James Teit and the Documentation of Secwépemc Material Culture

James Alexander Teit (15 April 1864 to 30 October 1922) was born in Lerwick, Shetland, Scotland. He immigrated to Canada and married a Nlaka'pamux woman named Susanna Lucy Antko, and after her death in 1899 settled at Spences Bridge, British Columbia. He "worked with Franz Boas to study Interior Salish First Nations peoples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries," and later with Edward Sapir of the Geological Survey of Canada.

Through the Jesup North Pacific Expedition series Teit published The Thompson Indians of British Columbia (1900), The Lillooet Indians (1906), The Shuswap (1909) and Mythology of the Thompson Indians (1912). Later works issued after his death include Ethnobotany of the Thompson Indians (1930), Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region (1930 printing of the 1928 report) and The Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus (1930).

Boas explained why Teit was irreplaceable: "he was not only on terms of intimate friendship with the Thompson Indians of British Columbia but... he had full command of the language of that tribe, one of the groups most prolific in the making of decorated basketry." The basketry study Teit undertook was financed privately and designed as "an investigation into the attitude of the individual artist toward his work," a strikingly modern research question that centred the makers themselves.

Teit's The Shuswap (1909) remains "the most authoritative treatise ever written about the Shuswap people": 346 pages and 15 chapters covering "nearly all aspects of their lives, including social structure, clothing, subsistence, warfare and religion," ending with 107 recorded myths.

Teit was also an activist. "In the later part of his life Teit worked tirelessly with the native people to preserve their human rights." Boas noted that the basketry work was delayed because Teit "was engrossed, for a time, in work undertaken for the welfare of the Indians of British Columbia." He died in 1922 "without completing his notes"; Helen H. Roberts assembled the final monograph from his and Herman Haeberlin's manuscripts.