- The Cannibal Spirit by Harry Whitehead, Hamish Hamilton Canada, 295 pp.
In his debut novel, The Cannibal Spirit, Harry Whitehead delves into the fascinating story of George
Hunt, a West Coast shaman who also worked as an assistant to anthropologist Franz Boas.
Hunt, the son of an English father and a Tlingit mother, was charged with cannibalism in 1900 and Whitehead uses that historical moment in West Coast history as a starting point for his work of fiction.
Whitehead researched his subject as a scientist before deciding to turn the material into something else. The result is a surrealistic journey into the heart of darkness where different cultural traditions come together in one man. The author spoke to the North Shore News about his research on Hunt's life and how that work led to The Cannibal Spirit.
North Shore News: Before you started writing you worked for many years as a location manager in the film industry.
Harry Whitehead: I did maybe for 12-15 years in the U.K. I did a fair bit of travelling with it but I was based in London. I worked in pretty much every genre at some point in TV and movies. In the last few years whilst I was writing my novel and I was pursuing a PhD part-time I ended up working in large painful budget television commercials which would give me high doses of income in short bursts and allow me to write so that's where I ended up for the past three or four years of my career of location managing.
North Shore News: How did you come upon the subject matter for The Cannibal Spirit?.
Harry Whitehead: I did a master's degree in medical anthropology and a PhD in creative writing. I pursued a master's in medical anthropology because I was particularly interested in this story that I had tracked down. I'd read this story about an obscure 19th century British Columbian shaman who had wanted to become a shaman in order to expose the lies and trickeries of shamanism and he'd gone off and learned all these arts of prestidigitation and then his chieftain had asked him to save his sick son. Very reluctantly he had performed these rituals and of course lo and behold the child was cured.
This story had played through some of the anthropological literature and just kind of obsessed me and it was why I pursued the master's degree and how I ended up coming out here with a few hundred quid from my university to try and track down the man's true identity. In the Royal British Columbian Museum archives I finally tracked down that he was actually a man named George Hunt whose father was white and whose mother was a Tlingit noblewoman from out of Alaska. He grew up at the northern end of Vancouver Island and it was there I discovered who this guy was and I became all the more obsessed with who he was. His liminal stages as a kind of half man living between these two worlds in 1900 in the midst of the end of the colonial era just interested me more.
It led very slowly to my attempts to write a biography of him and then increasingly an awareness that actually my interest in him was my own obsessions and it had to be a work of fiction.
North Shore News: Why did it have to be a novel? Harry Whitehead: Because it was my own obsession with him that was driving me on. My book has been thought of as a book about Canada which I have to confess I never really envisioned. It was sort of the impossibility of trying to build a linear narrative about yourself when we live in a world of so many opposites, and we have to be so many different things that don't really match, and George Hunt's life was almost a pure example of that - you know the two sides of who he was just couldn't match and they never could. It's that that really fascinated me.
North Shore News: He was like a ground zero for two different cultures.
Harry Whitehead: That's exactly right. When I discovered that he had been tried for cannibalism in 1900 I mean that's such a perfect story writ at large - really you know he was kind of set up by the missionaries. What would he argue when he got to court? Would he stand up as one of his mother's people and say be damned with the lot of you or would he roll over and say I'm a scientist and anthropologist's assistant and this is ridiculous? How would he stand up in that moment and that really came to represent everything that I was interested in about his identity.
North Shore News: How unusual was George Hunt in the community? Was there anyone else Boas could have used as an intermediary?
Harry Whitehead: Not really, not in that part of the world.
Boas had a few people spread around but up in that part of the island Hunt was such a perfect character. He spoke four or five different languages and English as well. And he was articulate. He could read because his father sent him to learn with missionaries and he learned to read as a child so he was really a unique person in that part of the world. So it had to be him really.
And yet at the same time his mother was a Tlingit and the Tlingit and the Kwakiutl from that part of the world had 300 years of on/off warfare with each other so when George Hunt married one of the local native girls in 1874 he ended those hundreds of years of warfare because of his maternal line. His father was the Hudson's Bay Company factor for that part of the world so he was also kind of representing this other group and he suddenly became extremely important among the people there through his marriage. He occupied this really unique position between all these different kinds of worlds.
North Shore News: A unique position but was he equally respected in both the Tlingit and Kwakuitl cultures?
Harry Whitehead: He was a liminal figure, really, he was loved and hated almost still is from some of the contemporary writing from that part of the world that I've read. There are some people that still call his descendants the Hunt family 'outsiders' and 'foreigners' because of his Tlingit heritage from a 100 years back. There he was - the missionaries and the white people didn't like him much because he was propagating native culture just as they were trying to suppress it. And at the same time the local people saw him as sort of pilfering their stories and their material culture and shipping it all off to the American Museum of Natural History. He really was a liminal man loved and hated in almost equal measure but he was incredibly charismatic by all accounts - quite a powerful, intimidating guy and I suspect it was by the sheer force of his will that he continued to maintain his senior position in the world.
North Shore News: You write "For whites he was guilty of his crimes by his very nature to the Indian he was a half-breed guilty of betrayal."
Harry Whitehead: Exactly. For me I have articulated that into his consciousness as part of my fiction if you like. He did use to write letters to Boas which kind of hinted at this kind of thing without being I suspect quite as obsessed throughout his life as I've played him although when the trial for cannibalism happened this is when he was most conscious of his position and most upset about what had really happened.
North Shore News: Is there much documentation on the trial? Harry Whitehead: There's some. In the Vancouver Sun there are a number of articles that covered it in April of 1900. There were two or three articles there. There was some information in the legal archives that I tracked in the Royal British Columbia Museum from the time as well. And there was a guy called William Bowser who went on to become premier of British Columbia who represented him as his lawyer. I write him in the book actually. I tried to keep him as accurate as I could. He saw it as something of a cause célèbre as well because nobody had actually acted on these so-called antiIndian potlatch laws. Hunt was the first guy, he was the experiment really, in trying these laws out. When he gets off by stating himself as a scientist that really is exactly what happened. I kept the bones of the structure of the trial accurate and kind of concatenated a load of other life events of his into that short period.
North Shore News: In the novel there's a lot of profanity is that taken in spirit from Boas' texts?
Harry Whitehead: Not so much from Boas' texts although Boas didn't shy completely away from it. It was more from other texts of the time and what I read around the subject. I've struggled at times to track down a real spoken voice from that time. There's not much around but what I got was a kind of second-hand material about how people spoke. You find in a lot of the authors of that time you get a blank line where a swear word would be. Conrad does it a lot. I had to fill in those blanks if you like and that took a whole pile of research trying to track down what the slang would have been in British Columbia at the time because it was such a melting pot.
Everyone had come from pretty much everywhere at the time and of course everybody spoke differently and one of the problems I had in writing the first draft is I tried accurately to reflect all these different registers and it was just too confusing. I had to slice it down and unify the registers a little more than perhaps I would have done at first by choice.
North Shore News: Did they write their research notes in English? Harry Whitehead: What Boas did is he invented a written language for Kwak'wala. He and George Hunt drew it up together and it's immensely complex. A lot of the Kwakiutl say, "How the hell can
we ever read this?" because there's all kinds of dots and accents. Boas taught Hunt to use it at the Chicago Fair in 1893 and then sent Hunt back and what he would do is write in the Kwak'wala and then he would write an exact English translation not trying to rationalize the English but word for word underneath the Kwak'wala.
North Shore News: Where did they meet?
Harry Whitehead: Boas met Hunt for the first time in Victoria in 1888. He was introduced by a guy called Newcombe. When Boas first turned up out there he was looking for a guide and a translator I think it was his second visit when he actually met Hunt. The first time he met him was in this kind of doss house in Victoria and he wasn't particularly impressed with him. Hunt rolled in about four hours late and was staring off into space and not particularly interested in Boas so he got his hackles up a little bit but then they met again up in Fort Rupert and Boas very quickly realized how useful Hunt was.
North Shore News: What did they do in Chicago?
Harry Whitehead: They took a travelling Kwakiutl band with them and did some totem poles and built a Kwakiutl great house. They performed dances and quote unquote "cannibal rituals" outside the front of the house. Hunt infamously created this dance that accurately looked like they were eating a boy because that was part of the whole ritual structure that was this pretend cannibalism. They did it so convincingly there was outrage in the press and they ostracized the Kwakiutl after that - it was all a bit of a disaster. There are photographs of them online at the Chicago Fair standing outside and you can see George Hunt off to the left with a big bushy moustache standing in the background kind of as the architect of all sins.
North Shore News: That must have been amazing to see them in Chicago.
Harry Whitehead: Such revelation. The other thing that I haven't mentioned in the book (is the connection between) Boas and Edward Curtis, the photographer.
Curtis came to the Northwest Coast in 1914 and made a movie called In the Land of the Head Hunters and George Hunt was pretty much the first assistant director, costume designer, production designer. There's pictures of him standing on set with a megaphone and I think his son Stanley was the lead actor in it.
What has always interested me about Hunt is he's in some ways the architect of the culture as its known in the Academy or the Western world if you like. So many of the stories that he sent to Boas were actually stories of his own life and life experiences and all of them would have been clouded in some way by his marginal status. There's a lot that's interesting about what was real that he wrote and what wasn't and how it's all positioned at the heart of academic study and has been in all the years since.
