Gitxsan Erotic

The Gitxsan take their name from a river. Git means people of, and Xsan is the river of mist, the one English maps call the Skeena. Their territory follows that river and its tributaries through the mountains of northwestern British Columbia. It lies inland from the coast but is tied to it by salmon, trade and kinship, and in fishing season the smokehouses on the riverbanks are working buildings, not props. Gitxsanimaax is a Tsimshianic language, close enough to Nisga'a that some linguists count the two as one. It is completely unrelated to the Athabaskan language of the Wet'suwet'en up the Bulkley River, a people the Gitxsan have married into, feasted with and gone to court beside. What makes someone Gitxsan, though, is belonging to a house. Descent runs through the mother. Everyone is born into one of four clans, Lax Gibuu (Wolf), Lax Seel (Frog), Gisk'aast (Fireweed) and Lax Skiik (Eagle), and within the clan into a wilp, or house. A house is a lineage, not a building. It holds fishing sites and hunting grounds, crests and songs, and adaawk, the oral histories that explain how the house came to its land. Some reach back to Temlaham, the ancestral town of the upper Skeena. Hereditary chiefs carry names that outlive them, and a name only counts once it has been taken up in the feast hall in front of guests who are paid to witness it.

Missionaries reached the Skeena in the late nineteenth century, and most Gitxsan today are Christian, but the church never replaced the feast. A death still brings a funeral service, followed by feasts that settle what the house owes and, in time, pass the name on. Canada outlawed the potlatch from 1884 to 1951, and the feast outlasted the law. Sternwheelers, gold seekers and the Grand Trunk Pacific railway came up the valley. Reserves shrank the houses' territories to village plots, and the chiefs kept saying the land had never been surrendered. That argument became Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, a case brought by Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs in the 1980s and named for a Gitxsan chief's title. Witnesses recited adaawk and sang house songs in the courtroom. The trial judge gave that testimony little weight and threw out the claim in 1991. In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that oral histories must be weighed as evidence and set out what Aboriginal title means in Canadian law. The ruling is still cited wherever pipelines and logging roads cross unceded land. At home the past stays visible: carved poles still stand at Gitanyow and Gitwangak, and the carving school at 'Ksan, beside Hazelton, trained a generation of artists from the 1970s on.