RECORDING CULTURE CHANGES AMONG THE 

 CARRIER INDIANS OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 



By JULIAN H. STEWARD 

 Senior Anthropologist, Bureau of American Ethnology 



Persons who believe that anthropologists are strange, antiquarian 

 scientists who prefer skeletons to living people and the dust and 

 decay of past ages to things living and modern, may be puzzled 

 that an anthropologist should deliberately choose to study an Indian 

 tribe that had abandoned 90 percent of its native customs in favor 

 of "civilized" ways of life. Yet studies of acculturated tribes have 

 become a major field of research and fit neatly within the scope of 

 the "science of man." Anthropology directs only part of its atten- 

 tion to the past, which it sees as a background to the present. It 

 views contemporary primitive peoples as very live groups, whose cul- 

 tures, though rooted in history, are not relics of the past but are 

 present realities that function and develop today in the ever-chang- 

 ing medium of the modern world. The anthropologist studies these 

 modern primitives to gain insight into social change and to test 

 social theory. 



Particularly well suited for studies of culture change are the 

 Carrier Indians of central British Columbia. It was known that the 

 social organization of these Indians had been fundamentally altered 

 twice in the past. In prehistoric times the Carrier had substituted a 

 complex society copied from that of the coast Indians for their own 

 simple organization. After the white man came, their social structure 

 was revolutionized again through contact with civilization. By what 

 processes were these changes effected? What relation had economic 

 pursuits to social organization? In the present Carrier culture, what 

 is Indian, what is White? The writer visited the Carrier during the 

 summer of 1940 to gather information required to answer these 

 questions. 



The Carrier country is still a vast wilderness of lakes and forest- 

 covered mountains. Except for the Canadian National Railway that 

 runs through it to the Pacific coast, a little precarious farming south 

 of the railroad, and scattered mines in the "bush," it is unchanged 

 by civilization. The Indian population continues to live mainly on 

 the resources of forest and stream : Deer, bear, caribou, and moose, 

 salmon and trout, some of the latter weighing up to 18 pounds, and 



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