At Victoria the preferred course for the new intake of Indians was forestry studies. Forestry was a major industry of British Columbia, and one well suited to future native management. At the muscle end of the business, large numbers of Indians were engaged in it already.
Porter became engaged in it. The first required subject was botany, which he liked well enough. But after a few weeks he discovered biology, and decided to specialise in it. Switching studies so early was discouraged, but care was being taken not to disaffect the Indian students and his application was reluctantly approved. This was when his career took off. He learned with exceptional rapidity. He learned in all directions.
It took him no time to find out that although the meeting with Brother Eustace might have been an act of God, the reason for the delight was probably an Act of the US government.
The US government, in a settlement of claims with the Indians of Alaska, was planning a cash payment of half a billion dollars, plus a further half billion in royalties, plus 15 per cent of the territory of Alaska. This bounty was to be administered through Indian corporations.
The Canadian government, with similar problems ahead, was thinking on different lines. Rather than separate the Indians, and pay them, it was better to integrate them. Full partnership in the common weal was surely of higher value than dollars, or royalties, or title deeds to portions of Canada. To do the job successfully it was necessary to select the brainiest and immerse them in the value.
Porter appreciated the value, and knew why he was getting it, but for the time being he kept his head down in biology. Before he was twenty he took a first-class degree in it, and as the outstanding student of his year was urged to go at once for his doctorate.
Instead he dropped the subject and immediately began studying another, 2000 miles away, at McGill.
Although he was wayward, this was not a wayward action. There were good reasons for his choice. McGill was in Quebec, at the other side of the continent, but it had old connections with Victoria, which had indeed started life as a far-western affiliate of the older university.
But the main reason was Quebec itself, and Montreal. Ethnic issues were high on the agenda there — French separatism the principal one but with Indian questions also to the fore. These were the questions he planned to study.
In his last year at Victoria he had started numbering Canadian−Indian claims against the government. There were 550 of them, few properly documented, all poorly prepared. In the absence of a written language, oral traditions had to be relied on, and the Department of Indian Affairs did not rely on them.
Porter addressed himself to this. He broke the problem into two. In the first part he aimed to demonstrate the reliability of tribal records, and in the second to get the ones relating to claims admitted as evidence.
He began reading anthropology. He not only read it but famously added to it. (His Amended Syllabary of Tsimshean, unique as an undergraduate publication, won him a gold medal.)
‘Syllabaries’, in the absence of any developed writing among the Indians, had been recorded for several of the languages. These sound-dusters had been taken down by anthropologists, none of them Indian. Porter was the first Indian at the work, and he soon found that many of his predecessors had had a tin ear. The languages were exceedingly complex, and a misheard click or vowel frequently altered, or even reversed, the meaning of whole passages.
He followed up with other publications, and learned more languages — all for his main work: a comparative study of tribal legends, designed to show their line-by-line similarities. For as it happened there were many similarities.
As a child it had not struck him as strange that the stories of the Gitksan, the Nass and the Tsimshean should be so similar. They were grown-up stories that everyone knew; why shouldn’t they be similar? But now it seemed strange. These tribes were almost unintelligible to each other. Yet their stories, which took hours or even days to recite, were identical almost to the smallest detail. Without writing, by word of mouth, they had been faultlessly transmitted from generation to generation over vast periods of time.
All this was useful evidence for the first part of his task, and he published it to acclaim. And before he was twenty-three had taken a First in anthropology also.
His energy at the time was prodigious, and his waywardness a byword. His supervisors found him impossible to control. In this period he became strongly politicised, and he also contracted a marriage — a sadly unfortunate one. And his movements were erratic. Before publication of his Comparisons he suddenly took off to Russia for seven months — this the result of a letter from an institute there commending his earlier work and enclosing syllabaries of some native Siberian languages. The translations struck him as unreliable and he set out to learn the languages himself.
He returned to take his First, however, and, as not only a prize student but now Canada’s prize Indian, was offered a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He accepted at once, again for reasons of his own. (His young wife was now, tragically, dead, and he was on his own again.) More than ever he was immersed in his work — and a difficulty had surfaced in it.
Proving that tribal story-tellers had good memories was not enough. What they remembered were stories. In official eyes the ‘claims’ were also stories. The repetition of them, in however much detail, did not make them true. What was needed was other evidence, written evidence. A single piece of it that could match, detail for detail, the oral version of the Indians would not only authenticate that version but help to validate all the others he had researched. At the least, it could take matters out of the Department of Indian Affairs and into the courtroom.
The evidence he particularly wanted related to treaties made between the Indians and the British in the years 1876, 1877 and 1889. In the pow-wows preceding them, various agreements had been arrived at.
‘These agreements’, as a framed inscription in his room reminded him, ‘remain in the memories of our people, but the government is wilfully ignorant of them.’ The inscription was a copy of a mournful resolution by a convention of chiefs. ‘Yet the obligations were historic and legal ones: solemn agreements. Indian lands were exchanged for the promises of the commissioners representing Queen Victoria.’
Unfortunately the commissioners’ promises did not appear in the published treaties although the details relating to land had been quite exact. When the British later gave up direct rule in Canada no promises turned up in the papers left behind. But they would be in some papers, Porter reasoned. Even to experienced colonial negotiators the circumstances of a powwow were exotic enough to merit record — in notes, reminiscences, letters perhaps, which could still be mouldering away somewhere in England. The question was, where? Oxford was a likely place to start finding out.
He had been in the town three months when the letter arrived from Canada. His old professor of biology there wrote to say that he was coming to Oxford for a conference on 29 June, and looked forward to seeing Porter. Which on 30 June he did.
The event was a reception for the visiting scientists, and his professor had taken him along as a guest. ‘After all,’ as he told him, ‘you were one of us yourself, before you fell into error.’ And he had introduced him to other biologists.
Porter, at the time, was an aloof disdainful figure of twenty-three. His head seemed over-large, and his hair over-long. He wore it cut in a fringe over his eyes with the rest hanging straight and black like a helmet all around. At any gathering he would have been distinctive, and even at this international one he stood out. Yet it was not one of the welcoming hosts but one of the receptive guests who identified him first.