Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch

Xwelíqwiya

Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters

SERIES EDITOR: JANICE DICKIN

Social history contests the construction of the past as the story of elites—a grand narrative dedicated to the actions of those in power. Our Lives seeks instead to make available voices from the past that might otherwise remain unheard. By foregrounding the experience of ordinary individuals, the series aims to demonstrate that history is ultimately the story of our lives, lives constituted in part by our response to the issues and events of the era into which we are born. Many of the voices in the series thus speak in the context of political and social events of the sort about which historians have traditionally written. What they have to say fills in the details, creating a richly varied portrait that celebrates the concrete, allowing broader historical settings to emerge between the lines. The series invites materials that are engagingly written and that contribute in some way to our understanding of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Manuscripts that include an introduction or epilogue that contextualizes the primary materials and reflects on their significance will be preferred.

SERIES TITLES

A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri

John Leigh Walters

Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery

Helen Waldstein Wilkes

A Woman of Valour: The Biography of Marie-Louise Bouchard Labelle

Claire Trépanier

Man Proposes, God Disposes: Recollections of a French Pioneer

Pierre Maturié, translated by Vivien Bosley

Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch

Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly

Xwelíqwiya

The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch

Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly

Copyright © 2013 Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly

Foreword © 2013 Steven Point

Published by AU Press, Athabasca University

1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, ABT5J 3S8

ISBN 978-1-927356-56-2 (print) 978-1-927356-57-9 (PDF) 978-1-927356-58-6 (epub)

A volume in the series Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters

1921-6653 (print) 1921-6661 (electronic)

Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Point Bolton, Rena, 1927–, author

Xwelíqwiya, The life story of a Stó:lō matriarch /

Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly.

(Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters series, ISSN 1921-6653 ; 5)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-927356-56-2 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-927356-57-9 (pdf).—

ISBN 978-1-927356-58-6 (epub)

1. Point Bolton, Rena, 1927–. 2. Stó:lō Indians—Biography. 3. Native artists—British Columbia—Biography. 4. Native women—British Columbia—Biography. I. Daly, Richard, 1942–, author II. Title. III. Series: Our lives : diary, memoir, and letters ; 5

E99.S72P64   2013                     305.897’943                     C2013-905399-9

C2013-905400-6

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund.

Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Map of Northern British Columbia

Map of Xwélmexw (Stó:lō) territory and nearby Coast Salish areas

Introduction

Richard Daly

1 Born at a Very Young Age Born at a Very Young Age

First Memories

My Father and My Brother

Hiding from Destiny

Semá:th Lake

2 Xéyteleq

Chu’chelángen

Xéyteleq’s Story

After Xéyteleq: Family Ties

More Family Ties

3 Devil’s Run

Peter Speedy Bolan

Charlie Gardner

4 School, Work, and Marriage

Coqualeetza

Home for Summer

Uncle Ambrose and Auntie Jean

Canneries

Marriage and Family

Child Rearing

Canoe Racing

Lehál

5 Life of the Spirit

Syúwel

Mí’hla

Spirit Guides

A Personal Experience

Sxwóyxwey

Responsibility for the Masks

Passing on Sxwóyxwey

Burnings

6 Breaking the Silence

Weaving My Way into Political Life

Indian Homemakers

Alliances

Oliver Wells

Revivals

Meeting Other Activists

7 Moving North

Promoting Native Arts and Crafts

The North: New Threads

Life with Cliff

Baskets and Textiles

8 They Begin to Listen

Rewards

Children of Mother Earth

Xwelíqweltel and the Queen

Still a Long Way to Go

9 Life Cycles

When We Come Back

Water and the Cycle of Life

For the Young

Epilogue

Family Trees

A. Rena’s family through her mother’s second marriage

B. Rena’s maternal grandmother’s family

C. Rena’s maternal grandfather’s family

D. Rena’s father’s family

Pronunciation Guide

Glossary

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

1 Richard Daly, Rena, and Richard’s wife, Liv Mjelde, in Rena’s workroom

2 Rena at five months, with her mother

3 Rena around the age of three, in her Kimiko period

4 Sumas Lake, looking north

5 Surveyor’s map of Sumas Lake, ca. 1920

6 Dan Milo and his wife, Agnes Milo (née Edwin), in the 1920s

7 Th’etsimiya, Rena’s great-grandmother

8 Frank Hilaire performing with Coast Salish exhibition dancers, ca. 1912

9 A portrait of Rena’s mother’s family, ca. 1910

10 Silva family portrait, ca. 1929–30

11 A youthful Rena is a cedar bark dance costume

12 Rena and Roy Point with their first child, Tim

13 Rena’s grandmother-in-law, Mrs. Dan Milo

14 The children of Rena and Roy Point

15 Rena’s son Mark, wearing a Salish robe that his mother made for his graduation

16 Rena and Steven on the occasion of his graduation from law school

17 Dugout canoes created from red cedar logs, the work of Mark Point and Cliff Bolton

18 The Si:l’hiy crest, painted on a drum

19 The Si:l’hiy crest, knitted into a sweater by Rena

20 The large basket that Rena made to house the female Sxwóyxwey masks

21 The large basket, also made by Rena, that houses the male Sxwóyxwey masks

22 A Point family racing canoe

23 Mark Point and his wife, Brenda, with Rena

24 Wool, after the carding and spinning, that has been treated with natural dyes and hung to dry

25 Rena at her loom, weaving a Salish swó’waxw blanket

26 Two Salish robes, which Rena made for her sons

27 A Xwélmexw basket, woven of red cedar, wild cherry, and grasses

28 Family members dancing in Rena’s cedar bark costumes at Expo ’86

29 Mrs. Agnes Sutton, of the Gitxsan Nation

30 Tsimshian weaver Willy White and Rena, modelling gifts they made for each other

31 Cliff and Rena Bolton

32 Rena, during the Christmas season, in what was then the newly built log house on the Zymacord River

33 Cliff Bolton displaying one of his moon masks, made red cedar inlaid with jade and abalone shell

34 Cliff and Rena in 2010, exchanging stories over tea at the kitchen table

35 Rena working on a northern-style basket

36 Rena at work on a North Coast spruce-root basket

37 The first rows: beginning a North Coast basket

38 Rena edging a North Coast basket

39 Examples of Rena’s North Coast basketry in spruce root and cedar bark

40 North Coast spruce-root hat, interior view

41 Rena holding one of her rare Salish fish baskets, made from split cedar boughs

42 One of Rena’s Salish textiles

43 One of the traditional Salish robes that Rena wove for her sons

44 A rattle basket, made of spruce root

45 Producing the lid for the rattle basket

46 Rena working on a Thompson River (Nlaka’pamux) basket

47 Rena holding the Coast Salish basket that accompanied her to the British Columbia Lifetime Achievement awards

48 A marriage of two worlds: Rena beginning work on a basket at Government House, in Victoria

Foreword

I have been asked to pen a few words with regard to my mother’s book, and I am very pleased to help in this way. Any time that people put their whole life into written form I think they run the risk of misapprehension and even criticism from others. Richard Daly has taken on the monumental task of listening to and recording my mother’s thoughts and memories about her life. For this I am very grateful. This book has been an ongoing project for many years, and both Richard and Rena have devoted countless hours to making this book a reality. Richard’s training in the field of anthropology, together with his self-critical attitude toward his work, lends itself very well to the task at hand.

For too long, anthropologists and historians have written about Aboriginal people from a purely academic perspective, with their mind on audiences somewhere else, perhaps in Europe. This has produced some marvellous reports, but in some cases it has resulted in a one-dimensional, ethnocentric, and subjective analysis of people about whom the writer in fact knows very little. That is, such accounts simply describe the surface and not the depth of Aboriginal people’s reality.

Richard Daly has chosen a much different approach, in that he spends time with the subjects of his study, attending gatherings and feasts and even residing inside their communities so that he can gain a deeper, inside perspective that later informs his written work. He brings a passion for learning and a compassion for the people he studies. His voice is not demanding, nor is it condescending or fraught with the attitude of superiority that too often prevents some writers from getting at the broader and more complex story before them. I am very pleased with the end product of his long and hard work.

So that there could be no mistake, in September of this year, 2012, at Chilliwack, I presented Richard with a talking stick. This stick was presented to him at my home in the presence of my mother and with her approval, so there is no doubt that he speaks on behalf of my mother in this book. Richard and Mother have done a marvellous job and I know that you will enjoy this book, as I have.

Steven Point

20 October 2012

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the acquisitions editor at Athabasca University Press, Pamela MacFarland Holway, for her considerable editorial assistance, her literary, historical, and linguistic vigilance, and her good humour. Thanks as well to copy editor and linguist Joyce Hildebrand. We also acknowledge the constructive work of the anonymous peer reviewers who suggested, among other things, that we make more explicit our actions in the crafting of this book. Thank you to Athabasca University Press’s book promotion team and to Rena’s daughter Wendy Point Ritchie, a teacher of Halq’eméylem, for her work on the glossary and for standardizing the spelling of the Halq’eméylem words in the text. We are grateful for the encouragement we got from Wendy’s siblings and their spouses in the Sardis area, among them Gail, Charlotte, Mark, and Steven.

Will Lawson helped to draw up one of the early clean copies of the work from the hitherto scattered transcripts, notes, and fragments, and this enabled me to see some of the story gaps that needed to be filled in by Rena, who then responded by elaborating on her narrative. Will has also provided sensible advice through the years on the anarchic realm known as English usage.

Liv Mjelde has kept me on my toes by arguing that the problematic of told-to autobiographies is coloured more by social stratification than simply by colonial heritage and that the questions being raised about who contributed what to the life story are usually fewer when the subject enjoys power and influence in society than when they do not. I hope that this project answers her question about why textual accounts of life stories of people with less power and influence in society are subject to more skepticism regarding authorship. This project has shown me that telling a life story, writing it down, organizing it, and then writing it up can be a true and deep cooperation, even though the formal presentation may obscure much of this cooperative and consultative work.

I deeply appreciate the long years of unflagging support, warmth of spirit, and good talks that both I and my wife, Liv, enjoyed with both Rena and the late Cliff Bolton. And finally, Rena and I are grateful for the introductory words provided by Steven Point.

Richard Daly

Maps

Northern British Columbia. Rena lived for many years near Kitsumkalum, in Tsimshian country, although she is originally from the southern part of the province (see map 2, a detail of the area within the rectangle).

Xwélmexw (Stó:lō) territory and nearby Coast Salish areas. Born at Kilgard, Rena was raised at Devil’s Run, on the banks of the Fraser River, and spent much of her life in Sardis (Skowkale), just south of Chilliwack.

Introduction

An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another—thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world’s future generations.

Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1999), 155

Back in the days when we both had more bounce to our step, Rena, Mrs. Point Bolton, asked whether I would help to prepare a book about her life. She wanted to leave a document for those who come after to show how she was raised and what the culture she grew up in was like. She also wanted to record the teachings she had learned from her grandparents and other elders, as well as the insights about life that she has acquired over the years—not to mention the values she stands for in regard to addressing the ecological and spiritual imbalance between the natural and the human worlds.

We first met in December 1988, while I was working for what was then known as the Alliance of Tribal Councils, gathering data on the past and present use of the Fraser River and its salmon fishery by local First Nations—the Secwepemc, the Nlaka’pamux, and the Stó:lō, who also call themselves the Xwélmexw.¹ In the course of my research, two of Rena’s sons, Mark and Steven Point, recommended her to me as someone knowledgeable about the river’s importance. Rena was living and working far from the Fraser River at the time, residing with her second husband, Cliff Bolton, outside Kitsumkalum, on the Skeena River west of the town of Terrace. Cliff, a Kitsumkalum Tsimshian simoogit (chief), was known for his wood and jade carving, as well as for the canoes that he and Rena’s son Mark jointly produced.

Our first meeting occurred neither in Xwélmexw territory nor in Tsimshian country, but rather at a motor inn on Burrard Street in Vancouver—which, of course, sits on traditional lands of the closely related Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We got down to work, and Rena told me how, when she was a girl, she had lived on the banks of the Fraser River, and it was there that her family had survived the Depression years of the 1930s by relying on what the river provided. She explained that they had also suffered from the loss of their main source of food, Sumas Lake, the body of water that once stretched south from Abbotsford to Yarrow and across the border near Lummi, in Washington State. In 1924, just two years before Rena’s birth, the lake had been drained to create rich farmland. Those were hard times, she told me. The next meal had to be earned. We really had to work for it. She went on to describe how the family members who raised her caught ducks with nets suspended from poles and also survived by fishing. We carried our nets over Sumas Peak to Murphy’s Landing, she recalled. We took coho in the fall in a creek called Kw’ekw’íqw. Grandmother was so happy to see the fish because then we had food for a whole day.

Of course I had more questions. Rena suggested that I come to visit them at their home since I, too, was living along the Skeena River in northern British Columbia at the time. I met Cliff and Rena again six months later, in July of 1989, at their home on the Zymacord River, where it joins the Skeena, some miles west of Terrace. When we finished talking, Rena handed me a sheaf of papers and a couple of brown envelopes containing news clippings and other writings. I wonder, she said, if you would be willing to help write my life story. I’ve already started. Can you take these pages and look them over?

On her mother’s side, Rena Point Bolton’s origins lie at Sumas, or Semá:th, where she was born.² Upon her first marriage, to Roy Point, she moved upriver to live in his family’s settlement, the Skowkale (Sq’ewq’éyl) reserve, at Sardis, just south of downtown Chilliwack, where her children, the Point family, live today. On the basis of the old teachings, many of them learned from their mother, Rena’s children continue to embrace many of the traditional customs and outlooks of their people, but they have managed to do so without turning their backs on modern life.

The name Rena carries is Xwelíqwiya—a name with a history rooted at Semá:th, as she explains in chapter 2.³ Her mother’s grandmother, the last daughter of Chief Xéyteleq, was matriarch of the Steqó:ye Wolf People. Her matriarchal duties were passed to her daughter and eventually to her daughter’s granddaughter, Rena. Through her maternal grandfather, who belonged to the upriver Tii:t people, Rena has also, by birthright, become custodian of the ceremonial Sxwóyxwey masks (about which see chapter 5).⁴

In her turn, as Xwelíqwiya, Rena Point Bolton has become the mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, or foster mother of many. She is also an artist and craftswoman and a hereditary carrier of specific traditions and spiritual practices. She has been an activist, inspiring her family, her people, and First Nations in general both to persist in acquiring formal education and to learn how to build their lives on the basis of locally situated knowledge. For her, this knowledge encompasses the spiritual, meditative, artistic, and scientific traditions lived by her people in their daily life on the land and river.

Silence

The creation and maintenance of silence in any human relationship is often transactional. It can be a perverse form of dialogue, albeit one in which the participants seldom interact with an equal degree of power, social standing, or influence. Those who have been denied power and influence, who have been silenced by figures of authority, are often silenced internally as well, of their own volition. As a means of self-protection, they choose to maintain silence, to refuse interaction—but their silence can also be a powerful form of communication.

During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, like other First Nations across Canada, the people of the lower Fraser River were silenced, and efforts were made to obliterate their culture. Under the banner of social and moral improvement, a process of forced assimilation was undertaken by Canadian institutions that variously administrated, policed, schooled, and proselytized among Aboriginal peoples. These actions were informed by the values and protocols of the Dominion of Canada, a component of the British Empire, which provided the social infrastructure on which Canada still models itself.

In Xwélmexw culture—before the great silence—the values, stories, histories, and protocols governing interfamily life had been sources of power and legitimacy and were accordingly well-guarded by elders, who passed these traditions carefully down along socially sanctioned lines of kinship and marriage to a new generation of custodians. There was a subtlety to this process of transmission, such that the members of each generation were guided by a flow of silent, family-based knowledge that felt right, as a result of their upbringing, and yet could be adapted to variations in personal abilities and talents as well as to changing conditions of life. As the colonial administration extended its reach, however, the old procedures for passing on culture and knowledge met with new legal and ideological pressures. The federal government imposed on First Nations communities, previously organized in many and different ways, a standardized administrative model of Indian band membership and elective band councils. For good measure, it carried off most of the children to residential schools and placed decision making in the hands of Indian agents rather than family elders.⁵ More recently, provincial and local governance has consistently sought to alienate First Nations from lands, rivers, and coastal regions whenever such peoples are deemed to be getting in the way of development—hindering the activities of those seeking to exploit the raw materials that lie in, and beneath, the home territories of these peoples.⁶

These Canadian initiatives were modelled on the idea of freeing First Nations peoples from their kin-based systems of land holding and land use, by replacing relations based on kinship with those that, while decidedly Christian, would also be market driven.⁷ Part of the overall plan was to convert such peoples into modern wage earners equipped with European parliamentary democracy—that is, to impose a system of community political management based not on kinship alliances but rather on the individual’s relation to the nation-state. Officials were to be recruited by means of a one-man, one-vote electoral process oriented toward individual decision making (a model that imperial Western nations have been trying to spread to the rest of the world for over a century). These government initiatives overrode the kinship-based, hereditary system of governance that existed in most small-scale Aboriginal societies—a system that relied on elders and on interfamily diplomacy couched in the metaphors of competitive and cooperative gift giving, alliance building, and power balancing, as well as on kin-based knowledge transmission in the form of family lore, history, stories, and other teachings passed down the generations.⁸

In the area of the lower Fraser River, the hereditary keepers of Xwélmexw culture were silenced by the standard combination of traumas: dispossession from their lands, paternalistic attitudes on the part of both government and church bureaucracies, and massive intimidation born from the stern mother of colonial prejudice, as well as a fundamentally racist contempt for Indigenous knowledge and ways of life. Those administering the infrastructure of government, church, and education were deaf to concerns voiced by local communities. They would not listen to the hereditary carriers of culture, and, for their part, the hereditary carriers responded by refusing to attempt to talk to people who would neither listen nor respect what they had to say about the preferred ways of conducting local society. Here is Rena’s description of the onset of the silence:

When the elders found out that the new society had such contempt for our ways, when the churches called our respected ancestors naked savages and children of Satan, then the old people who were the guardians of the culture, they said to themselves, Oh goodness, the only dignified thing to do is to say absolutely nothing. They went silent and were ready to take the knowledge to the grave with them. It became sxaxá—taboo—to talk about private matters. The old people were afraid. They stopped talking, mainly because there was nobody to listen to them any longer.

By the 1950s, this situation had resulted in a deafening two-way silence and considerable social breakdown across First Nations communities, now largely confined to reserves.⁹ On the one side, family knowledge, always jealously protected, became even more secretive; on the other side, shared cultures based on hunting, fishing, and gathering were undermined by individual proprietorship and the commercialization of the land. Old ways, tried and true, were of no interest to the dominant commercial and cultural forces in a society that wanted Indians to forget the past and become, at first, Christian small farmers and then later job seekers and minor entrepreneurs in the new resource-based industrial economy.¹⁰

Prior to the inauguration of the government-imposed system of bands and councils, Indigenous governance along the Fraser River consisted of small communities that largely ran their own affairs. As Wayne Suttles (1990, 464) explains, Most local groups consisted of the household of an established kin group and several dependent households. Men identified as chiefs of local groups were probably heads of leading households or kin groups. For the most part, these local communities would act together as united political bodies, in the modern sense, only in moments of crisis such as raids and attacks from abroad.¹¹ Politics and administration were conducted in large cedar houses, where extended families lived, worked, and held their ceremonies.¹²

Before the colonial conquest of what is now western Canada, knowledgeable elders played a pivotal role as forces of moral influence, as advisors, and often indirectly, in the course of steering communities of kinfolk and affines (in-laws), as shapers of local political decisions. In many places, the moral and political influence of elders continued long after the advent of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), which presumed the right to administer these affairs in the best interests of the Canadian government. The knowledge, experience, and social managerial skills of elders were family-centered and kin-based, and their skills and wisdom extended to those families into which they and their descendants had married. They also exerted moral influence and enjoyed respect and a reputation for wisdom in the wider society of the day.

But legislation was enacted, and official reports were published. As far as Rena’s elders were concerned, the legislation that affected them most was, first, the Indian Act of 1876, which gave government the exclusive right to administer the affairs of First Nations; second, the potlatch ban of 1885, inspired by missionaries, which outlawed ceremonies by which kinship rights and duties were passed from one generation to another; and, third, the recommendations of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission (1913–16), which established and delimited reserves for First Nations in British Columbia. These legal and administrative activities were, and continue to be, predicated on the assimilation of the First Nations into mainstream Euro-Canadian life. In the eyes of nineteenth-century missionaries and government agents, Aboriginal peoples were, in their natural state, childlike and backward, ignorant of the virtues of modernity and the Christian faith. The original inhabitants needed to be raised to social and political adulthood, brought into a civilized state under the stern but dispassionate parental guidance of the government and its supporters. It was therefore assumed that they would benefit from severe tutelage in Euro-Canadian ways.

Over the decades that ensued, the accumulated actions on the part of government intimidated and in fact traumatized the old kinship societies; their members had to become furtive and adept in subterfuge if they were to continue to fulfill their ceremonial responsibilities to each other and to the land. The era of silence was most pronounced during the period marked by the so-called potlatch law, enacted in 1885. This amendment to the Indian Act of 1876 made illegal Aboriginal ceremonial practices, including the hosting of feasts in the course of which families gave away, in what missionaries and others saw as an improvident manner, their wealth to their guests. In so doing, of course, the families demonstrated not only their industriousness but also their proprietary rights to land and fishing sites (as was evidenced by the fact that the hosts always announced to their guests the names of the family places from which these gifts originated).¹³

Once ceremonial practices were outlawed and customary family-based forms of leadership usurped by the Canadian government, Aboriginal elders and leaders were encouraged, as well as bribed and pressured, to conform to the ways prescribed by the new society. In the name of equality and democracy, and under the gaze of the European version of the Creator, Aboriginal communities were expected to shun their spiritual beliefs, give up their ceremonial life, and convert to some form of Christianity, to embrace the individualism of the modern ethic, and to try their hand at entrepreneurship and competition in the capitalist market. They were expected to forget their collective heritage and their seasonal round of living from the land, as well as to reject social practices of hospitality and veneration for the natural world. They were further expected to destroy their material culture, to cease to produce their visual arts, their crafts, and their music, to relinquish their storytelling traditions, to abandon the kin-based status system and the taking and keeping of captives from other tribal groups, and to apply themselves to becoming literate and learning a trade. This was the wider world into which Rena Point Bolton’s grandparents were born, and, as the twentieth century replaced the nineteenth, they witnessed the fruits of government policy.

Rena is of the opinion that those who were most willing to adapt to modernity and who therefore responded most readily to the new order often belonged to sections of extended families whose members had not enjoyed much authority in the pre-existing society or had fallen in status owing to some calamity, such as being taken captive by raiding tribes from along the coast. Another category consisted of those family members who had intermarried with the newcomer settlers. Such persons, raised at least partially outside the old culture, possessed little of what was by then esoteric Xwélmexw knowledge and had little to lose socially by cooperating with the new society and new power structure.¹⁴ For their part, those who had been the old guard, or had, in a sense, occupied the position of cultural elite, often refused to participate in the new ways. Here is how Rena explains the split between new and old. Speaking rather formally and diplomatically but at the same time acknowledging the hierarchy inherent in the old society, she begins by describing those who welcomed the new order:

These people often were not from the high-born families, or at least not people who were in the traditional line to inherit responsibility for guarding the culture. They did not have the right or responsibility to be, as you say, stewards for the old culture. Anyway, some of them wanted to move with the times and abandon all the old ways, leave them behind. Their aim was to be modern. So when the anthropologists came around, the people who would talk to them were usually those who were most familiar with the white ways, and often, these people were the ones least sympathetic with the old ways of our people.

The old society had a pecking order. Those who were high-born, they sort of kept the culture and the procedures among themselves. They looked after it. […] The free people, the