Wilson Duff (March 23, 1925 in

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

– August 8, 1976) was a Canadian archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and museum curator. He is remembered for his research on First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast, notably the

Tsimshian The Tsimshian (; tsi, Ts’msyan or Tsm'syen) are an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Their communities are mostly in coastal British Columbia in Terrace and Prince Rupert, and Metlakatla, Alaska on Annette Island, the only r ...

Gitxsan Gitxsan (also spelled Gitksan) are an Indigenous people in Canada whose home territory comprises most of the area known as the Skeena Country in English (: means "people of" and : means "the River of Mist"). Gitksan territory encompasses approxi ...

, and Haida, and especially for his interest in their plastic arts, such as

totem poles Totem poles ( hai, gyáaʼaang) are monumental carvings found in western Canada and the northwestern United States. They are a type of Northwest Coast art, consisting of poles, posts or pillars, carved with symbols or figures. They are usually m ...

. Along with Bill Holm and Harry Hawthorn, he was one of a small coterie of academics in the 1950s and '60s who worked to bring Northwest Coast art to international prominence.

Biography

Duff obtained a B.A. from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

(UBC) in 1949 and a master's in anthropology in 1951 from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, where he studied with Erna Gunther. His master's thesis was based on fieldwork with the Stó:lõ

Salish Salish () may refer to: * Salish peoples, a group of First Nations/Native Americans ** Coast Salish peoples, several First Nations/Native American groups in the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest ** Interior Salish peoples, several First Nat ...

people of the Fraser River in B.C. He collaborated with Charles E. Borden in 1952 to develop the Borden System for archeological site designations. He served as Curator of Anthropology at the British Columbia Provincial Museum (later known as the

Royal British Columbia Museum Founded in 1886, the Royal British Columbia Museum (sometimes referred to as Royal BC Museum) consists of The Province of British Columbia's natural and human history museum as well as the British Columbia Provincial Archives. The museum is loca ...

or RBCM) in

Victoria Victoria most commonly refers to: * Victoria (Australia), a state of the Commonwealth of Australia * Victoria, British Columbia, provincial capital of British Columbia, Canada * Victoria (mythology), Roman goddess of Victory * Victoria, Seychelle ...

from 1950 to 1965, at which point he joined the faculty at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at UBC. He was a founding member of the

British Columbia Museums Association British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

, and in the 1950s worked to preserve the last remaining totem poles on Haida Gwaii (formerly the

Queen Charlotte Islands Haida Gwaii (; hai, X̱aaydag̱a Gwaay.yaay / , literally "Islands of the Haida people") is an archipelago located between off the northern Pacific coast of Canada. The islands are separated from the mainland to the east by the shallow Heca ...

). In 1958, Duff and his assistant curator Michael Kew brokered an agreement with the Gitksan community of Kitwancool (a.k.a.

Gitanyow Gitanyow is an Indian reserve, Indian reserve community of the Gitxsan people, located on the Kitwanga River 8 km south of Kitwancool Lake, at the confluence of Kitwancool Creek. The community is located on Gitanyow Indian Reserve No. 1. Gi ...

), arranging for some of the village's totem poles to be removed to the RBCM for preservation, in exchange for replicas and for the publication of the Kitwancool people's histories, territories, and laws. During this project, Duff and Kew worked through the part-

Tlingit The Tlingit ( or ; also spelled Tlinkit) are indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Their language is the Tlingit language (natively , pronounced ),

interpreter for the Gitksan,

Constance Cox Constance Cox (25 October 1912 – 8 July 1998) was a British script writer and playwright, born in Sutton, Surrey. Life and career Cox was born Constance Shaw in Sutton, Surrey, in 1912. She married Norman Cox, a fighter pilot, who was kille ...

. In 1958-59, while he was a professor of anthropology at the

, he worked alongside the anthropologist and folklorist

Marius Barbeau Charles Marius Barbeau, (March 5, 1883 – February 27, 1969), also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A ...

in Ottawa on a

Canada Council The Canada Council for the Arts (french: Conseil des arts du Canada), commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporations of Canada, Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It acts as the fede ...

Senior Fellowship, organizing Barbeau and

William Beynon William Beynon (1888–1958) was a Canadian hereditary chief of the Tsimshian Nation and an oral historian; he served as ethnographer, translator, and linguistic consultant to many anthropologists who studied his people. Early life and educatio ...

's massive fieldnotes and other material on the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples (

Gitksan Gitxsan (also spelled Gitksan) are an Indigenous peoples in Canada, Indigenous people in Canada whose home territory comprises most of the area known as the Skeena Country in English (: means "people of" and : means "the River of Mist"). Gitksan ...

, and

Nisga'a The Nisga’a , often formerly spelled Nishga and spelled in the Nisga'a language as (pronounced ), are an Indigenous people of Canada in British Columbia. They reside in the Nass River valley of northwestern British Columbia. The name is a ...

). Duff became a champion of the importance of the Barbeau-Beynon corpus, though he distanced himself from Barbeau's more controversial theories on the recent peopling of the Americas. In 1960 he did fieldwork in Gitksan and Nisga'a communities, and in 1969 he served in court as an expert witness in the Nisga'a land-claims case ''Calder vs. Attorney-General of B.C.,'' the famous " Calder case." In his later years he was consumed with studying Haida art in all its formalistic and cosmological complexity—taking in structuralist and psychoanalytical insights—an endeavour which he undertook with his friend the Haida artist

Bill Reid William Ronald Reid Jr. (12 January 1920 – 13 March 1998) (Haida) was a Canadian artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid ...

but which never resulted in a comprehensive published articulation. His immersion in the Haida thought-world was so total that, as he wrote in the early 1970s, colleagues "are concerned about my sanity and reputation." His students included the anthropologist

Marjorie Halpin Marjorie Halpin (February 11, 1937 – August 30, 2000) was a U.S.-Canadian anthropologist best known for her work on Northwest Coast art and culture, especially the Tsimshian and Gitksan peoples. She earned an M.A. from George Washington Universit ...

. He committed suicide in his faculty office with a shotgun on August 8, 1976. The subsequent death of Lilo Berliner, a correspondent of Duff who left their letters on the doorstep of poet Phyllis Webb, led to the creation of the memorial poetry sequence "Artifacts" in the collection ''Wilson's Bowl'' (1980).

Selected works

* (ed.) (1959) ''Histories, Territories, and Laws of the Kitwancool.'' (Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir no. 4.) Victoria, B.C.: Royal British Columbia Museum. *(1964) "Contributions of Marius Barbeau to West Coast Ethnology." ''Anthropologica'' (new series), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 63–96. *(1964) The Indian History of British Columbia: Volume 1 The Impact of the Whiteman. BC Provincial Museum

Sources

* Abbott, Donald N. (ed.) (1981) ''The World Is as Sharp as a Knife: An Anthology in Honour of Wilson Duff.'' Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum. * Nowry, Laurence (1995) ''Marius Barbeau, Man of Mana: A Biography.'' Toronto: NC Press.

External links

"Bring Me One of Everything" (2011) fiction novel based on Wilson Duff
{{DEFAULTSORT:Duff, Wilson Canadian anthropologists Haida Tsimshian Gitxsan 1925 births 1976 deaths 20th-century anthropologists 1976 suicides