CHAPTER I: FRANZ BOAS AND GEORGE HUNT
History of Collaboration
“Now about the book with the many illustrations. There are so many mistakes in the names of the masks and dishes that I think should be put to rights before one of us die.”
—George Hunt to Franz Boas, 7 June 1920
Franz Boas first met George Hunt in 1888 and later hired him to assemble a Kwakwaka’wakw collection and delegation for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the fair, Boas trained Hunt to transcribe Kwak̓wala speech, stories, and song lyrics. The following year, Boas was Hunt’s guest in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, where they documented a Winter Ceremonial and collected materials for museums in New York and Washington, DC. When Boas hosted his own small feast at this event, he was given the name Hiłdzakwal’s. The two men worked together extensively between 1896 and 1905, while Boas was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. After Boas took a teaching post at Columbia University, the transcription and publication of textual material consumed them both until Hunt’s death in 1933.
Franz Boas with the Hunt Family, Fort Rupert, November 1894. Back row, left to right: Sam Hunt, George Hunt, Mary Ebbetts Hunt (George’s mother), Franz Boas; standing, left to right: Lalaxs’a (wife of David Hunt, not pictured), Jonathan Hunt; seated, left to right: Emily Hunt (holding Marion Hunt), Lucy Hunt; kneeling, left to right: Mary Hunt, George Hunt Jr. Photograph by Oregon C. Hastings, Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library, U5-1-28.
