| For understanding processes of social reproduction on the Northwest Coast, no phenomenon is as central as the assumption of hereditary name-titles. For the Tsimshian of northwestern British Columbia, naming practices tie together different ways actors are or become Tsimshian: names incarnate in individuals to make them their own ancestors; they weave their holders into nested lineage identities; and names also sit at the center of the central Tsimshian social institution, the potlatch, where they are at once the audience, performers, and prizes in highly politicized displays and orchestrations of wealth. Names, embedded in their structures, are vehicles for the making of histories---lineage histories, personal ceremonial histories, even contact histories---by individuals.;Tsimshians explicitly identify social reproduction with the ritual business of assuming hereditary names. Name-taking feasts are the site of the representation and reproduction of agency and identity. At feasts people act sometimes as names, sometimes as name-holders, and sometimes as the embodiments of corporate groups, but in their capacity as names they are the focus of a complex collective act of establishing or reestablishing rank through the ceremonial exchange of goods.;Actions by names, people, and lineages is constructed as willful and open-ended. In ceremonial life as in the oral histories that stand behind and validate it, names and lineages are agents who co-create events in response to political and social realities. Potlatches are real-world, risky events, rather than staged and scripted performances. In the same way the oral histories that describe the origins and careers of names and clans are linear chronicles to which names, through their deeds, are constantly adding new chapters. So understanding how Tsimshian names act in the world involves understanding a Tsimshian sense of the relationship between history and structure. This understanding, of names as immortal and transcendently real agents making history, has been and continues to be a resource for resisting Canadian colonialism. |
