Lax Kw'alaams

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Lax Kw'alaams, usually called Port Simpson, is a First Nations village community in British Columbia, Canada, not far from the city of Prince Rupert. It is the home of the so-called "Nine Tribes" of the lower Skeena River, which are nine of the fourteen tribes of the Tsimshian nation. The Nine Tribes are: Giluts'aaw, Ginadoiks, Ginaxangiik, Gispaxlo'ots, Gitando, Gitlaan, Gits'iis, Gitwilgyoots, and Gitzaxłaał.

Lax Kw'alaams derives from Laxłgu'alaams, which means "place of the wild roses." It is an ancient camping spot of the Gispaxlo'ots tribe and in 1834 became the site of a Hudson's Bay Company trading post called Fort Simpson, then Port Simpson.

In 1857 an Anglican lay missionary named William Duncan brought Christianity to Lax Kw'alaams, but, feeling that he was competing in vain with the dissipated fort atmosphere for Tsimshian souls, he relocated about 350 of his flock to Metlakatla, at Metlakatla Pass just to the south. There was no further missionary presence at Lax Kw'alaams until the arrival of the Rev. Thomas Crosby of the Methodist church in 1874. The community is still predominantly Methodist (i.e. United Church of Canada).

It was in Port Simpson in 1931 that the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia was founded as the province's first Native-run rights organization. Its four founders included the Tsimshian ethnologist William Beynon.

Duncan estimated the population of Lax Kw'alaams in 1857 as 2,300, living in 140 houses. Approximately 500 died in a smallpox epidemic shortly after Duncan's departure. Today Lax Kw'alaams is the largest of the seven Tsimshian village communities in Canada. Its population in 1983 was 882.

The legal and political interests of the people of Lax Kw'alaams vis à vis the provincial and federal governments are represented by the Allied Tsimshian Tribes Association, which represents the hereditary chiefs of the Nine Tribes.

[edit] Prominent people of Lax Kw'alaams descent

• Frederick Alexcee, artist
• William Beynon, hereditary chief and ethnologist
• Alfred Dudoward, hereditary chief
• Charles Dudoward, artist
• Valerie Dudoward, playwright
• Bill Helin, artist
• Rudy Kelly, journalist, humorist, and playwright
• Paul Legaic, hereditary chief and trader
• Odille Morison, translator and art collector
• Rev. William Henry Pierce, missionary and memoirist
• Terry Starr, artist
• Henry W. Tate, oral historian
• Arthur Wellington Clah, hereditary chief and diarist
• William White, weaver
• Ed E Bryant / Hagwil Gaa , Tsimshian artist / carver

[edit] Bibliography

• Bolt, Clarence (1992) Thomas Crosby and the Tsimshian: Small Shoes for Feet Too Large. Vancouver: UBC Press.

• Garfield, Viola (1939) "Tsimshian Clan and Society." University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 167-340.

• Inglis, Gordon B., et al. (1990) "Tsimshians of British Columbia since 1900." In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 7: Northwest Coast, pp. 285-293. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

• Meilleur, Helen (2001) A Pour of Rain: Stories from a West Coast Fort. Vancouver: Raincoast Books.

• Neylan, Susan (2001) The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.