ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the interweaving of narratives has shaped the creation of a self-conscious cultural value or ethnie amongst the Kwakwaka’wakw people of Vancouver Island. Various features are common to those asserting a national or ethnic identity. Both rely on the belief that the community exists, this belief being held to be the case on the grounds of common recognition and sensibilities, shared observances or language, and mutually acknowledged obligations. Ethnie are a kind of ‘chronotope’ of myths and symbols of communities, the symbolic and social capital of a group, their actualizations, reproductions and negotiations, the experiential basis of cultural recognition and intimacy. In 1886, when Boas first visited the peoples on Vancouver Island he was subsequently to call the ‘Kwakiutl’, they had been in contact with traders, miners, settlers, missionaries, and governmental bureaucracy for more than a century.
