G. M. Dawson — The Man Who Photographed the Haida
The death of assumptions
The year is 1878. A hunchbacked geologist and poet from Pictou, Nova Scotia, lands on Graham Island, off the west coast of Canada. The first thing he sees as his boat slowly approaches the shore is a forest of totem poles. They are carved, and colorfully painted, and they are everywhere, standing tall and proud along the shoreline, guarding the local cedar houses.
When George M. Dawson (1849–1901) visited the Haida in the late 1870s, Graham Island was the largest among the 400 red cedar-covered islands and islets that colonial officials had baptized the Queen Charlotte Islands. People commonly called them “the Charlottes”. Today, the archipelago has been renamed Haida Gwaii, the “Islands of the Haida people”.
The Haida communities G. M. Dawson visited in the 1870s had already been decimated by waves of European-imported epidemics. Smallpox, measles, influenza, dysentery, and consumption had swept through the archipelago throughout the 19th century.
The worst epidemic had begun in March 1862, after a steamship from San Francisco had brought smallpox to Fort Victoria. On the outskirts of the city lived thousands of Indigenous groups. Most of them belonged to the Tsimshian First Nation, some were Haida from Haida Gwaii.
