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advocate of forced assimilation. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” he wrote. “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” (Scott was also a poet and writer; his literary reputation has been overshadowed by his role in implementing Indian residential schools.)
    Potlatches kept the culture alive. Scott wanted them stopped.
    And if the courts wouldn’t do it, he had another plan. Scott persuaded the government to make the crimes summary offences. That meant judges no longer heard the cases. Indian agents could hear the evidence as justices of the peace and render verdicts. They worked for Scott. They knew what their masters wanted.
    Cranmer’s local adversary was William Halliday, the newly appointed Indian agent for Alert Bay, who shared Scott’s zeal for ending the potlatch culture.
    Cranmer was thirty-three, a handsome and respected leader. He knew the risks and made plans to avoid Halliday and the police. His people had been induced to move from their traditional village on the Nimpkish River to Alert Bay, then a growing town on northern Vancouver Island.
    It wasn’t safe to hold a potlatch there, with so many watching white eyes. Cranmer planned to hold the ceremony on Village Island, near Knight Inlet, far from the church and the government agents and the police.
    The potlatch was a great success. Representatives from at least five bands made their way to Village Island, carryingtheir potlatch regalia and sacred items. The gifts were lavish, part of a tradition of competitive sharing that saw each host and clan strive to outdo the next. Guests received gas-powered boats, pool tables, sewing machines, gramophones, cash, and blankets.
    â€œThe potlatch went on for five or six days,” Dan Cranmer’s son Bill told the Victoria Times Colonist in 2005. “It was apparently one of the biggest potlatches ever held in our area.”
    Too big, perhaps. Word had reached the authorities.
    Halliday and Sgt. Donald Angerman of the British Columbia Police travelled across the water to Village Island and found the potlatch in full swing. They immediately started arresting participants.
    Forty-five people were charged and brought before Halliday as justice of the peace. Angerman was the prosecutor.
    There they were offered a choice. Be sent to Oakalla Prison for two to four months.
    Or give up the masks and robes and whistles and art that were part of their culture and essential to celebrating the potlatch. Not just their own items. To avoid jail for their members, the bands would have to surrender all those things that linked the people to their past, and let them share their history.
    Twenty-two people said yes. Oakalla was a fearsome place for Natives who had never left the coast. The struggle to keep the old ways alive had become, for many, just too hard.
    The rest—men and women—were led away in front of crying relatives to be locked up in the jail outside Vancouver, clearing trees, working the prison farm, sleeping on straw mattresses in crowded cells.
    â€œGreat Potlatch May Be Last Of Its Kind,” said the headline in the British Colonist , a Victoria newspaper: “Chief Dan Cranmer’s Festival Somewhat Marred By Interference Of Authorities.”
    Soon Natives began arriving in Alert Bay, handing over masks and robes and copper engravings and rattles, the potlatch art and regalia handed down within the tribe.
    They gave up hundreds of pieces of art and craft, the links to their past and their culture. The carved masks and robesworn by dancers were spectacular, eagles and thunderbirds and spirits. They were beautiful, and valuable.
    Halliday displayed all the seized goods on benches in the Alert Bay Anglican Parish Hall and charged admission for people who wanted to see them. A keen amateur photographer, he and others