Peoples of the coast: The Indians of the Pacific Northwest

by George Woodcock

Hardcover, Ex-library book with library markings, protective mylar, inside is unmarked.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Woodcock was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but moved with his parents to England at an early age, attending Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow and Morley College. Though his family was quite poor, Woodcock had the opportunity to go to Oxford University on a partial scholarship; however, he turned down the chance because he would have had to become a member of the clergy.Instead, he took a job as a clerk at the Great Western Railway and it was there that he first became interested in anarchism (specifically libertarian socialism). He was to remain an anarchist for the rest of his life, writing several books on the subject.

It was during these years that he met several prominent literary figures, including T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley and became good friends with George Orwell despite ideological disagreements. Woodcock later wrote The Crystal Spirit (1966), a critical study of Orwell and his work which won a Governor General's Award.

Woodcock spent World War II working on a farm, as a conscientious objector. At Camp Angel in Oregon, a camp for conscientious objectors, he was a founder of the Untide Press, which sought to bring poetry to the public in an inexpensive but attractive format. Following the war, he returned to Canada, eventually settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1955, he took a post in the English department of the University of British Columbia, where he stayed until the 1970s. Around this time he started to write more prolifically, producing several travel books and collections of poetry, as well as the works on anarchism for which he is best known.

Towards the end of his life, Woodcock became increasingly interested in what he saw as the plight of Tibetans. He travelled to India, studied Buddhism, became friends with the Dalai Lama and established the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society. He and his wife Inge also established Canada India Village Aid, which sponsors self-help projects in rural India. Both organizations exemplify Woodcock's ideal of voluntary cooperation between peoples across national boundaries.

George and Inge also established a program to support professional Canadian writers. The Woodcock Fund, which began in 1989, provides financial assistance to writers in mid-book-project who face an unforeseen financial need that threatens the completion of their book. The Fund is available to writers of fiction, creative non-fiction, plays, and poetry. The Woodcocks helped create an endowment for the program in excess of two million dollars. The Woodcock Fund program is administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and has distributed $887,273 to 180 Canadian writers, as of March 2012.

Reviews

[Lucinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an old volume published in the 1970s that provides an overview to Pacific Northwest First Nations. In general it is written in an engaging and respectful manner, though there are some elements that really show this book was written in different times when scholars still described non-western traditions as 'primitive'. Woodcock also has a somewhat bizarre fascination with the similarities between Asian (i.e. Siberian, and east Asian) shamanism and types of shamanic ritual that existed/ exist amongst different Pacific Northwest Aboriginal culture. He is very hung up on showing continuity between these two traditions, perhaps with an eye to 'proving' the Bering Land Bridge thesis (which is today the commonly held theory of the peopling of the Americas). The logic of this argument, and the proofs Woodcock uses as evidence, is really pretty weak - and the implication that the shamanic rituals of the NW Coast peoples are derivative is pretty insulting, really.
Other than this, I think this book is a pretty good introduction, it provides a good sense of how the peoples of the NW Coast differ in some important ways (think their similarities are often over-emphasized). I would recommend, however, that anyone reading this book find books that discuss NW Coast tradition, culture, history and current issues that are faced, in a more contemporary context. A lot has changed since 1973.