What started as a study into the relationship between salmon resources and potlatch behaviour became a 20-year investigation by Dr. Leland Donald (Anthropology) into a murky part of anthropological study avoided by many of his colleagues. The result of his more than two decades of research is a book, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, published recently by University of California Press.
Donald researched 800 published and unpublished ethnograph's and historical sources for his book.
"I was trained primarily as an Africanist and spent two years in Sierra Leone and no one trained as an Africanist can ignore slavery." says Donald.
He says he is not making value judgments in his book, but is only explaining how different Aboriginal cultures functioned. In past studies, slaves were ignored because they were believed to have served no worthwhile function or because anthropologists thought it was unwise to mention slavery at a time when Aboriginal cultures were slowly gaining recognition and stature.
Donald and his initial research partner, former department colleague Dr. Don Mitchell, discovered that a community's success in preserving the year's salmon catch often depended on the number of slaves in their possession.
"The general thinking of the day [late 1960s, early 70s] was that the salmon resource was so rich that any variation didn't matter. But we learned that the critical issue isn't the catching of the fish, it's the preservation. You have to have enough people to do it. Since traditionally women processed the fish, they were critical to a successful food fishery." If slaves could be used to swell the ranks of the fish processors, the food supply benefited, and so did the prestige of a particular band when it made bounteous presentations of fish at a potlatch.
Besides being an important source of labour and a useful trade commodity, slaves also filled another role that many anthropologist found distasteful enough to ignore, but that Donald deals with matter-of-factly.
"Discussion of cannibalism is very controversial," he acknowledges. "It usually occurred in ritual events and the eaters were believed to be temporarily infused with a supernatural spirit that required human flesh." Slaves were usually offered up as the victims. They were also sometimes sacrificed following the death of an important community leader.
Donald attributes a lack of material about slavery to anthropologists' sincere desire to emphasize the positive aspects of Aboriginal culture. As an example, he points out that Edward Curtis' extraordinary 1914 film depicting Aboriginal life was initially titled "In the Land of the Headhunters." When re-released in 1960, the title had been changed to "In the Land of the War Canoes."
The use of Aboriginal slaves began to dwindle in the 1860s although there are some documented cases of slavery as late as the 1890s. For the next several decades, Aboriginals joined anthropologists in an uneasy alliance of avoiding the issue since, as recently as the 1970s, descendants of slaves felt stigmatized within their own culture says Donald. He hopes his new book won't lead his colleagues to deal him the same fate.