Model Behaviour

In 1829, the fur-trading ship Volunteer sailed down the east coast of Haida Gwaii, then known to the wider world as the Queen Charlotte Islands, passing the village of Skidegate. Travelling with the traders was the missionary Jonathan S. Green, the first outsider to record his impressions of its cedar plank houses and totem poles. “To me the prospect was most enchanting, and, more than any thing I had seen, reminded me of a civilized country,” the reverend wrote. “The houses, of which there are thirty or forty, appeared tolerably good, and before the door of many of them stood a large mast carved in the form of the human countenance, of the dog, wolf, etc., neatly painted.”

Green was properly impressed. Yet his note encapsulates a tension that’s common in the observations of visitors who made their way to the coast of British Columbia and Alaska in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hesitant to acknowledge anything that rises quite to the...