Marius Barbeau

Marius Barbeau

Charles Marius Barbeau, CC FRSC (March 5, 1883 – February 27, 1969), also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québécois folk culture, for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia (Tsimshian, Gitxsan, and Nisga'a), and other Northwest Coast peoples, and for his unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.

There is evidence that Barbeau did not attend to the priorities that Indigenous people may have presented to him. In his anthropological work among Tsimshian and Huron-Wyandot, for instance, Barbeau was solely looking for “authentic” stories that were without political implications. Informants were often unwilling to work with him for various reasons. It is possible that the "educated informants” who Barbeau told his students not to work with did not trust him to disseminate their stories.

Read more about Marius Barbeau:  Portrait, Selected Works, Bibliography