Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) begins to focus on the Northwest Coastal Indigenous peoples after working with Baffin Island Inuit. Intrigued by a Nuxalk mask, Boas visits Newitti village in Kwakwaka’wakw territory and begins collecting Raven stories. Boas begins his anthropological work on the Northwest Coast believing Indigenous peoples are a vanishing race and that their cultural data should be collected for scientific value.

Hatoum, Rainer. "“The First Real Indians That I Have Seen”: Franz Boas and the Disentanglement of the Entangled." Ab-Original 2, no. 2 (2018): 157-84. Accessed March 14, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/aboriginal.2.2.0157.

Wilner, Isaiah Lorado. "Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness." In Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, by Audra Simpson, edited by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, (New Haven, Conneticut: Yale University Press, 2018), 3-41.