William Beynon

Who was William Beynon?

William Beynon was a hereditary chief from the Tsimshian nation and an oral historian who served as ethnographer, translator, and linguistic consultant to many anthropologists.

Beynon was born 1888 in Victoria, British Columbia, son of a Welsh steamer-captain and a Tsimshian woman of Nisga'a ancestry. Although some sources describe Beynon as being himself Nisga'a or as being matrilineally Nisga'a, the truth is slightly more complicated. Beynon's maternal line leads back to members of the Laxgibuu of the Nisga'a nation, but members of his line had been moved from the Nass River to Port Simpson, British Columbia, the largest Canadian Tsimshian community, to fill a power vacuum there when nearly the entirety of the Gitlaan tribe migrated to Metlakatla, Alaska, in 1887.

Beynon's maternal grandfather was the Tsimshian chief and Hudson's Bay Company employee Arthur Wellington Clah. Beynon was the only one of six brothers raised fluent in the Tsimshian language. When Mrs. Beynon's only surviving brother, Albert Wellington, died in 1913, William moved to Port Simpson to assume his uncle's hereditary title, Gwisk'aayn, in accordance with Tsimshian rules of matrilineal succession, making him chief of the Gitlaan tribe until his death.