| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press 2005)

IN A FEW SHORT pages in the introduction to Authentic Indians, historian Paige Raibmon deftly unpacks the key strands of contentious debates – academic and popular – about cultural identity and authenticity. Using the example of the 1999 return to whaling by members of the Makah community of western Washington State, Raibmon sketches very clearly the parameters of ideological clashes over the "traditional" versus the "modern," the ecological versus the wasteful Indian, civilization versus barbarism. The ideology of authenticity, she forcefully shows, has held Aboriginal people to "impossible standards" of cultural purity – standards as a historical as they are unattainable. (9) I write in the present tense here because Raibmon's book, while grounded in case studies from the late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century Pacific Northwest, has such resonance with present-day expectations of Native and other cultural communities. No culture adheres to an unchanging check-list of definitive traits – yet this is precisely what has been expected of indigenous communities across the globe as they seek to assert their legal, economic, and cultural rights. One of many strengths of Raibmon's book is the way it captures both the tragic historical story of such misplaced expectations, and the ongoing intellectual and practical consequences of this binary thinking. The authentic-inauthentic dyad, she argues, is still a basic part of our thinking about cultural identity: we remain trapped on its terrain.

Authentic Indians is a study of "the work that authenticity did" in defining the parameters of Indianness for non-Natives and, in important ways, for Native people in the late-nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. Authenticity is not defined so much as characterized: it is a "powerful and shifting set of ideas that worked in a variety of ways toward a variety of ends." (3) Raibmon at every turn undermines the received meaning of the term – the notion of "purity or timeless tradition." (212) Rather, authenticity is a colonial discourse, a set of colonizer assumptions and practices with important real-life implications for Native people. Raibmon uses three episodes – Kwakwåkå'wakw participation in the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, Aboriginal migrant labour in the Puget Sound hop industry, and 1906 legal proceedings against a Tlingit artist – to investigate historically the implications of this ideology.

While those implications were often dire, Raibmon is careful to attend to the many ways Native people made use of, subverted, and benefited from such expectations. Yet her attention to agency is not romanticized. The reader is regularly reminded of the broader context in which the episodes play out: this was an era of efficient and nearly final appropriation of Native lands and resources; of increasing economic marginalization of Native people; and of the rise of anthropology's salvage paradigm, with its zeal to rescue the last vestiges of "doomed" Indian cultures. In this oppressive context, Native people found ways to serve their own ends. The story of most interest to readers of Labour/Le Travail might well be the fascinating and multi-layered account of seasonal migrant workers in the hop fields of western Washington.

The title of the book and its episodic focus might lead one to assume that it is a work of cultural history – and it is that. But it is also a work of labour history. As Raibmon puts it, the episodes discussed in its pages "would misrepresent the historical reality of Aboriginal life were they not labour histories as well." (11) The annual participation of thousands of Native men, women, and children in the hop harvest in the Puget Sound region is an instructive and understudied moment in Native history. As early as 1885 a British Columbia government agent reported that six thousand BC Native people were off working in the hop fields – perhaps a quarter of the province's Aboriginal population. For many the late-summer hop harvest came close on the heels of work in the salmon canneries, a modern incarnation of the complex seasonal productive rounds that Native people had followed for millennia. The journey to Puget Sound would have been familiar to many people from Alaska and bc, who had for some decades been making the trip to find work in sawmills and other operations.

Hop harvesting had a labour hierarchy, and some Aboriginal men were able to profit from this. Some became "hop bosses" and pole pullers, higher-paying positions that might allow them to advance the interests of their own family or community members. The more lowly pickers exercised autonomy in this labour-intensive industry by leaving a farm that didn't provide proper housing or food for one that did, or by avoiding the region altogether in a bad health season. Work stoppages were another effective method of getting demands met: in an industry heavily reliant on Aboriginal labour, their refusal to work could threaten a whole year's crop.

Aside from direct work in the industry, Aboriginal people took advantage of many more economic and cultural opportunities in the region, many of these invisible to or misunderstood by non-Native observers. The gathering of diverse Native peoples from across the Pacific Northwest was an opportunity for trade, feasting, visiting with extended family, gambling, courting, and sport – much like the massive inter-cultural gatherings that had taken place in western Washington long before the first fur traders arrived. Medicine men, shamans, and other healers found a niche in cramped labour camps where people were more than usually susceptible to disease. Raibmon is writing about a period when international and reservation boundaries, and legal constraints like the banning of potlatches, sought to sharply restrict Native movement: labour migration offered a "short-term escape valve," (103) although not without complications.

Most intriguingly in the context of Raibmon's analysis of authenticity, Native people in the hop industry found opportunity in spectacle. Hop pickers in their "bright, showy calicoes" and with their "incessant song-singing and fun" made a very picturesque sight, as the naturalist John Muir put it. Throughout the picking season hundreds of tourists daily made their way to the fields by local train, streetcar, or hotel carriage. It was precisely the impulse of authenticity – the notion among non-Natives that Natives were a romantic, vanishing culture to be glimpsed before it disappeared – that opened these spaces for Native innovation.

Raibmon acknowledges that being on display and having to "play Indian" in this way must have been a trial. Her primary attention, though, is to the ways Native people used the interest to their own ends. Many men came to the area not to work in the fields but as hunting and fishing guides. Many women found a captive market for baskets and other favorite tourist curios. A handsome basket could fetch as much cash as three days' work in the fields. Posing for photographs was another important source of income: Edward S. Curtis took some of his earliest shots in the hop fields.

Raibmon and the press deserve congratulations for generous use of visual material. Wonderful images bring another dimension to Raibmon's story. At times the reader would like a little more decoding. Why, for instance, are the hop-picking women dressed in high Victoriana in the late-summer heat? (82) Are they playing to contradictory expectations of feminine propriety and Native "showiness"? What about those who made cash through prostitution? Did they ply their trade in the makeshift tents and lean-tos of the encampments that dotted the Seattle and Tacoma waterfronts in the 1890s? (95)

Raibmon's account of the Native people in the hop industry ends, as does the book, on a more pessimistic note. Hop pickers reaped important economic benefits, but "ultimately they paid out much more than they earned." (133) Both the Indianness they performed for the tourists and the wage labour they performed for their employers helped to cement colonialist understandings of Native people as relics of a vanishing past. Aboriginal people were able to manipulate this ideology to their own benefit, but in the end they could exert little control over its parameters. As Raibmon demonstrates through close and careful historical analysis, Native people could never get outside the dominant dichotomies of their day – authentic/inauthentic, Aboriginal/ modern. In our own times, authenticity continues to act as "gatekeeper of Aboriginal people's rights to things like commercial fisheries, land, and casinos." (206) We remain trapped on authenticity's confining terrain.


ELIZABETH VIBERT University of Victoria

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