Vill PREFACE

If I were to investigate and report on the Bella Coola at
the present time, I would undoubtedly be influenced by many
years of contact with American anthropologists and their
work. I would assume a greater knowledge of North-West
coast institutions, less interest in the details of ceremonial
rites, and it would be impossible not to avoid comparisons
with, and observations upon, the theoretical implications of
many of the facts recorded. But though every field investi-
gator is strictly objective as to the facts he collects, yet his
interests, and his method of presenting them, are coloured by
his background; in my case, by the older school of English
anthropology. On the whole, I think this is fortunate. It means
that the Bella Coola are portrayed as I saw them when I came
fresh to a new field, practically uninfluenced by problems of
North-West coast culture, and fully prepared to throw myself
into their life. They were “my people,” not a group in which I
was interested because they had, or had not, certain culture
traits with which I wasconcerned. Inthe course of my teaching
experience, furthermore, I have wished repeatedly to give
serious students detailed field monographs in which are re-
corded the interwoven social, religious, and folk-lore concepts
of a people, the sum-total of their mental life, collected by one
man at one time. This I have tried to do for the Bella Coola.

Following the English tradition, I wish to record how this
material was collected. Before leaving for British Columbia,
I was advised by the late H. I. Smith, who had worked in the
area, to talk to Joshua Moody (see Plate 2), an elderly Bella
Coola Indian with whom Smith had worked. On explaining to
Joshua that I had come to record in permanent form the tradi-
tions and lore of Ais people, Joshua grinned broadly and prom-
ised his help. Unfortunately, he spoke only a few words of
English. I tried interpreter after interpreter, Indian and white,
with only fair success, and my difficulties increased with the
opening of the canning season and the consequent employment
of the younger men and women. I was urged to learn the
Chinook jargon, which serves widely as a lingua franca on the