Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (review)

Reviewed by: Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast Petra Tjitske Kalshoven Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. Paige Raibmon. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 307 $23.75 Paige Raibmon’s Authentic Indians is a rich account of late-nineteenth-century encounters between different categories of ‘non-Indians’ and Aboriginal people on the Northwest Coast of North America. Her study, based on a wide range of archival documents and drawing on insights from ethnohistory, anthropology, and (to a lesser extent) tourism studies, takes the reader on a trip to three principal arenas of contact, each laid out in three chapters. This structurally pleasing set-up is reinforced by Raibmon’s astute use of the narrative device of ring composition: to stage her central concept, ‘authenticity,’ she starts her introduction with a story about the Makah Indians, whose reinstatement of the whale hunt in 1999 provoked an outcry because of their use of modern equipment. In her conclusion, the Makah make [End Page 113] a brief reappearance as the characters in the postcard printed on the book’s cover, which sums up the painful ironies implied in Raibmon’s discussion of the doings of authenticity. As she states in her Introduction, ‘the work that authenticity did is the subject of this book’ (3). In the first arena of contact, we meet Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw performing at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and upsetting missionaries and government officials at home. The second arena of contact is set in the hop fields of Puget Sound, where Aboriginal hop pickers migrated seasonally to generate additional income and enjoy the company of extended family, while sightseers flocked to the fields for a picturesque spectacle of a ‘vanishing’ people. The third arena of contact is the Alaskan town of Sitka, where Tlingit produced souvenirs for visiting tourists who did not hesitate to venture into the intimacy of Tlingit homes. In all cases, Raibmon shows how Aboriginal people made apt use of opportunities created by tourism, colonial policies, and capitalist development. She insists, however, on the limitations they faced in the unequal relations of power that governed the various encounters, and concludes that any benefits reaped by Aboriginal people were largely outweighed by those enjoyed by white colonizers. Raibmon argues that interaction between Northwest Coast Indians and white anthropologists, missionaries, government officials, tourists, and settlers was predicated on a shifting notion of authenticity, which is glossed over by the author as ‘traits that colonizers assumed were authentic’ or ‘colonially defined notions of authenticity’ (212n13). In each of her examples, she highlights how non-Aboriginals imposed their view of what constituted an ‘authentic Indian’ upon Aboriginals themselves, while remaining blind to the continuation of indigenous practices in colonial settings and to their subtle adaptations to ‘modern’ circumstances. According to outsiders, Aboriginal people either lost their Indianness by adapting to modern life or were bound to disappear by hanging on to their authenticity. In the sources that Raibmon cites for white insistence on Aboriginal authenticity, I did not come across the terms ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticity.’ As they are central to the argument, an explanation of the author’s choice of ‘authenticity’ as the best umbrella term for the sentiments and opinions expressed by the white protagonists in her fascinating stories would have been particularly interesting – as would have been a discussion of ‘authenticity’ as a cultural artifact in itself. Raibmon forcefully presents and critiques colonial politics of representation, but intriguing signs of individual agency and [End Page 114] resistance are embedded, especially in the endnotes. This suggests that relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of Northwest Coast society were sometimes more complex than it would appear from the main narrative. Raibmon’s stories would have been even richer had she allowed such complexities to trouble the (sometimes slightly predictable) ‘good guys’ versus ‘bad guys’ dichotomy of her account. A feeling for individual experience that I, as an anthropologist, sometimes felt to be lacking in the discussion of hop pickers and Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw performers is conveyed very effectively towards the end of the book in Raibmon’s compelling (and very painful) account of...

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