Notable Tsimshian people

Tsimshian people have recorded their histories through oral narratives, hereditary names, house ownership, songs, carving, photography, written accounts and political action. The people profiled here include hereditary leaders, artists, photographers, writers, activists and community historians.

The English name Tsimshian is commonly used for Indigenous peoples whose traditional territories are in northwestern British Columbia. Tsimshian communities are also established in Metlakatla, Alaska. Sm’algyax is the language of the Coast Tsimshian people.

Individual identity is more specific than the general word Tsimshian may suggest. People may identify themselves through their community, nation, house and one of the four Tsimshian clans: Eagle, Raven, Wolf and Killer Whale. Names, titles and spellings differ among families and historical records.

Arthur Wellington Clah

Arthur Wellington Clah, also known as Ła’ax and T’amks, was born in 1831 near what became Fort Simpson, now Lax Kw’alaams. He was a hereditary leader in the Gispaxlo’ots community and worked at different times as a trader, interpreter, teacher and preacher.

Clah learned to read and write English during the early years of Anglican missionary William Duncan’s work at Fort Simpson. He helped Duncan learn Sm’algyax but did not simply surrender his own views to those of the missionary.

Beginning in the late 1850s, Clah kept a detailed diary in English. His surviving journals cover about 50 years and more than 2,000 pages. They document trading voyages, fishing, wage work, family matters, missionary activity, colonial government policies and changes within Tsimshian communities.

Clah had planned to use his journals to write a history of his people. That larger project was never completed. His diaries are now held by the Wellcome Collection in London and have become an important first-person account of Tsimshian life during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Paul Legaic

Legaic, also written Ligeex and Legex, is a hereditary name associated with the Gispaxlo’ots and the Eagle clan. Several leaders held the name, so historical accounts do not always refer to the same man.

Paul Legaic was one of the most powerful Tsimshian leaders during the nineteenth century. His house controlled trade routes linking the coast with communities along the Skeena River. Goods moving between coastal traders and inland peoples often passed through networks controlled by Legaic and his allies.

His relationship with missionary William Duncan began with conflict. Legaic later converted to Christianity, took the name Paul and spent time in the new Christian settlement at Metlakatla, British Columbia. He continued travelling and trading while working with Duncan.

Paul Legaic died at Lax Kw’alaams around 1869. Other hereditary leaders later carried the Legaic name.

William Beynon

William Beynon was a hereditary chief, interpreter and ethnographer. His Tsimshian name was Gwisk’aayn, and he belonged to the Gitlaan people and the Wolf clan.

Beynon worked closely with Tsimshian hereditary leaders and community historians. He recorded narratives, names, territories, feasts, house histories and social organization in Sm’algyax and English.

He collaborated with Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau for several decades. Much of the information credited to Barbeau depended upon Beynon’s language skills, family relationships and understanding of Tsimshian law.

Beynon also worked with anthropologists Franz Boas, Viola Garfield and Philip Drucker. His records are held by museums and archives in Canada and the United States. Later researchers have increasingly recognized him as an ethnographer and author rather than merely an interpreter or informant.

Henry Wellington Tate

Henry Wellington Tate was born around 1860 and died in 1914. He was a Tsimshian teacher, interpreter, writer and oral historian from Lax Kw’alaams.

In 1903, Franz Boas contacted Arthur Wellington Clah while looking for someone who could record Tsimshian language and oral narratives. The work passed to Tate, who began sending written accounts to Boas.

Tate and Boas apparently never met in person. They worked through correspondence. Tate recorded stories in Sm’algyax and prepared English versions, while Boas edited and arranged the material for publication.

The resulting work, Tsimshian Mythology, appeared in 1916 under Boas’s name. Tate supplied much of its original material. Later scholarship has examined how Boas’s editing changed the wording, arrangement and presentation of Tate’s accounts.

A collection titled The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories: The Original Tsimshian Texts of Henry Tate was published in 1993. It returned attention to Tate’s work as a writer and recorder of Tsimshian narratives.

Benjamin Alfred Haldane

Benjamin Alfred Haldane was born in 1874 at Metlakatla, British Columbia. At age 13, he moved with his family and hundreds of other Tsimshian people to the new community of Metlakatla on Annette Island, Alaska.

Haldane taught himself photography and opened a professional portrait studio in 1899. He is recognized as one of the earliest Indigenous professional photographers in North America.

His portraits differ from many photographs of Indigenous people made by outside photographers during the same period. Haldane photographed relatives, neighbours, musicians, wedding parties and community gatherings as members of a living town. His subjects chose how they dressed and presented themselves before the camera.

Haldane was also a merchant, musician, organist, choirmaster and community secretary. He directed the Metlakatla Concert Band and served as organist and choir director at the William Duncan Memorial Church.

Many of Haldane’s glass-plate negatives were separated from their original records or credited to unknown photographers. Community researchers and museums have worked to identify his photographs and reconnect them with the people and families they depict.

Haldane died in 1941. Collections of his work are held by the Tongass Historical Museum, the University of California’s C. N. Gorman Museum and other institutions.

Frederick Alexcee

Frederick Alexcee, whose surname also appears as Alexie and Alexee, was born around 1853. He lived most of his life at Lax Kw’alaams.

His mother belonged to the Giluts’aaw people and the Killer Whale clan. His father was a Haudenosaunee employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Alexcee worked as a carver, painter and illustrator. He made carved figures, model poles, canoes and other objects. His paintings recorded Lax Kw’alaams, community buildings, ships, people and events during a period of rapid change.

Some of his work combined Tsimshian carving knowledge with European painting materials and methods. He also painted images on glass slides that could be projected with a lantern projector while stories were told.

Two of Alexcee’s paintings were included in a 1927 exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. His work is now held by the National Gallery, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Royal BC Museum, the Burke Museum and other collections.

William Jeffrey

William George Jeffrey was born in 1898 or 1899 and died in 1995. He was a hereditary Tsimshian chief, political organizer, speaker and carver.

Jeffrey attended residential school between 1914 and 1917. He wanted to study law, but federal restrictions limited the educational opportunities open to First Nations students.

During the 1930s, Jeffrey helped organize the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia. The organization pressed for fishing, hunting and land rights, improved education and the removal of laws that prohibited the potlatch.

Jeffrey appeared before a committee of the Canadian House of Commons in 1940. He spoke about Indigenous rights and the treatment of First Nations people under Canadian law.

He began carving poles during the 1960s. His works were placed in Prince Rupert, West Vancouver, Whitehorse and other locations. A pole he carved for the British Columbia centennial was presented to the Yukon in 1971 and later restored with help from members of his family.

David A. Boxley

David A. Boxley was born in 1952 and raised in Metlakatla, Alaska. He became a teacher before working full time as a Tsimshian artist, carver and culture bearer.

Boxley studied museum collections, historical photographs and surviving Tsimshian works. He also learned from elders and community members who remembered songs, names and family histories.

In 1982, Boxley organized a potlatch in Metlakatla and raised a carved pole. It was the community’s first such public gathering in many decades. He later formed the Git-Hoan dance group and worked with younger artists, singers and dancers.

Boxley has carved poles, masks, rattles, bentwood boxes and house panels. One of his large poles was raised at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

His sons, David Robert Boxley and Zachary Boxley, have continued working in Tsimshian art, carving, song and dance.

Marcia Crosby

Dr. Marcia Crosby is a Tsimshian and Haida art historian, writer, educator and curator. Her academic work examines the ways museums, galleries, governments and popular culture have represented Indigenous people.

Crosby’s essay “Construction of the Imaginary Indian” examined how non-Indigenous institutions created simplified images of Indigenous identity while overlooking contemporary Indigenous people and their own accounts of themselves.

She has taught Indigenous art history and worked on exhibitions that return names, family information and community interpretations to historical photographs and museum objects.

Crosby co-curated To Be Seen, To Be Heard: First Nations in Public Spaces, 1900–1965 at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The exhibition paired archival photographs with commentary from Indigenous community members.

Roy Henry Vickers

Roy Henry Vickers is an artist, printmaker, painter, carver and author with Tsimshian, Haida and Heiltsuk ancestry. His father was Indigenous, and his mother was of English ancestry.

Vickers established the Eagle Aerie Gallery in Tofino, British Columbia. His artwork includes prints, paintings and carved works based on Northwest Coast forms, personal experience and stories connected with communities along the coast.

He has also written and illustrated books with historian Robert “Lucky” Budd. Their books include Raven Brings the Light, Cloudwalker, Peace Dancer and Hello Humpback.

Other Tsimshian leaders and record keepers

Alfred Dudoward was a hereditary Gitando chief, Christian leader and political organizer. He became involved in the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia.

Odille Morison worked as an interpreter for William Beynon and Marius Barbeau. She also helped document Tsimshian material held by museums and collectors.

Peter Simpson was a Tsimshian political activist associated with Metlakatla, Alaska. He challenged government restrictions and advocated for Alaska Native rights.

Walter Wright was a hereditary Kitselas chief and oral historian. His accounts contributed to written records of Tsimshian history and social organization.

Audrey Hudson became the first woman elected chair of the Metlakatla Indian Community on the Annette Islands Reserve in Alaska.

Scholars who worked with Tsimshian communities

Several non-Tsimshian anthropologists and scholars collected information about Tsimshian language, history and social organization. They include Franz Boas, Marius Barbeau, Viola Garfield, Philip Drucker, Wilson Duff, Marjorie Halpin, George F. MacDonald, Jay Miller and Charles Menzies.

These collections must be read with care. Much of the information came from Tsimshian writers, interpreters and hereditary leaders whose contributions were reduced or omitted when the work was published.

William Beynon and Henry Tate did far more than supply raw information. They selected accounts, translated language, explained relationships and recorded material that outside researchers could not have gathered without them.

Missionaries and Tsimshian history

Missionaries who worked in Tsimshian communities included William Duncan, Thomas Crosby, William Henry Collison, Robert Tomlinson, Bishop William Ridley and Edward Marsden.

Their letters, journals and church records contain names, dates and descriptions that can help families and historians reconstruct events. Those records also carry the religious and colonial assumptions of their authors.

Mission churches sought converts and attempted to replace Tsimshian ceremonies, spiritual practices and systems of authority. Missionaries sometimes described traditional practices as obstacles to Christianity rather than recording what those practices meant to Tsimshian people.

For that reason, missionary accounts should be compared with Tsimshian oral histories, family records, hereditary knowledge and writings by Tsimshian people.

Notable Tsimshian People: Leaders, Artists, Historians and Culture Bearers