of gliding onto the beach at Kalokwis on Turnour Island among the canoes where the housefronts stare out to sea, their imagery and context intact. Or walk up to the group of people standing in front of Kwaksistala, a house on Harbledown Island, in 1900, children and adults wrapped in blankets, a few of them in headdresses. That house’s sculpin front informed, in memory, some of Mungo Martin’s work in Thunderbird Park, as of course did Gwayasdums. We can almost remember, looking at these photographs; almost trace the trajectory of the artist’s work back to his original home at Fort Rupert on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, where clams were dried by the fire and elegant hooks of western yew might bring up a halibut. We can almost stand there in our otherness, our clothing slowly absorbing the smell of cedar smoke and salt.

    In 1906, Charles Newcombe sold a portion of his private collection of artefacts to the Canadian Geological Survey for $6,500; this paid for the house he built the next year at Ogden Point, the house I’d hoped was the one I’d visited as a Brownie, the same house now sheltering paroled inmates from federal prisons. It no longer even carries the Newcombe name but rather that of a deceased chaplain of one of the local penitentiaries, its original owner forgotten by the neighbours — who maybe even wonder why the large tree on the corner of their property is protected by heritage status and can’t be cut down.
    Newcombe increasingly devoted his attentions to the British Columbia Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, which had opened in 1887 and had concentrated, until then, on stuffed animal specimens under the direction of its curator John Fannin rather than the cultural riches of the province’s Indigenous peoples. If this omission had resulted in the materials being left in villages of their origins, then one could commend Mr. Fannin from this century to his own. But alas, as a visitor to New York observed in 1900, there is “a veritable forest of totem poles” at the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park. 18 And the Field Museum in Chicago, through the collecting tenacity of George Dorsey and others, had the contents of many Haida burial caves and gravehouses.
    Rising to the heights of umbrage, The British Colonist featured this headline in November 1903: “LOSS TO BRITISH COLUMBIA Through The Depredations Of United States And Other Foreign Collectors Of The Province’s Most