Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
Born at Tsax̱is (Fort Rupert), Charles James Nowell was the first full blooded Kwakwaka'wakw to act as an interpreter and collector for outsiders. He was married to the daughter of Chief Lageuse of the 'Namgis First Nation. Between 1899 and his death in 1924, Nowell was the assistant to Charles F. Newcombe, an Englishman who supplied ethnographic objects to the Field Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Peabody Museum at Harvard and others. Nowell and Bob Harris, also from Tsaxis, were part of the Kwakiutl and Nootka display at the 1904 St. Louis Universal Exposition.
Places
Legal status
Functions, occupations and activities
Mandates/sources of authority
Internal structures/genealogy
General context
Charles James Nowell's life story is told in first person in "Smoke from Their Fires: The Life of a Kwakiutl Chief" (1941) by Clellan S. Ford. It is one of earliest Indigenous biographies.