Wilson Duff

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Wilson Duff was a Canadian anthropologist known for his research on Northwest Coast cultures, especially the Tsimshian, Gitksan, and Haida, and especially for his interest in their plastic arts, such as totem poles.

In 1958, Duff and his colleague Michael Kew brokered an agreement with the Gitksan community of Kitwancool (a.k.a. Gitanyow), arranging for some of the village's totem poles to be removed to the Royal British Columbia Museum for preservation, in exchange for replicas and for the publication of the Kitwancool people's histories, territories, and laws. During this project, Duff and Kew worked through the part-Tlingit interpreter for the Gitksan, Constance Cox.

In 1958-1959, while he was a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, he worked alongside the anthropologist and folklorist Marius Barbeau in Ottawa on a Canada Council Senior Fellowship, organizing Barbeau and William Beynon's massive fieldnotes and other material on the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples (Tsimshian, Gitksan, and Nisga'a). Duff became a champion of the importance of the Barbeau-Beynon corpus, though he distanced himself from Barbeau's more controversial theories on the recent peopling of the Americas.

In 1960 he did fieldwork in Gitksan and Nisga'a communities.

His students included Marjorie Halpin.

[edit] Selected works

• (ed.) (1959) Histories, Territories, and Laws of the Kitwancool. (Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir no. 4.) Victoria, B.C.: Royal British Columbia Museum.

• (1964) "Contributions of Marius Barbeau to West Coast Ethnology." Anthropologica (new series), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 63-96.

[edit] Sources

• Nowry, Laurence (1995) Marius Barbeau, Man of Mana: A Biography. Toronto: NC Press.