William Beynon

William Beynon (1888–1958) was a hereditary chief of the Tsimshian nation (British Columbia, Canada) and an oral historian; he served as ethnographer, translator, and linguistic consultant to many anthropologists who studied his people.

Beynon was born 1888 in Victoria, British Columbia, son of a Tsimshian woman of Nisga'a ancestry and "Captain Billy" Beynon, a Welsh steamboat captain. Although some sources describe Beynon as being Nisga'a or matrilineally Nisga'a, his ancestry was more complicated. Beynon's maternal line descends from members of the Laxgibuu (Wolf clan) of the Nisga'a nation. But members of his line moved from the Nass River to Port Simpson, British Columbia, the largest Canadian Tsimshian community, to fill a power vacuum when nearly the entirety of the Gitlaan tribe (one of Lax Kw'alaams's "Nine Tribes") migrated in 1887 to Metlakatla, Alaska. Beynon's maternal grandfather was Arthur Wellington Clah, a hereditary Tsimshian chief and a Hudson's Bay Company employee.

William Beynon was the only one of six brothers to be raised fluent in the Tsimshian language. When his mother's only surviving brother, Albert Wellington, died in 1913, William Beynon moved from Victoria to Port Simpson at the age of 25 to assume his uncle's hereditary title, Gwisk'aayn. This was in accordance with Tsimshian rules of matrilineal succession, and he served as hereditary chief of the Gitlaan tribe until his own death.

Beginning in 1914, Beynon was hired as a translator and transcriber by the anthropologist Marius Barbeau, then in the employ of the Geological Survey of Canada. Barbeau and Beynon's series of interviews with Lax Kw'alaams chiefs and elders in 1914-15 has been called by the anthropologist Wilson Duff "one of the most productive field seasons in the history of [North] American anthropology." In 1916 Beynon continued the same type of work, on his own, with the Tsimshian of Kitkatla, B.C. This field trip was marred by a measles epidemic among the people, causing high mortality. In addition, Benyon was shipwrecked for ten days on an uninhabited island with Chief Seeks of the Kitkatla tribe.

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