Ligeex

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Ligeex (variously spelled: "Legaic" etc.) is an hereditary name-title belonging to the Gispaxlo'ots tribe of the Tsimshian First Nation from the village of Lax Kw'alaams (a.k.a. Port Simpson), British Columbia, Canada. The name, and the chieftainship it represents, is passed along matrilineally within the royal house (a matrilineally defined extended family) called the House of Ligeex. The House of Ligeex belongs to the Laxsgiik (Eagle clan).

Ligeex is considered to be traditionally the most powerful Tsimshian chieftainship. In the period of early European contact, Ligeex controlled Tsimshian trade with peoples up the Skeena River, a privilege he protected through tribute and through war if necessary. His position was eventually weakened as the Hudson's Bay Company rose in influence through the fur trade in the nineteenth century.

The name Ligeex is conventionally described as being of Heiltsuk linguistic origin and as meaning Stone Cliff. Tradition holds that the House of Ligeex is an offshoot of another Gispaxlo'ots Laxsgiik house, the House of Nis'wa'maķ, which is one of the Gwinhuut houses deriving from migrations from Tlingit territory in what is now Alaska. A woman from the House of Nis'wa'maķ was kidnapped by -- and wedded to -- a Haisla chief from Kitamaat, to the south, and was subsequently kidnapped from Kitamaat by a Heiltsuk chief from Bella Bella, even farther south, who also took her as his wife. She bore him a son, who inherited from his father, the Heiltsuk chief, the name Ligeex. When the woman and her son were able to return to the Gispaxlo'ots, the name Ligeex was retained as a name that could passed along in the family's maternal line, gradually rising to prominence.

It was a Ligeex who married his daughter Sudaał to Dr. John Frederick Kennedy of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1832, an arranged intercultural marriage which smoothed the way for the establishment of the HBC fort (Fort Simpson, a.k.a. Port Simpson) at Lax Kw'alaams, Ligeex's territorial possession, in 1834.

The most famous holders of the name were a series of men named Paul Legaic in the late nineteenth century.

In one famous incident, the HBC employee and Gispaxlo'ots house-group chief Arthur Wellington Clah intervened and saved the life of the Anglican lay missionary in Lax Kw'alaams, William Duncan, when Paul Legaic ordered Duncan at gunpoint to cease tolling churchbells on the day of his (Legaic's) daughter's initiation into a Tsimshian secret society. This Ligeex soon became a key convert of Duncan's and was baptised with the name of Christ's disciple Paul. This Paul Legaic and his wife and daughter moved with Duncan for a while to the nearby village of Metlakatla, founded by Duncan in 1862 as a utopian Christian community where about 50 Lax Kw'alaams natives could be protected from the pernicious influence of the H.B.C. fort atmosphere. There Legaic was made a constable briefly and was also sent to Lax Kw'alaams and the Nass River to try to convert more First Nations to people to Christianity. On one such trip, in 1869, he died in Lax Kw'alaams.

The anthropologist Viola Garfield wrote in 1938 that the last fully installed chief of the original House of Ligeex had been Paul Legaic (d. 1890), a successor to the Paul Legaic converted by Duncan. Paul Legaic II's sister Martha Legaic succeeded him and herself died in 1902. At that point the maternal line had run out and, for lack of a consensus among other Gispaxlo'ots over succession, a council of four leading house-group heads administered Gispaxlo'ots affairs for a period. Then the Ligeex chieftainship was given to George Kelly, a member of the House of Sgagweet, the leading, royal Laxsgiik house of the Gitando tribe of Lax Kw'alaams and a house with close historical relations with the House of Ligeex. Kelly, whose father was white and who had been born at Port Ludlow, Washington and raised in Victoria, B.C., died in 1933 and Garfield in 1938 reported that at that point a new council had taken over the Gispaxlo'ots leadership. She opined that there would probably never be another Ligeex, although she detailed rival claims for taking over the name and its privileges, including a Cape Fox, Alaska, Tlingit family that had established itself in Lax Kw'alaams as a new House of Nis'wa'maķ.

In Barbeau's survey of totem poles, he reports that a Fin-of-the-Shark pole more than thirty feet in height belonging to Ligeex was erected ca. 1837. In 1950 Barbeau wrote that the eagle figure which topped this pole was still preserved in Lax Kw'alaams. An earlier Fin-of-the-Shark pole had stood at the original Gispaxlo'ots village on the Skeena River where the Skeena meets the Shames River.

Barbeau also describes an Eagle totem pole belonging to Ligeex which stood in Lax Kw'alaams until falling and was probably cut up, some time before 1926. This pole had been erected about 1866. It had been typical for slaves to be sacrificed by having the pole erected into a hole on top of them or by being killed first and then buried beneath the pole. On this occasion, however, a Nisga'a slave woman and a Haida one were liberated at the last moment before they could be sacrificed.

In the early 1930s Garfield recorded information on Ligeex and the Gispaxlo'ots, including phonograph recordings of House of Ligeex songs, from Matthew Johnson, a head of one of the other Gispaxlo'ots house-groups.

A rock painting on a cliffside near the mouth of the Skeena River, visible from Highway 16, depicts traditional copper shields and a human face, marking Ligeex's ancient control of the river's trade.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Barbeau, Marius (1950) Totem Poles. 2 vols. (Anthropology Series 30, National Museum of Canada Bulletin 119.) Ottawa: National Museum of Canada.
  • Garfield, Viola E. (1939) "Tsimshian Clan and Society." University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 167-340.
  • Marsden, Susan, and Robert Galois (1995) "The Tsimshian, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Geopolitics of the Northwest Coast Fur Trade, 1787-1840." Canadian Geographer, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 169-183.
  • Neylan, Susan (2003) The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
  • Pierce, William Henry (1933) From Potlatch to Pulpit, Being the Autobiography of the Rev. William Henry Pierce. Ed. by J. P. Hicks. Vancouver, B.C.: Vancouver Bindery.
  • Tate, John (1997) "The Bella Bella Origin of Legaix." Recorded by William Beynon, 1952. In Tsimshian Narratives 2: Trade and Warfare, ed. by George F. MacDonald and John J. Cove, pp. 62-65. Ottawa: Directorate, Canadian Museum of Civilization.
  • Wellington Clah, Arthur (1997) "How Tamks Saved William Duncan's Life." Recorded by William Beynon, 1950. In Tsimshian Narratives 2: Trade and Warfare, ed. by George F. MacDonald and John J. Cove, pp. 210-212. Ottawa: Directorate, Canadian Museum of Civilization.