At the bridge

The remarkable story of James Teit holds lessons for today’s bridge-builders, says Wendy Wickwire at IPSS.

Historian Wendy Wickwire shares the legacy of forgotten bridge-builders in this excerpt from the Rights & Respect Magazine.

Attendees of IPSS are forming relationships, developing partnerships, and building bridges to a positive future of economic reconciliation.

One might call them mavericks or visionaries. However, the journey they are on is but a part of a much longer passage—a passage during which many who came before struggled and toiled. Some of these mavericks of the past have been nearly erased from history, as was the case with one of Canada’s earliest ‘bridge-builders,’ James Teit, a fellow from Scotland’s Shetland Islands who first landed in BC in 1884 to work in a shop in Spences Bridge.

During IPSS 2022’s Success Showcase ‘At the Bridge,’ Wendy Wickwire, emeritus professor in the department of history at the University of Victoria, tells how Teit immersed himself in the communities and cultures of the area’s Indigenous peoples. He became fluent in the Interior Salish languages and developed deep friendships with the people. He also recorded many aspects of their lives, including their stories and songs. Teit was not given credit for his voluminous ethnographic documentation—instead, Teit was “invisibilized” and the work was claimed by the anthropologist Franz Boas.

Wickwire says others also tried to silence Teit’s political activism. For their tireless work with the Indigenous people to help them preserve their rights and “settle the land problem,” Teit and fellow activists, including Haida First Nation member Peter Kelly, were labelled agitators by the government.

Upon Teit’s passing in 1922, Kelly described Teit as “not just a friend, he was a brother of the Indians in this province. He had their utmost confidence. He had their implicit trust. He was looked to, not as a white man, not as a soldier among the Indians in this province, but one of them. One who could present their views perhaps better than any other man of the present generation.”

Wickwire says Teit “first took hold of me when I was in my twenties.” Over the course of four decades, she uncovered his history, which she then documented in her award-winning book At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging, published in 2019.

This article was originally published in Rights & Respect, Issue 2. To purchase a physical copy of the magazine, click here. To purchase tickets to the Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase, coming June 1-2, 2023, click here.