The Making of the Heiltsuk Working Class: Methodism, Time Discipline, and Capitalist Subjectivities

Abstract

The Heiltsuk,1 a First Nation group in British Columbia, first encountered Europeans around the beginning of the 19th century. By the 1830s, they were thoroughly engaged in the trans-Pacific fur trade and the burgeoning commercial economy of the region. The fur trade generated considerable wealth for Heiltsuk traders, who maintained autonomy as providers of an important commodity. However, by the 1880s, many Heiltsuk were employed as wage-laborers, working at a nearby cannery, or as part of logging or commercial fishing crews. This shift to a wage-labor economy was accompanied by ideological shifts, a product of formal education and, in particular, the teachings of Methodist missionaries. Using E.P. Thompson’s study of the English working class in the early Industrial Revolution, and his concept of ‘time discipline,’ these ideological transformations are viewed as components of capitalist subjectivities.