After 19 years teaching anthropology, primarily at the University of Western Ontario, Margaret Seguin was named first chair of the First Nations Studies program at the University of Northern British Columbia. Margaret Seguin developed courses on indigenous languages pertaining to the region and conducted field research on Tsimshian feasting at Hartley Bay, located 80 miles south of Prince Rupert. During her five years of intermittent residence at Hartley Bay over a 15-year period, she married a commercial fisherman from the community and changed her name to Margaret Seguin Anderson. As an authority on Tsimshian potlatching, she edited 13 mostly academic papers from a 1979 conference held at Hartley Bay for The Tsimshian: Images of the Past, Views for the Present (UBC Press, 1984). Contributors included Louis Allaire, Ken Campbell, John Dunn, Carole Farber, Marie-Francoise Guedon, Marjorie Halpin, Andrea Laforet, George MacDonald, James A. McDonald, Jay Miller and Audrey Shane. Ken Campbell provided a brief history of Hartley Bay to open the study. Margaret Seguin Anderson was born on June 12, 1945 in St. Clair, Michigan.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Tsimshian: Images of the Past: Views for the Present

BOOKS:

Seguin, Margaret (editor). The Tsimshian: Images of the Past, Views for the Present (UBC Press, 1984). Using diverse perspectives from archaeology to linguistics, and social anthropology the volume examines Tsimshian culture from the prehistoric period to the recent past.

Seguin, Margaret. Interpretive Contexts for Traditional and Current Coast Tsimshian Feasts (Ottawa: Mercury Series, National Museum, 1985).Describes the feast tradition of the Coast Tsimshian people based on fieldwork in Hartley Bay, B.C. It also includes a discussion of the cultural meaning of the traditional feast complex, a brief summary of feasting patterns over the last fifty years and a description of current feasts.

Anderson, Margaret Seguin & Marjorie Halpin (editors). Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon's 1945 Notebooks (UBC Press, 2000). As the son of a Welshman and a Tsimshian mother, William Beynon was an accomplished ethnographer, documenting the traditions of the Tsimshian, Nisga'a, and Gitksan. For the first time, Beynon's nearly 200 pages of notebooks are published, bringing to light some of the most significant written records of Northwest coast potlatching.

[BCBW 2016] "First Nations" "Anthropology"