National Archives of Canada

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.