At Home With the Bella Coola Indians: T. F. McIlwraith's Field Letters, 1922-1924

Between 1922 and 1914, the young Canadian anthropologist T. F. McIlwraith spent eleven months in the isolated community of Bella Coola, British Columbia, living among the people of the Nuxalk First Nation. During his time there, McIlwraith gained intimate knowledge of the Nuxalk culture and of their struggle to survive in the face of massive depopulation, loss of traditional lands, and the efforts of the Canadian government to ban the potlatch. McIlwraith's resulting ethnography, The Bella Coola Indians (1918), is widely considered the finest published study of a Northwest Coast First Nation.