Marius Barbeau
Production
Biography
Charles Marius Barbeau, CC FRSC (March 5, 1883 – February 27, 1969), also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québecois folk culture, and for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia (Tsimshian, Gitxsan, and Nisga'a), and other Northwest Coast peoples. He developed unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.
Known For
For Indigenous peoples the totem pole is the symbol of life, portraying the relationship between humans and animals. Fitting into the landscape of British Columbia, these monuments, witnesses to an ancient and powerful culture, look down at us. The group "Indians of British Columbia" singing group provide a powerful soundtrack as Haida and Tsimshian people talk about poles in their communities.
Totems
Ethnologist Marius Barbeau introduces us to indigenous mythology. Masks, dances, songs, and totems are used to give the audience a highly suggestive representation of the "biblical" history (Mr. Barbeau's word) of Indigenous tribes.
Marius Barbeau et l'art totémique
The Indigenous peoples of northern British Columbia still hunt and fish, using a combination of traditional ways and modern equipment and techniques where appropriate. Lumbering and trapping bring them money and goods. Their traditional arts and crafts, however, remain essentially unchanged. This archival film reflects the social and cultural values and beliefs prevalent at the time of production.
People of the Potlatch
This film, reconstructed by the staff of Library and Archives Canada from film shot by James Sibley Watson Jr., documents the activities of Marius Barbeau and Ernest MacMillan among the Nisga’a of the Nass River region of British Columbia. Barbeau, an ethnologist at the National Museum of Canada, and MacMillan, then principal of the Toronto Conservatory of Music, are depicted in their efforts to record ‘with camera and phonograph’ what the film’s first intertitle describes as ‘the vanishing culture, the rites and songs and dances of the Indians along the Canadian Pacific Coast, north of Vancouver.