George Hunt

Who was George Hunt?

George Hunt was a Tlingit consultant to the anthropologist Franz Boas who through his contributions is considered a linguist and ethnologist in his own right. He was Tlingit by birth but through marriage and adoption became an expert on the traditions of the Kwakwaka'wakw people of coastal British Columbia.

He was born in 1854 at Fort Rupert, British Columbia, the second of eleven children of Robert Hunt, a Hudson's Bay Company fur trader from Dorset, England, and Mary Ebbetts, a member of the Raven moiety of the Taantakwáan tribe of the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska. Robert and Mary had been married at the original Fort Simpson, on the Nass River in northwestern B.C.

Hunt's parents' marriage was the occasion of the introduction of many Tlingit hereditary privileges and artistic motifs into Kwakwaka'wakw society.

In the early 1880s Hunt served as boatman, guide, and interpreter for Adrian Jacobsen of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.

Hunt's collaboration with Boas began in 1886 when Boas first visited the Kwakwaka'wakw. In 1893, Boas brought Hunt to the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and taught him how to write the Kwak'wala language. He carved a totem pole, Kwanusila, that was on display in a Chicago park for many decades until it had to be replaced; the carver of the replacement was his descendant Tony Hunt. Hunt was also instrumental in the purchase of the Yuquot Whalers' Shrine in 1904, an object that has since been of some controversy in recent decades.