This August, I thought I’d spend my leisure time before the coming storm of study reading more about the place I live in. I began with Charles Demers’s Vancouver Special – short, quirky essays about Vancouver, which also contain references to other works. This led me to one of the books I’ll write about here, Mark Leier’s Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia. At the same time, a book that I’d placed on order at Vancouver Public Library finally turned up, Wendy Wickwire’s At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging. These two books that came to me at the same time by very different routes have much in common. Each makes use of substantial archival and other historical work to look back over a century and excavate something that has been forgotten. Each is an attempt by someone trained as an academic to write a book that reaches a more general audience. Each also makes an argument from history, about the way in which we think of political organisation (Leier) or anthropology as a discipline (Wickwire). And each itself comes from praxis: Leier was a union shop steward, while Wickwire was involved both in returning earlier academic research to Aboriginal communities, and in such efforts as the campaign to preserve the Stein Valley from logging in the 1980s.  There’s also an interesting contrast. Leier’s book comes out of his Master’s thesis at Simon Fraser University: it’s right at the beginning of what would be a distinguished academic career. Wickwire’s book is late career book, a project that had its gestation in the 1970s, when she began her research, but which was only published this year, after her retirement.

Where the Fraser River Flows is the shorter and the simpler of the two book. As its subtitle suggests, it’s a history of the IWW, or the “Wobblies” in British Columbia, starting with the founding of “the revolutionary industrial union” (1) in Chicago in 1905, and ending with the split at its 1924 convention that “was not the cause of the union’s decline,” but “made it final and irreparable” (123). The IWW were in essence syndicalists, disagreeing with attempts by socialist unions at the time to enter electoral politics or to gain formalised recognition in the workplace from employers who would allow the deduction of union dues. Instead, they sought to have workers gain control of the means of production in each individual workplace. As Leier presents them, they were also advocates of gender equality, and they did not subscribe to the racist exclusion of non-White workers advocated by many other unions. It’s also interesting that the changes happening in British Columbia a century ago, with mechanisation and Taylorism promoting the de-skilling of a workforce, have parallels today with the advent of the gig economy and the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Here’s an elegant illustration from the building trades:

Framing changed dramatically: the traditional craft of timber framing, which required great skill in joining large pieces of wood with mortise and tenon joints, was increasingly replaced by the now familiar balloon, or stud, framing. A miscalculation of an inch or so while timber framing could mean the ruin of a large and expensive piece of wood, but cutting too much off a two-by-four while balloon framing was of no real consequence. (20)

 Leier’s book is in part polemic, trying to rescue the IWW from the rather obscure corner of history that they have been consigned to. Without knowing much about the topic or the underlying archives I’d say that some of the rhetoric of the text suggests that he idealises the IWW to make his point, and perhaps unfairly represents the socialist unions and organisations which worked with it at times, and competed with it at others. But it’s an interesting opening up of a now forgotten history.

At the Bridge, in contrast to Where the Fraser River Flows, focuses on a single life, that of James Teit, who appears most often in the historical record as the local assistant who helped anthropologist Franz Boas with his fieldwork on indigenous peoples in British Columbia. As Wickwire convincingly argues, Teit was a lot more than simply an assistant: he actually carried out the majority of the fieldwork that Boas would base his larger theoretical constructs upon. Teit had come to British Columbia from the Shetland Islands north of Scotland, from a lived experience of the appropriation of land and the eviction of those who had lived on it for generations by rich landlords, of socialist organisation, and of efforts to preserve and grow a distinct culture and way of life threatened by capitalism and what we’d now call globalisation. Arriving in Spences Bridge in the British Columbia interior, Teit worked with indigenous Nlaka’pamux people, learning their and other indigenous languages, marrying into the community, and playing a crucial role as an intermediary, interpreter, and translator in their struggles to gain recognition of their sovereignty over the land from both provincial and national government. Wickwire makes a further argument — that Teit drew on this experience of praxis to evolve a form of anthropological knowing that was very different from Boas’s, and indeed much closer to contemporary anthropology in his “efforts to connect the physical world with the social world[,] and his grounding of the anthropological endeavour in living praxis rather than abstract salvage” (284-285).

Intriguingly, Wickwire grounds her own growth as an anthropologist in her encounter with Teit. Her work on the West Coast began in the 1970s when, as a trained ethnomusicologist, she accepted a contract to transcribe audio recordings of Sylix traditional songs from the Okanagan as part of a larger indigenous languages project. This led to her to visit communities from which the songs came, to her discovery of Teit’s recordings of traditional songs from south central British Columbia made in the early years of the twentieth century, and her bringing back of these recordings to the communities from which they came. Teit’s meticulous notes and publications also proved instrumental in documenting historical Nlaka’pamux presence in the Stein Valley, and supporting the campaign for the area’s conservation. Wickwire interviewed elders as part of this campaign, and Teit’s vision of anthropology as a form of praxis influenced her future work.

Two books, then, which are useful to me as I go back into the university, in their interest in archival work, in careful historicization, but also in the connections that they make between the way we live and the way we can know, and of the resultant possibilities of socially engaged modes of knowledge and scholarly practice.