Diamond Jenness and Athapaskan Ethnography
The Wet'suwet'en (or northern Carrier) are a First Nations people who live on the Bulkley River and around Broman Lake and Francois Lake in the northwestern interior of British Columbia.
In 1923-24, Diamond Jenness spent five months with the Wet’suwet’en at Hazelton and the nearby reserve of Hagwilget, at the confluence of the Bulkley and Skeena rivers. The result is a detailed examination of a customary way of life and thought deeply rooted in northern Athapaskan traditions, but variously influenced over the centuries by close contacts with the neighbouring Gitksan, a Tsimshian-speaking people. Initially published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1943, the monograph focuses on the social, political, and religious dimensions of Wet’suwet’en life, with particular emphasis on clan organization and beliefs about illness and healing.
"The westernmost subtribe of the Carrier Indians, the Hwitsowitenne, “Clever People,” as it called itself, occupied the basin of the Bulkley River, an important tributary of the Skeena in northern British Columbia, together with a block of territory that extended for an uncertain distance to the south. Flanking it on three sides were other subtribes of the same Carrier nation, but on the west were Gitksan Indians of the Tsimshian stock, whose nearest village, Hazelton, lay only 4 miles from the Carrier village of Hagwilgate (plate 1).
After 1800 there were many disturbances of population in this area due to epidemics of diseases, the growth of European settlements, and the greater ease of communication through the building of roads and a railway. Many Carrier families were blotted out and their places taken by immigrant families from other districts; and there was much intermarriage with the neighboring Gitksan Indians. Today the sub-tribe numbers rather more than 300, and has two main settlements, Hagwilgate and Moricetown, while a few families reside at other villages along the line of the transcontinental railway.
Some of the Indians remain in their settlements throughout the entire year, others cut ties for the railway in winter, or hunt and trap in remote districts where the land is not yet preempted by white settlers and game still survives in fair numbers. Two or three families even roam occasionally as far south as the Eutsuk lake area, which the Bulkley people incorporated into their territory after the earlier inhabitants, who seem to have formed a distinct subtribe, were destroyed by an epidemic of smallpox about 1838."
