Politics & Power Quote by Ellsworth Huntington

Calling the coast of British Columbia “one of the three chief centers” is the kind of tidy ranking that early-20th-century American educators loved: it turns a vast, living set of nations into a map legend. Ellsworth Huntington wrote in an era when “aboriginal America” was a standard classroom category and when scholarship often sorted Indigenous life into “culture areas,” “centers,” and “stages” of development. The intent reads as partly corrective and partly controlling. Corrective, because it insists the Northwest Coast belongs in the top tier of pre-contact complexity: dense populations, sophisticated social hierarchies, monumental art, and intricate economies anchored by salmon and maritime trade. Controlling, because it makes that recognition legible only through a civilization-scoreboard frame.

The phrase “chief centers” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It borrows the prestige of “centers” of Western history (Athens, Rome) while sidestepping sovereignty. “British Columbia” anchors the geography to a colonial jurisdiction, not to Haida, Tlingit, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Coast Salish, or dozens of other polities. “Aboriginal America” lumps distinct peoples into a single premodern container, implying a past tense even when those communities were very much present.

Context matters: Huntington is also known for environmental determinism, a mode of explanation that treats climate and geography as destiny. Read that way, the coast becomes a “center” because the environment “allowed” it, not because Indigenous governance, innovation, and agency made it so. The line flatters Indigenous achievement while keeping the author in the judging seat, awarding significance as a classificatory prize.