Franz Boas Among the Shuswap: The 1890 Field Report

In 1890 Franz Boas published his Sixth Report on the North-Western Tribes of Canada for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, based on fieldwork that included the Shuswap (Secwepemc). It is one of the earliest systematic descriptions of Secwepemc material life, written a generation before James Teit's fuller monograph.

On the arts, Boas was unequivocal: "The Shushwap do not know the art of pottery, and do little, if any, carving in wood. Their household goods are made principally of basketry, in which they excel." He recorded that Shuswap and Nlaka'pamux basketry "is sold extensively to the tribes of southern Vancouver Island," with roots "dyed black with an extract of fern root, and red with an extract of alder-bark or with oxide of iron," so that "very beautiful patterns are made in these three colours."

He described a technology of daily life built on plant fibre and hide: bulrush mats strung on nettle threads, fire made with a fire drill and willow-root spunk, canoes of cottonwood, cedar or bark, food boiled in watertight baskets with red-hot stones, and roots steam-cooked in earth pits.

He sketched trade networks in which art objects and materials moved constantly: dentalium shells from the Chilcotin, "dressed deer-skins" and later horses from the Shuswap, copper dug near Kamloops Lake, and horses from the Okanagan.

Boas also left the first published note of Secwepemc rock art: "A number of rock paintings are found on the shores of Kamloops Lake. I have not seen them, and do not know what they represent." The report is a snapshot taken during a period of catastrophic change, barely 28 years after the 1862 smallpox epidemic, and its clipped observations preserve details of Secwepemc art and technology that would otherwise be lost.