Overview

Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada and as a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In The Salish People, his field reports are collected for the first time. In The Salish People each volums serves as a useful guide to a specific geographic area, bringing the past to the present. The four volumes, rich in stories and factual details about the old customs of the Coast and Interior Salish, are each edited with an introduction by Ralph Maud, who lives in the Fraser Valley and who teaches a course on the B.C. Indian Oral Tradition at Simon Fraser University. Volume IV of The Salish People deals with the Sechelt and the South-Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island and includes a bio-bibliography of Charles Hill-Tout, as well as miscellaneous short pieces of special interest, such as letters and a review of Franz Boas's book about Bella Coola. Marius Barbeau tells the story of a noted English anthropologist arriving in New York in the first years of this century and asking his American colleague who met him at the pier: ""Where's Hill-Tout?"" This query, says Barbeau, ""was often repeated with a smile among New York anthropologists as characteristic of the British point of view as to the progress of American anthropology."" Ralph Maud's introduction to this volume finally locates Hill-Tout among his peers. It reveals a man ""whose inner dignity is real enough, not something dependent on the opinions of others. It sees him through.""

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The rescuing of unorthodox anthropology from the conspiracy of silence that academics have woven around it.

"""The rescuing of unorthodox anthropology from the conspiracy of silence that academics have woven around it."""

Author Information

Charles Hill-Tout Charles Hill-Tout devoted many years to ethnographic and anthropological field work among the Salish people of the west coast recording their customs, stories and art. The Salish People is a four volume collection of all the field work done by Charles Hill-Tout in the period 1895 to 1911, divided by specific geographical and cultural areas. Ralph Maud Ralph Maud is the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996) and the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000). He has edited much of Dylan Thomas's work, including The Notebook Poems, 19301934 and The Broadcasts, and is co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 19341953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud is also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III and IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. In addition, he has done extensive work on the translation collaboration between Henry W. Tate and Franz Boas, including the book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology.

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