Share This
Spread the word
Haida Gwaii, British Columbia
Tony Carter
Fisherman. Photo-journalist. The man who went to the edge of the world and came back with the story.
By Gerald
March 2026 · Best Days Ever
There is a particular kind of person who ends up on Haida Gwaii. Not the tourist, not the weekender, not the person who has read about it and wants to tick it off. The person who ends up on Haida Gwaii — really ends up there, stays, comes back, goes again — is someone for whom the rest of the world has become insufficient. Anthony Carter was that person.
Born in Somerset, England, in 1920, Carter came to Canada as a child when his family emigrated to Saskatchewan in 1926. He served with the RCAF during the Second World War, and it was during that service — stationed on the Queen Charlotte Islands, as Haida Gwaii was then known — that he first encountered the landscape and the people who would define the rest of his working life. The islands did something to him. Most people who went there for the war came home. Carter kept going back.
For eighteen years he worked as a fisherman and skipper along the BC coast. He learned the tides, the channels, the weather patterns, the names of the inlets. He learned, slowly and with great patience, the names of the people. And then, in the 1960s, he picked up a camera and started writing things down.
Ancient totem poles in the forest of Haida Gwaii. Photo: Brenda Dineen.
This Is Haida
Carter's most important book, This Is Haida, was first published in 1968 by Agency Press in Vancouver. It was republished by Hancock House in 1971 and again in 1977. The title is not a description. It is a declaration. This is Haida. This is what it looks like. This is who these people are. This is what you need to know.
The photographs in the book — Carter's own, taken over years of visits — document the totem poles, the longhouses, the faces, the ceremonies, the landscape. They are not ethnographic in the clinical sense. They are intimate. They are the photographs of someone who had been given access, who had earned it, and who understood what he was being trusted with.
He followed This Is Haida with three further books in what became known as the Indian Heritage series: Somewhere Between (1966/1967), From History's Locker (1968/1972), and Abundant Rivers (1972), the last of which included material edited by Chief Dan George. Together, the four books form one of the most significant documentary records of First Nations cultures in British Columbia produced by a non-Indigenous author in the twentieth century.
He documented what he had been given access to — and he understood what he was being trusted with.
— Just Gerald, on Anthony Carter
SGang Gwaay — The Village at the Edge of the World
SGang Gwaay — also known as Ninstints — is a small island at the southern tip of Haida Gwaii. It is the site of an ancient Haida village, abandoned in the 1880s after smallpox reduced the population to almost nothing. What remains are the mortuary poles and house posts, standing in the forest, slowly being reclaimed by the moss and the rain. In 1981, UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site. It is one of the most extraordinary places on earth.
Carter photographed SGang Gwaay during his years of work on the islands. The images he made there — the poles leaning at impossible angles, the forest pressing in, the silence — are among the most powerful in his archive. They are photographs of loss, but they are also photographs of survival. The poles are still there. The Haida Nation is still there.
His archive — approximately 4,000 photographs, prints, slides, negatives, and transparencies, along with 9.4 centimetres of textual records — is held at the Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. It is one of the most significant photographic records of First Nations cultures in British Columbia from the 1960s and 1970s.
— Advertisement —
The Four Books
Somewhere Between
1966 / 1967 · Agency Press / AMAC Publishing
Carter's first book, documenting the coastal First Nations cultures of British Columbia. The title captures the liminal quality of his subject — a world between what was and what was becoming.
This Is Haida
1968 / 1971 / 1977 · Agency Press / Hancock House
His masterwork. Three editions over nine years. A photographic declaration of the Haida people, their landscape, and their culture. The book that made his name.
From History's Locker
1968 / 1972 · Self-published
A deeper dive into the historical record — photographs and stories drawn from the communities Carter had spent years building relationships with.
Abundant Rivers
1972 · Hancock House
The final volume in the Indian Heritage series, with material edited by Chief Dan George. A collaboration that reflects the trust Carter had earned over a decade of work.
The Legacy
Anthony Carter died in 1992. He was 71. He had spent the better part of three decades documenting a world that most Canadians had never seen and would never see — the remote archipelago off the northern coast of British Columbia, the ancient villages, the poles, the people. He was not an academic. He was not an anthropologist. He was a fisherman who picked up a camera and understood, with the instinct of someone who had spent eighteen years on the water, what was worth recording.
His work is not without its complications. The relationship between non-Indigenous photographers and Indigenous communities in the mid-twentieth century was not always straightforward, and Carter's books — sympathetic but not academic, personal but not always rigorous — reflect the assumptions of their time. But the archive he left behind, now held at UBC's Museum of Anthropology, is irreplaceable. It is a record of a world at a particular moment, made by someone who cared enough to go there and stay.
The best days of Anthony Carter's life were almost certainly the ones he spent on the water, or in the forest, or standing in front of a pole that had been standing there for a hundred years, trying to make an image that would do it justice. He was, in the end, a man who understood that some things are worth the journey. Haida Gwaii was worth the journey.
— Advertisement —
Sources
- Anthony Carter fonds — Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives, Museum of Anthropology, UBC. atom.moa.ubc.ca
- BC BookWorld — Anthony Carter biography. abcbookworld.com
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — SGang Gwaay. whc.unesco.org
- This Is Haida (Agency Press, 1968; Hancock House, 1971, 1977)
- Somewhere Between (Agency Press, 1966; AMAC Publishing, 1967)
- From History's Locker (Self-published, 1968, 1972)
- Abundant Rivers (Hancock House, 1972)