ETHELDRED'S HOPLITES: A TALE OF A FEMALE PALAEONTOLOGIST

The species' name is a homage to Etheldred Benett, an early English geologist often credited with being the first female geologist — a fossil collector par excellence.

If you happened to join us for today's VIPS talk with Phil Hadland, Collections & Engagement Curator of Natural Sciences at the Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, UK, on 101 Fossils of Folkstone, you will have heard him mention her in his talk.

She was also credited with being a man  —  the Natural History Society of Moscow awarded her membership as Master Etheldredus Benett in 1836. The confusion over her name (it did sound masculine) came again with the bestowing of a Doctorate of Civil Law from Tsar Nicholas I.

The Tsar had read Sowerby's Mineral Conchology, a major fossil reference work which contained the second-highest number of contributed fossils of the day, many of the best quality available at the time. Forty-one of those specimens were credited to Benett. Between her name and this wonderous contribution to a growing science, the Russian Tsar awarded the Doctorate to what he believed was a young male scientist on the rise. He believed in education, founding Kyiv University in 1834, just not for women. He was an autocratic military man frozen in time — the thought that this work could have been done by a female was unthinkable. Doubly charming is that the honour from the University of St Petersburg was granted at a time when women were not allowed to attend St. Pete's or any higher institutions. That privilege arrived in 1878, twenty years after Nicholas I's death.

Benett took these honours (and social blunders) with grace. She devoted her life to collecting and studying fossils from the southwest of England, amassing an impressive personal collection she openly shared with geologist friends, colleagues and visitors to her home. Her speciality was fossils from the Middle Cretaceous, Upper Greensand in the Vale of Wardour — a valley in the county of Wiltshire near the River Nadder.

Etheldred was a local Wiltshire girl. Born Etheldred Benett on 22 July 1775 at Pyt House, Tisbury, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of the local squire Thomas Benett. Etheldred's interest was cultivated by the botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert (1761-1842), a founding member of the Linnean Society. Benett's brother had married Lucy Lambert, Aylmer's half-sister. Aylmer was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of the Arts. He was also an avid fossil collector and member of the Geological Society of London. The two met and got on famously.

Aylmer kindled an interest in natural history in both of Benett's daughters. Etheldred had a great fondness in geology, stratigraphy and all things paleo, whilst her sister concentrated on botany. Etheldred had a distinct advantage over her near contemporary, the working-class Mary Anning (1799-1847), in that Benett was a woman of independent wealth who never married — and didn't need to — who could pursue the acquisition and study of fossils for her own interest.

While Anning was the marine reptile darling of the age, she was also greatly hindered by her finances. "She sells, seashells by the seashore..." while chanted in a playful spirit today, was not meant kindly at the time. Aylmer's encouragement emboldened Etheldred to go into the field to collect for herself — and collect she did. Profusely.

Benett’s contribution to the early history of Wiltshire geology is significant. She corresponded extensively with the coterie of gentlemen scientists of the day —  Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, James Sowerby, George Bellas Greenough and, Samuel Woodward. She also consorted with the lay folk and had an ongoing correspondence with William Smith, whose stratigraphy work had made a favourable impression on her brother-in-law, Aylmer.

Her collections and collaboration with geologists of the day were instrumental in helping to form the field of geology as a science. One colleague and friend, Gideon Mantell, British physician, geologist and palaeontologist, who discovered four of the five genera of dinosaurs and Iguanadon, was so inspired by Benett's work he named this Cretaceous ammonite after her — Hoplites bennettiana.

Benett's fossil assemblage was a valuable resource for her contemporaries and remains so today. It contains thousands of Jurassic and Cretaceous fossil specimens from the Wiltshire area and the Dorset Coast, including a myriad of first-recorded finds. The scientific name of every taxon is usually based on one particular specimen, or in some cases multiple specimens. Many of the specimens she collected serve as the Type Specimen for new species.

Fossil Sponge, Polypothecia quadriloba, Warminster, Wiltshire

Her particular interest was the collection and study of fossil sponges. Alcyonia caught her eye early on. She collected and recorded her findings with the hope that one of her colleagues might share her enthusiasm and publish her work as a contribution to their own.

Alas, no one took up the helm — those interested were busy with other pursuits (or passed away) and others were less than enthusiastic or never seemed to get around to it.

To ensure the knowledge was shared in a timely fashion, she finally wrote them up and published them herself. You can read her findings in her publication, ‘A Catalogue of Organic Remains of the County of Wiltshire’ (1831), where she shares observations on the fossil sponge specimens and other invert goodies from the outcrops west of town.

She shared her ideas freely and donated many specimens to local museums. It was through her exchange of observations, new ideas and open sharing of fossils with Gideon Mantell and others that a clearer understanding of the Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of Southern England was gained.

In many ways, Mantell was drawn to Benett as his ideas went against the majority opinion. At a time when marine reptiles were dominating scientific discoveries and discussions, he pushed the view that dinosaurs were terrestrial, not amphibious, and sometimes bipedal. Mantell's life's work established the now-familiar idea that the Age of Reptiles preceded the Age of Mammals. Mantell kept a journal from 1819-1852, that remained unpublished until 1940 when E. Cecil Curwen published an abridged version. (Oxford University Press 1940). John A. Cooper, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove, published the work in its entirety in 2010.

I was elated to get a copy, both to untangle the history of the time and to better learn about the relationship between Mantell and Benett. So much of our geologic past has been revealed since Mantell's first entry two hundred years ago. The first encounter we share with the two of them is a short note from March 8, 1819. "This morning I received a letter from Miss Bennett of Norton House near Warminster Wilts, informing me of her having sent a packet of fossils for me, to the Waggon Office..." The diary records his life, but also the social interactions of the day and the small connected community of the scientific social elite. It is a delight!

Though a woman in a newly evolving field, her work, dedication and ideas were recognized and appreciated by her colleagues. Gideon Mantell described her as, "a lady of great talent and indefatigable research," whilst the Sowerbys noted her, "labours in the pursuit of geological information have been as useful as they have been incessant."

Benett produced the first measured sections of the Upper Chicksgrove quarry near Tisbury in 1819, published and shared with local colleagues as, "the measure of different beds of stone in Chicksgrove Quarry in the Parish of Tisbury.” The stratigraphic section was later published by naturalist James Sowerby without her knowledge. Her research contradicted many of Sowerby’s conclusions.

She wrote and privately published a monograph in 1831, containing many of her drawings and sketches of molluscs and sponges. Her work included sketches of the fossil Alcyonia (1816) from the Green Sand Formation at Warminster Common and the immediate vicinity of Warminster in Wiltshire.

Echinoids and Bivalves. Collection of Etheldred Benett (1775-1845)

The Society holds two copies, one was given to George Bellas Greenough, and another copy was given to her friend Gideon Mantell. This work established her as a true, pioneering biostratigrapher following but not always agreeing with the work of William Smith.

If you'd like to read a lovely tale on William's work, check out the Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester. It narrates the intellectual context of the time, the development of Smith's ideas and how they contributed to the theory of evolution and more generally to a dawning realization of the true age of the earth.

The book describes the social, economic or industrial context for Smith's insights and work, such as the importance of coal mining and the transport of coal by means of canals, both of which were a stimulus to the study of geology and the means whereby Smith supported his research. Benett debated many of the ideas Smith put forward. She was luckier than Smith financially, coming from a wealthy family, a financial perk that allowed her the freedom to add fossils to her curiosity cabinet at will.

Most of her impressive collection was assumed lost in the early 20th century. It was later found and purchased by an American, Thomas Bellerby Wilson, who donated it to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Small parts of it made their way into British museums, including the Leeds City Museum, London, Bristol and to the University of St. Petersburg. These collections contain many type specimens and some of the very first fossils found — some with the soft tissues preserved. When Benett died in 1845, it was Mantell who penned her obituary for the London Geological Journal.

In 1989, almost a hundred and fifty years after her death, a review of her collection had Arthur Bogen and Hugh Torrens remark that her work has significantly impacted our modern understanding of Porifera, Coelenterata, Echinodermata, and the molluscan classes, Cephalopoda, Gastropoda, and Bivalvia. A worthy legacy, indeed.

Her renown lives on through her collections, her collaborations and through the beautiful 110 million-year-old ammonite you see here, Hoplites bennettiana. The lovely example you see here is in the collection of the deeply awesome Christophe Marot.

Spamer, Earle E.; Bogan, Arthur E.; Torrens, Hugh S. (1989). "Recovery of the Etheldred Benett Collection of fossils mostly from Jurassic-Cretaceous strata of Wiltshire, England, analysis of the taxonomic nomenclature of Benett (1831), and notes and figures of type specimens contained in the collection". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 141. pp. 115–180. JSTOR 4064955.

Torrens, H. S.; Benamy, Elana; Daeschler, E.; Spamer, E.; Bogan, A. (2000). "Etheldred Benett of Wiltshire, England, the First Lady Geologist: Her Fossil Collection in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Rediscovery of "Lost" Specimens of Jurassic Trigoniidae (Mollusca: Bivalvia) with Their Soft Anatomy Preserved.". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 150. pp. 59–123. JSTOR 4064955.

Photo credit: Fossils from Wiltshire.  In the foreground are three examples of the echinoid, Cidaris crenularis, from Calne, a town in Wiltshire, southwestern England, with bivalves behind. Caroline Lam, Archivist at the Geological Society, London, UK. http://britgeodata.blogspot.com/2016/03/etheldred-benett-first-female-geologist_30.html

Photo credit: Fossil sponges Polypothecia quadriloba, from Warminster, Wiltshire. The genus labels are Benett’s, as is the handwriting indicating the species. The small number, 20812, is the Society’s original accession label from which we can tell that the specimen was received in April 1824. The tablet onto which the fossils were glued is from the Society’s old Museum.

HALIOTIS MARINE MOLLUSCS / GWA'LIT'SA

Abalone / Gwa'lit'sa in Kwak'wala

This gorgeous natural dish adorns many households as a natural soap tray, jewellery box or material for earrings, carved cedar and regalia.

While we enjoy the beautiful blue, violet, green, and pink of the nacre, this shell was once the home of an abalone, a group of tasty marine snails that range from quite small to the size of a small dinner plate. They took an unfortunate evolutionary path that has left them both beautiful and delicious.

Abalone is the common name for a group of large marine snails — gastropod molluscs in the genus Haliotis, family Haliotidae. Haliotis once contained six subgenera but these are now grouped together as alternate representations of Haliotis. 

In the Pacific Northwest, our rocky shores are home to the Northern or Pinto abalone, Haliotis kamtschatkana. 

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, abalone are known as gwa'lit̕sa.

They range from Mexico to Alaska and are the only abalone species found in Washington state, British Columbia and Alaska. Abalone prefer to live amongst the cold waters and high surf of rocky reef habitats. They are easily harvested as their sweet spot is water between 3-18 meters or 10-60 feet deep.  

The shells of abalones have a low, open spiral structure, and are characterized by several open respiratory pores in a row near the shell's outer edge. The thick inner layer of the shell is composed of nacre or mother-of-pearl. Their iridescent nacre is gorgeous and runs from white to blue to green. Both their meat and their shells are highly prized. 

The Northern or Pinto abalone is protected today. Those looking to use the shell for decorative purposes must now look to California or New Zealand. The California abalone is more colourful than its northern cousin and has long been preferred by First Nations artists, particularly for the large earrings favoured by women of rank amongst First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. 

My relatives are no exception. This wonderful photo of Dzawada'enuxw Margaret Frank neé Wilson wearing abalone shell earrings was taken by celebrated photographer Edward Curtis on his visit to the northern end of Vancouver Island in 1914. 

Curtis visited many of my relatives and took numerous photos for which we are eternally grateful as they capture a time in history where the use of photography was still quite limited. 

When he filmed In the Land of the Head Hunters, Dzawada'enuxw Margaret Frank was featured. It was later named, much more appropriately, In the Land of the War Canoes.

He also captured the work of Anisalaga, Mary Ebbetts Hunt, on these visits. When she married Robert Hunt, her son William, my great great grandfather married Annie Wilson. 

It is through Annie that I am related to this beautiful soul captured here. 

Photo: Edward Curtis (1868-1952), circa 1914. This photo was taken in Tsaxis, Fort Rupert, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada

KEEPING TIME: AMMONITES

Argonauticeras besairei, José Juárez Ruiz

An exceptional example of the fractal building of an ammonite septum, in this clytoceratid Argonauticeras besairei from the awesome José Juárez Ruiz.

Ammonites were predatory, squidlike creatures that lived inside coil-shaped shells.

Like other cephalopods, ammonites had sharp, beak-like jaws inside a ring of squid-like tentacles that extended from their shells. 

They used these tentacles to snare prey, — plankton, vegetation, fish and crustaceans — similar to the way a squid or octopus hunt today.

Catching a fish with your hands is no easy feat, as I am sure you know. But the Ammonites were skilled and successful hunters. They caught their prey while swimming and floating in the water column. 

Within their shells, they had a number of chambers, called septa, filled with gas or fluid that were interconnected by a wee air tube. By pushing air in or out, they were able to control their buoyancy in the water column.

They lived in the last chamber of their shells, continuously building new shell material as they grew. As each new chamber was added, the squid-like body of the ammonite would move down to occupy the final outside chamber.

They were a group of extinct marine mollusc animals in the subclass Ammonoidea of the class Cephalopoda. 

These molluscs, commonly referred to as ammonites, are more closely related to living coleoids — octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish) than they are to shelled nautiloids such as the living Nautilus species.

The Ammonoidea can be divided into six orders:

• Agoniatitida, Lower Devonian - Middle Devonian
• Clymeniida, Upper Devonian
• Goniatitida, Middle Devonian - Upper Permian
• Prolecanitida, Upper Devonian - Upper Triassic
• Ceratitida, Upper Permian - Upper Triassic
• Ammonitida, Lower Jurassic - Upper Cretaceous

Ammonites have intricate and complex patterns on their shells called sutures. The suture patterns differ across species and tell us what time period the ammonite is from. If they are geometric with numerous undivided lobes and saddles and eight lobes around the conch, we refer to their pattern as goniatitic, a characteristic of Paleozoic ammonites.

If they are ceratitic with lobes that have subdivided tips; giving them a saw-toothed appearance and rounded undivided saddles, they are likely Triassic. For some lovely Triassic ammonites, take a look at the specimens that come out of Hallstatt, Austria and from the outcrops in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada.

Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826) Christophe Marot

If they have lobes and saddles that are fluted, with rounded subdivisions instead of saw-toothed, they are likely Jurassic or Cretaceous. If you'd like to see a particularly beautiful Lower Jurassic ammonite, take a peek at Apodoceras. Wonderful ridging in that species.

One of my favourite Cretaceous ammonites is the ammonite, Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826). This beauty is from Albian deposits near Carrière de Courcelles, Villemoyenne, near la région de Troyes (Aube) Champagne in northeastern France.

At the time that this fellow was swimming in our oceans, ankylosaurs were strolling about Mongolia and stomping through the foliage in Utah, Kansas and Texas. Bony fish were swimming over what would become the strata making up Canada, the Czech Republic and Australia. Cartilaginous fish were prowling the western interior seaway of North America and a strange extinct herbivorous mammal, Eobaatar, was snuffling through Mongolia, Spain and England.

In some classifications, these are left as suborders, included in only three orders: Goniatitida, Ceratitida, and Ammonitida. Once you get to know them, ammonites in their various shapes and suturing patterns make it much easier to date an ammonite and the rock formation where it is found.

Ammonites first appeared about 240 million years ago, though they descended from straight-shelled cephalopods called bacrites that date back to the Devonian, about 415 million years ago, and the last species vanished in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

They were prolific breeders that evolved rapidly. If you could cast a fishing line into our ancient seas, it is likely that you would hook an ammonite, not a fish. They were prolific back in the day, living (and sometimes dying) in schools in oceans around the globe. We find ammonite fossils (and plenty of them) in sedimentary rock from all over the world.

In some cases, we find rock beds where we can see evidence of a new species that evolved, lived and died out in such a short time span that we can walk through time, following the course of evolution using ammonites as a window into the past.

For this reason, they make excellent index fossils. An index fossil is a species that allows us to link a particular rock formation, layered in time with a particular species or genus found there. 

Generally, deeper is older, so we use the sedimentary layers of rock to match up to specific geologic time periods, rather like the way we use tree rings to date trees. A handy way to compare fossils and date strata across the globe.

References: Inoue, S., Kondo, S. Suture pattern formation in ammonites and the unknown rear mantle structure. Sci Rep 6, 33689 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep33689

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33689?fbclid=IwAR1BhBrDqhv8LDjqF60EXdfLR7wPE4zDivwGORTUEgCd2GghD5W7KOfg6Co#citeas

Photos: Argonauticeras besairei from the awesome José Juárez Ruiz.

Photo: Hoplites bennettiana from near Troyes, France. Collection de Christophe Marot

BOAS, ANNIE SPENCER, LUCY HOMISKANIS, CADWALLADER AND LYON

In 1885, at the age of twenty-seven, Franz Boas received the assignment of cataloguing a First Nation mask, which the explorer Johan Adrian Jacobsen had purchased on northern Vancouver Island and sent back to the Royal Museum of Ethnology. 

Boas was a German-born American anthropologist who spent considerable time on the west coast — much of it with my extended family. 

During the previous year, the museum had seized upon the German Empire’s expansion to assemble the world’s largest collection of bones and curios from “vanishing” cultures.

But this mask was no artefact of the past. It was in use until the moment its owner removed it from her box of treasures. 

The mask belonged to Lucy Homiskanis known as T’łaliłi’lakw, the wife of George Hunt (1864-1932), first born son of Robert Hunt and Mary Ebbets. Lucy had contributed to her husband’s ascent among the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert by displaying her dances—property rights that Hunt, the son of HBC Factor Robert Hunt and his highborn Tlingit wife— Mary Ebbets, Anisalaga, mixed with wealth, rhetoric, and political genius to join the Kwakiutl nobility.

As a teenager Lucy had disappeared while digging for clams, leaving only a pile of clothes on the beach. For a month she was thought to be gone—until the winter ceremonies when the dance leaders of Fort Rupert called the people to their secret spot in the woods to compose two songs for the supposedly vanished girl. 

That night a Killer Whale dancer appeared in the house, spouting water from his blowhole. Suddenly he pulled a hidden string, splitting his face in two and revealing the form of a supernatural Monster Fish said to have taken the girl away. Following this transformation, and shocking those who thought her gone, Lucy emerged to dance, enacting her role as a bearer of wealth for her family.

Boas, who printed a picture of this mask in 1897, would not learn the identity of its owner, much less the dramatic story of Lucy’s disappearance and reappearance, until the early 1920s, when Lucy had been dead for more than a decade. 

George Hunt, now approaching his seventies, sent Boas a list of corrections to their monumental, coauthored ethnography. Almost as if posing a counter-point to the classifying outlook Boas expressed in his title for the book, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,

George Hunt titled his latest work “name of the masks on the Book and who there Belong to.” 

In each sentence, Hunt contradicted Boas’s pursuit of the typical and tribal with an account of the personal and particular—beginning with his own family. “This mask,” Hunt wrote Boas, “was my wife's Killer Whale mask.”

It was Hunt, it turns out, who had sent the mask to Germany. 

500+ Kwakwaka’wakw Ceremonial Objects Send to Berlin 

In 1881, Hunt had served as Jacobsen’s guide, aiding in his collection of the more than five hundred Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial objects now in Berlin that stirred in Boas visions of a foreign world. “My fancy was first struck,” Boas recalled, “by the flight of imagination exhibited in the works of art of the British Columbians as compared to the severe sobriety of the eastern Eskimo.” 

Sea monsters, fantastical birds of prey, tangle-haired hags assaulted his senses, striking him as strange, “grotesque.” But as he held the masks in hand, noting mouths, eyes, snapping mandibles, faces that divided by the pull of a string to reveal a second face within, Boas realized “what a wealth of thought” lay hidden behind the designs.

Boas’s newfound interest in masks, a layer interposed between the self and the world, was more than a metaphor for his interest in culture. Boas lived behind a kind of mask—a look at his face revealed cracks in the facade: three scars over the eye, one across the nose, and a long, cruel slash from cheek to ear.

Boas had earned his Schmisse while fencing at university between 1877 and 1881 when a revived version of the Judenfrage or Jewish question, posed by the distinguished historian Hein-rich von Treitschke gripped the country, and students rallied to “emancipate the German people from a kind of foreign domination.”

Boas, a secular Jew, fought several duels to defend his honour against attacks from anti-Semites, but his attempt to escape his outsider’s identity, living by the code of his German secret society, marked him as the outsider he did not wish to be.

Few frontal portraits of Boas survive today because he tended to present his profile to the camera, leaving the scarred side in shadow.

The violence inscribed on Boas’s face signified a deeper conflict between his self-image as a romantic explorer and the flesh-and-blood reality of a scientist measuring humans in an age of empire.

Inspired by the globetrotting humanism of Alexander von Humboldt, whose magnum opus,

Cosmos, offered Europeans a vision of New World grandeur, Boas had set off in 1883 to live with the Inuit of Baffin Island, there awakening to the radical variety of human practice, the universality of human experience, and the sordid power performances involved in extracting information about both.

He returned in 1885 to an altered Germany, which had acquired an empire in his absence and now possessed colonies in Africa and the Pacific. The merging of imperial politics and romantic science provoked a profound crisis for Boas now defined at home as the ethnic outsider he had travelled so far to see.

As his mentors, Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian received packets of salted skin, hair, and severed hands from German collectors around the globe, Boas groped for a new self-understanding. 

He came to the conclusion that science must change. Though categorizing experience and generalizing data to form laws of nature could be one way of seeing the world, one must not lose one's sense of feeling. The “effective” search for the inner nature of the thing itself, rather than the way one might define it from the outside, could reveal a different form of truth.

Just as he came to this insight, the Northwest Coast artwork arrived, opening a door to affective perception. Lucy’s transformation mask, representing two faces, linked three states of being, those of the human (Dancer), animal (Killer Whale), and supernatural (Monster Fish) realms. It was an image of interconnection, portraying the relationships of humans with the nonhuman members of an animate cosmos. 

Even as Boas classified the mask, categorizing it by region and tribe, the object escaped his grasp, permeating the borders of being that locked Boas 

in place. This global consciousness remained dead to Boas so long as the mask remained severed from the message. But a potential existed. 

If the mask and the message could be reunited, they would transmit to Boas an Indigenous narrative. Through this opening, this crack in thought danced “die Bella Coola.” In the Hamburg animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck, who would later contribute to the invention of the modern zoo, toured Germany with an exhibition of humans.

Nine Nuxalk dancers from Bella Coola, a village north of Hunt’s home in Kwak’wala land, spent a year performing in zoos, hotels, and theaters across Germany.

The ethnographer Aurel Krause, who had recently returned from a stay with the Tlingit of Alaska, invited Boas to join him on a visit to the performers at Krolls Establishment, the amusement centre where they lived and danced.

The following days proceeded for Boas like a dreamer a vision as the dancers took the artefacts he had been struggling to lock into place and spun them, for a moment, into splendid motion. Donning the masks collected by Hunt, cocking their beaks to the beat, the Nuxalk posed as supernatural cranes and ravens. They rolled up their sleeves to display their scars, explained to Boas that the masks were tied to the secret societies of the Northwest Coast, and described the arduous initiation rituals—an experience to which Boas, a secret society initiate himself, could relate. 

A conversation began. 

The Nuxalk taught Boas their local trade jargon. They sang of love, and of loss, in the Puget Sound hop fields (“Ya, that is good! Ya, that is good! That worthless woman does not like me”).

One man, a skilled storyteller named Nuskilusta, taught Boas the rudiments of the Nuxalk language.

After four days Boas wrote to his fiancée, Marie Krackowizer, that he felt “wie in Himmel,” as if he were in heaven. By the time the group left for Breslau he had recorded four songs, sent a report to the Berliner Tageblatt, described the Nuxalk language, and written a sketch for the American magazine Science.

Boas had found his effective inspiration, a message for his developing medium.

The performers offered Boas an Indigenous education, a Bella Coola Bildung.

Making use of another people’s masks as found objects, they code-switched Boas to their mnemonic logic, transmitting their messages to him. The embodied materialism of this meeting, in which ideas moved through masks, blankets, and even scars, accommodated Boas’s German ideas about culture, for the ornate carvings of the Northwest Coast showed that this so-called “primitive” people, in fact, possessed a richly developed civilization.

When the Nuxalk danced, Boas wrote, “We saw ourselves transported into a foreign world whose outlook, whose customs, have taken a quite different course from ours, but which we must acknowledge as a high cultural state.”

Yet even by altering his judgment, Boas retained the authority to be the judge. A more powerful transformation was underway, one concerning the question of agency.

Transformation Masks

As he studied the artwork displayed by the Nuxalk, Boas noted an aesthetic feature of the Northwest Coast: the eye design.

This “repeated motif” deco-rated nearly every spoon, blanket, and mask that he saw. Boas did not yet know that sight—vision—was a central idea on the Northwest Coast. Visions of encounters with animals and spirits were a form of social currency. By performing visions, elites claimed their ancestral privileges and responsibilities. By experiencing visions, shamans received their healing powers. Stories were visions shared by a teller, pictures painted in words.

Through visions, through the metaphor of vision, the people of the coast depicted themselves as Eyes, not Others: vision seekers, vision speakers. Ultimately it is the person with vision, the person who glimpses a potential that others have missed, who is capable of altering a situation, thus bringing about a transformation. At the heart of this transformation was the idea of a mask. In the European outlook familiar to Boas, a mask concealed: it hid the wearer’s true identity, superimposing a false front. 

For the Nuxalk and for the Kwakwaka’wakw, masks were not merely coverings but skins, part and parcel of the substance beneath. A mask enabled its wearer to alter states, to don a second face. It provided a new way of being and of seeing.

Rather than hiding behind the mask, the people of the Northwest Coast took on the mask’s identity. When they put on their masks, they positioned themselves not as objects of anthropology but as subjects of history. Agents of change, they possessed the power to transform. There is no evidence to suggest that Boas felt tempted to wear one of these masks, thus donning the skin of the Nuxalk and their neighbours, seeing the world through their eyes. If he did so, quietly and out of view, we have no record of it.

We do know that Boas sought the meanings behind the masks. He asked what each design depicted, but the performers from Bella Coola could not tell him. The masks collected by Jacobsen were not their masks, they said. They did not know the stories behind them.

Once intrigued, Boas now found himself confronted by a mystery, and with this mystery, the door opened wider. To findout more, it would be necessary to visit the place where the masks were made. Twenty-five years later Boas would look back upon this moment, the moment of his Bella Coola

Bildung, as the beginning of his own transformation. The performers from Bella Coola, Boas wrote, offered him a chance to “cast a brief glimpse behind the veil that covered the life of these people.”

Had it not been for the Nuxalk performers, Boas might very easily have remained at home, where he would have become a professor of geography in Germany and, had he lived long enough, a stumbling stone on the streets of present-day Berlin.

It was due to the influence of Indigenous performers that his life veered in a new direction and began to take consequential shape. 

In 1886, Boas took leave of the museum to travel to the Northwest Coast. “The attraction,” he later wrote, “was irresistible.”

DRIFTED ASHORE HOUSE

Boas arrived on Vancouver Island like a parody of a detective, clutching sketches of the masks as his clues. The only drawback to these clues was that they lacked any connection to a case. Boas envisioned the masks as signs that Natives could connect to referents, lifting the veil that obscured their world of thought. But the masks were not signs. They were property that related the histories of their owners, and knowledge of the designs was limited to the circle whose history they discussed. No one else had a right to talk. 

After a week of sodden searching in the labour camps of Victoria, poking his head into tents, sharing pictures, requesting information in the shards of Chinook trade jargon he had learned from the Nuxalk, Boas had come no closer to the meanings that had eluded him in Berlin. He gave up his hunt in order to buy new masks, thus creating a clean set of signs and referents.

As he headed north on an old steamer toward Kwakwaka’wakw country, a case of tobacco and a bolt of cotton by his side, Boas formed the perfect caricature of the white man’s globalization. Money for masks, tobacco for tales, was Europe’s colonial calculus. Boas, no exception, needed masks to fund his trip. His pursuit of “handsome” objects to sell to Bastian in Berlin formed the subtext of his dealings at Newitti, a remote island town off the northern tip of Vancouver Island, twice razed by British gunboats yet still a bastion of the potlatch, the outlawed form of Indigenous governance that took place through a reciprocal exchange of feasts, dances, and most important to Boas, the display of masks.

The potlatch was an answer and an ode to the experience of modernity. It had taken a new form after the smallpox epidemic of 1862 when more than 50 per cent of the people died within a year, some villages vanished, and Northwest Coast peoples faced the possibility of imminent destruction. 

The potlatch was their survival strategy, a gift-giving system that soldered bonds between peoples, redistributed wealth—often in the form of fabricated metal plates known as coppers that were worth thousands of trade blankets—and spread stories across a thousand-mile coastline from the salmon-fishing grounds of the Columbia River to the eulachon harvesting spots by the Nass. 

Through this system of material and intellectual exchange, thousands of people responded to the existential threat that Western networks of power and pathogens posed to their homes, families, and communities. They fashioned a new Indigenous life world, drawing one another into an ongoing conversation that constructed a peaceful, pan coastal community. Because the potlatch system perpetuated Indigenous independence, Canada’s government had banned it in 1884.

But this did not stop the Kwakwaka’wakw, who determined to live—as one chief now put it to Boas—by “the strict law that bids us dance.”

The people of Newitti greeted Boas quizzically. Why would a white visitor ask to see the same dances that the white government had only just banned? Boas, compelled to communicate, clarified that he was not a missionary or a government agent but a traveller who had come to learn. “I do not wish to interfere with your celebration,” he promised the head chief, who had called a town meeting, asking the foreigner to explain his purposes. “My people live far away,” Boas said, “and would like to know what people in distant lands do.. . . And so I went and I came here and I saw you eat and drink, sing and dance. And I shall go back and say: ‘See, that is how the people there live. They were good to me and asked me to live with them.’”

In response to the stimulus provided by the people of Newitti, Boas had begun to reconsider his research methods. He talked about himself as the people wanted to see him, not as a collector but as a transmitter of information. During the next week, as Boas put together his 

During the next week, as Boas put together his collection, the people took time out from their dances to chat with the visitor. “Everyone,” Boas wrote, “is most anxious to tell me something.”

By revealing what they valued—their stories—those assembled at Newitti turned Boas from the material products that possessed Western value to the narratives that the objects encoded, which held greater wealth in the Indigenous world. Boas saw the masks in the context of their makers, who expressed their social history in carvings—masks and also poles, posts, family benches, and feasting dishes—all of which related the narratives of their owners.

At night, the head chief of Newitti gathered his people around the fire, where he related legends that Boas scribbled down with the help of a young translator. Sitting on the chief’s settee, carved with the heraldry of his lineage, Boas realized that the designs surrounding him told the history of the house. 

The people of Newitti lived within their narratives, enfolded by their stories. Although Boas styled himself as the intellectual, it was the Kwakwaka’wakw who turned him from objects to ideas.

Boas continued to collect, and he would succeed in paying for his trip by selling his collection (the “best masks available,” he reported home, including, “all the ornaments that belong to one dance”).

But the object of his interest shifted from the masks that brought him there to the storytelling style of theNorthwest Coast. So eager was Boas to hear more stories, and to see stories play out in dances, that he placed his masks at risk to do so, travelling through a severe storm to reach some potlatches at the town of Alert Bay. 

When his guide, blown ashore, refused to venture out again, Boas hired a Native boatman, stowed the masks in his craft, and pushed off into a ferocious wind. They might have died and were once pushed into a rocky peninsula, but somehow Boas and his new pilot managed to catch a friendly gust and steer for the totem poles of Alert Bay. 

A crowd rushed to bring the boat in, Boas springing out so eagerly that his guide burst into laughter. “You were just like a deer,” he said, “so quickly you jumped ashore!” 

Relieved, Boas walked to the dock to find George Hunt’s brother-in-law Stephen Allen Spencer, the owner of the local salmon cannery, whose attention immediately gravitated toward the masks, the constant object of imperial interest. “The first thing he told me,” Boas wrote, “was that my belongings would be locked up.”

Despite all the effort Boas had expended on masks—first to determine the meanings of the masks he had seen in Berlin, then to collect the second group of masks at Newitti, and finally to transport and secure them—his attempt to “cast a glimpse behind the veil” was a failure. 

The masks were not signs that could be lifted out of the Northwest Coast to generate principles. They were mediums, which their owners used to transmit messages. Even as Boas attempted to collect, and by collecting to categorize a culture, the people of the Northwest Coast attempted to communicate, and by communicating to transmit a history that defied categorization. As a result, Boas’s interest began to shift from masks to the mnemonic knowledge they encoded. It was in this context—the play between categorization and communication—that he met the Hunt family and, without realizing it, learned their family story.

Dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer, Harry Tennyson Cadwallader and Alexander Matthew Lyon

On his first night in Alert Bay, after dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer and his two brothers-in-law, each, like Spencer, was married to a sister of Hunt — Boas spent some hours in conversation with Annie Spencer (1856-1924), the younger sister to George (1864-1932) and William (1866-1952) Hunt, who regaled him with First Nation tales. 

“Mrs. Spencer was very gracious and told me many stories,” Boas wrote to Krackowizer, “which I recorded later in the evening.”

Four days later, Boas mentioned in a new note to his fiancée that he had visited Annie Spencer again and asked her to tell more tales. “She relates well and is very gracious,” he emphasized. “Unfortunately she is not well or I should really bother her.”

Nevertheless, Boas trod back to the Spencers’ home the same day. There he found Hunt’s sister either improved or doubly gracious, for she was “kind enough to tell me all I wanted to know. . . . The information I obtained from her was the most valuable I received in Alert Bay.”

The stories of Annie Hunt Spencer (1856-1924) daughter to Mrs. Mary Ebbits, Anisalaga, opened a vista on a narrative legacy linking all the peoples from Yakutat Bay to the Columbia River, who, though divided by physical and linguistic differences and by histories of conflict, held in common a heritage of thought. 

The Raven Cycle

A centrepiece of this heritage was the Raven Cycle, one of the oldest and largest bodies of oral literature in the Americas. In the bards who performed the Raven tales, and who daily altered them, were members not of a single school but of a living tradition whose members had innovated a stance toward the world in response to cycles of change from the Ice Age to the smallpox apocalypse. They had created a body of thought about people’s relationships to one another and to the cosmos, the beings within it, and the capacity of humans to right those relationships.

The star of the drama was Raven, scheming, ravenous, bumbling in his arrogance toward ever-greater disgrace, yet always surviving, evolving, and through his accidents and exploits establishing the present state of affairs.

Born before the earth had acquired its form, it was Raven—Old One, Great Inventor, Chief of the Ancients, Heaven Maker, Giving to the End, Going Around—who established the tools and forms of existence.

With the world veiled in darkness, Raven stole the box that held the sun and opened it, lighting the world by his ingenuity. 

He made man from grass and elderberry bushes, brought salmon to the people, fed the rivers with eulachon. He established the shapes and traits of his fellow animals and gave them their present powers and appearances. And though affairs could hardly change as radically in contemporary times as in the days of beginning, by his actions and infractions Raven pointed toward a way of being human. “So many stories are told about him,” Boas remarked during his first visit to the coast, “that they have a saying that human life is not long enough to tell all of them.”

Every First Nation of the Northwest Coast was woven into the fabric of the Raven Cycle through the warp and weft of a storytelling practice that linked speakers and listeners—messengers and mediums—within a pattern of call and response. There were no galleries around the fire, no lines dictating who paid and who performed. There were no observers, no outsiders, no Others. People did not merely listen to the Raven Cycle; they took part, asking questions, repeating refrains, goading the storyteller toward feats of ingenuity.

There was saltiness and sport in the Raven tales, sex and waste, greed and hate. The bards were like Raven: they begged, borrowed, stole, and in doing so created. They were origin poets who fostered possibilities by defying the rules of the system they had made.

The stories they told, often ending in just-so pronouncements—explaining, say, how wolves had come to behave so diffidently around humans (“they really became wolves after this,” one storyteller put it)—wove a fabric of thought that embraced every notable rock, tree, and stream in the neighbourhood, encompassing the human community within an animate cosmos. 

"I remember with the greatest pleasure many trips in colourful canoes with Indian guides who did not stop telling tales,” Boas wrote in one account of this storytelling culture for a German audience. 

“It was that mountain peak which alone reached above the waters during the great flood, and from this peak, the earth was populated again. Here, the battle took place in which the stone giants were outwitted and killed by the brave Indians. A dangerous rapid, formed in prehistoric times in a narrow strait, reminds us of the Son of God, who killed and sank a dangerous sea monster into the ocean at that place. Each strange place is woven into a legend.”

Origins of the World through Raven from the North

Yet, while the storytelling tradition of the Northwest Coast had survived long enough to envelop the landscape, the Raven Cycle had emerged from only a portion of it. As Boas’s first conversation with an elderly storyteller in Victoria revealed, only the northern peoples, including George Hunt’s mother’s people, related the origins of the world through the exploits of Raven.

Other peoples credited competing narratives, starring different figures.

Origins of the World through Mink in the South

Among the Kwakiutl people of Fort Rupert, the hero associated with light was not Raven but Mink, the son of the supernatural man who carried the sun across the sky. Much like Raven, Mink possessed an insatiable appetite, but not for food. A priapic scavenger after advantageous marriages, Mink lusted after women.

It was said of the mischievous Mink that he had sliced off a girl’s clitoris and attached it to a branch, wearing it on his forehead as a ludicrous headpiece. On another occasion, he convinced a flock of female ducks to enter the forest and there sit upon a rare type of elongated mushroom, which turned out to be Mink’s penis.

If Raven was Ego, Mink was Id. He pointed toward the urge within, the pre-socialized desire. The Kwakiutl went so far as to envision Mink as a child, given today dreams and pranks. When performing the role of Mink, they revelled in his youth by making the grammatical mistakes of a child.

But there was more than comedy in the Kwakiutl depiction of Mink’s youth, for the child had attained a precious status in a society that now possessed precious few children. 

Among the Kwakwaka’wakw, Mink—T' łisalagi’lakw, or “Born to Be the Sun”— was the most sympathetic of figures, the fatherless child. While the Tlingit tradition was to pass down rights through the matriline, the rights of the Kwakwaka’wakw were passed from father to son, meaning that Mink had to make his own way in the world.

The Kwakwaka’wakw traced the origins of modern times to Mink’s response to his fate. Teased by the other children because he had no father, Mink came home depressed, whereupon his mother related a wondrous tale. Mink did have a father, his mother assured him, and he was not just any father. He was the man who lit up the world by carrying the sun across the sky.

Hoping to meet his father, Mink shot an arrow into the sky, then a second arrow into the back of the first, and a third into the second, constructing a ladder of arrows that he ascended to the Upper World. Warmly greeted by his father, he was invited to try out his future occupation. Mink began well enough, walking calmly across the sky with the sun in his arms, but soon he grew impatient. He began to run, scorching the earth and bringing about a deluge. Disgraced, Mink was thrown to the earth by his father, fated to spend his life among men.

In the Kwakwa ka’wakw version of history, the origin of modern life was a great mistake, an ecological disaster that unleashed a scourge upon humankind.

The hero was a fallen child. His actions warned of the dangers of hubris, a trait ever-present in the avaricious fur trade. But the Kwakwaka’wakw storytellers who related the narrative were careful to show that the disaster did not befall an individual only; it impacted everybody. Mink tales epitomized the dark humour of the Northwest Coast, a tone infused with portentous irony. 

They had bravado, an acute awareness of human foibles, and epic warnings about the transitory nature of greatness—a style that had risen to prominence in a period of existential horror inhabited by many human Minks, many father-less children struggling for survival on a broken coast scorched by smallpox. Transformation—making change—not only created the world, it was what enabled people to make their way in it, negotiating a path through the currents of destruction. 

Mink’s essence as a transformer, as a hero, consisted not in his creation of the apocalypse but in his response to the apocalypse of everyday life. Smaller and weaker than the others, bearing no special talents, Mink survived by his wits—and it was his terrible wit, his deadeye for the jugular, that especially pleased the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert. 

Tlowitsis First Nation Village of Kalugwis on Turnour Island

Mink, they said, had lived at nearby Turnour Island in Johnstone Strait, where the sons of the Wolf chief had terrorized him, stealing his salmon from his trap. 

Threatened with starvation, Mink grabbed his spear, lay in wait for Wolf’s sons, and slaughtered them. But this was only the beginning of his revenge, for it was the insult, not the injury, that offended Mink—and which he aimed, in turn, to deliver.

By decapitating the eldest son of the Wolf and converting his head into a mask, Mink managed to impersonate his persecutor. In this blood-drenched costume, he arrived at the Wolf chief’s winter ceremonies to perform the dances of his heir. Three times Mink circled the fire, displaying the Wolf’s winter dances. On the fourth circuit he revealed his true form, throwing off his mask to mock his host: “Yahai, yahai, Mink wears as his cap the face of the son of the Wolf!” 

This was genocide: Mink had assassinated the Wolf’s heirs, taken their dances, and arrived at the crucial moment to deliver the coup de grâce. When he raised the head of his enemy, Mink announced a new future for his descendants, the Kwakiutl. This, it was said, was the origin of the winter dances that Boas had come to see.

At the centre of the dances was a single mask: a mask that allowed Mink to assume the form and take the name of a Wolf. Only by wearing this mask could Mink cross a boundary, enter the realm of the Wolves, and claim his prize. Mink transformed not because he was born to do so, but because he possessed vision. He saw and seized his chance to act, writing for himself a new history. 

Although the Mink stories emerged from an ancient tradition, that tradition had altered as Indigenous people reshaped it into something new. Mink’s actions were an outgrowth of and an answer to the experience of modernity. The tales Boas studied as generalities, looking for ideas that defined social groups, were the product of personal genealogies, formulated by storytellers whose innovations shaped the intellectual material of the coast to their purposes. 

This was especially true of the Hunt family, possessed of numerous storytellers, including Annie Hunt Spencer. Among the tales she shared with Boas was one about Raven and Mink, which would come to be of such importance to Boas that the story is worth recounting in full.

The first part of the story relates an adventure of Raven and Mink, who met at the Nass River, made friends, and decided to wander the earth together. (This was where Robert Hunt and Mary Ebbets had met and married, and Mary's mother had drowned)

Because they had no means of getting across the ocean, they were forced to rely on their wits. Coming upon Whale, they mentioned their desire to cross the water. “Won’t you take us across?” they asked. Whale opened his mouth and Raven and Mink stepped in. They had not been inside the Whale for long when Raven pinched Mink, who let out a scream. “Why does the little one cry?” Whale asked. 

When Raven replied that Mink was hungry, Whale generously offered a piece of himself. “I have lots of meat,” he said. “Cut him off a piece.” Raven and Mink soon finished their meal, whereupon Raven pinched Mink again. “What’s happening now?” Whale asked. “The little one is hungry,” Raven said. “Take as much as you want,” Whale consented, “only don’t cut my throat, because that would kill me" — whereupon Raven cut Whale's throat.

Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Yale University Press; Chapter Title: Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness; Chapter Author(s): Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Book Title: Indigenous Visions; Book Subtitle: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas; Book Editor(s): Ned Blackhawk, Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Published by: Yale University Press. (2018) 

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Alexander Mathew Lyon (1863-1950); Harry Tennyson Cadwallader (1874-1932)