The W̲SÁNEĆ and their neighbours : Diamond Jenness on the Coast Salish of Vancouver Island, 1935

In 1935, National Museum of Canada anthropologist Diamond Jenness did several months of fieldwork with the Coast Salish peoples of southwestern Vancouver Island. His main focus was the WSANEC, then a little-known group whose reserves lay on the Saanich Peninsula, a short distance from Victoria. Here, and later in neighbouring areas, local elders shared with him their knowledge of the "old ways," a mode of living they all knew at first-hand in their younger days. Covering a wide array of subjects, everything from fishing practices and marriage customs to conceptions of the natural world around them, the elders filled Jenness' notebooks with the substance of what stood to become a major contribution to the growing literature on the indigenous peoples of Canada's Pacific northwest. But when World War II intervened and he was called away to other duties, his partly-finished manuscript-The Saanich Indians of Vancouver Island-was set aside.… (more)