Constance Cox (interpreter)

Constance Cox (c. 1881–1963) was a Canadian schoolteacher of part Tlingit ancestry who lived and taught with the Gitksan First Nation in northwestern British Columbia and served as interpreter for several anthropologists.

Her father, Thomas Hankin, sponsored a $3,000 (Cdn) potlatch feast to present the infant Constance to the large population of Gitksans who had come to live at Hazelton.

Barbeau eventually began to rely more on the Tsimshian chief William Beynon's services as interpreter in his Gitksan work.

In 1947, Cox met Toronto Star reporter Dorothy Livesay on the street in Prince George, and admitted that she was doing penance for "robbing" Canada for the Field Museum in Chicago: "I collected thousands of dollars worth of Indian relics, pioneer equipment, photographs, letters.

She has also been active with the Canadian Folk Society... and last year had the signal honor of being made a member of the Native Brotherhood.

She is also honorary member of the Prince George Gun Club, to whom she presented a gun 140 years old, which her grandfather had used in the Crimean War...."[2] Cox also wrote articles for the paper on old-timers, and she had a radio series on CBC titled "Little Moccasin Trails" starting in June 1950: these were stories in 15-minute segments that she learned from the elders of the tribe in the Indian language, and she wrote them "hoping to preserve another part of the rapidly disappearing heritage of the Indians.

Cox's collection was displayed in a log cabin museum, set up on the auditorium floor of the Civic Centre in December 1958.

[6] Later in 1958, Cox served as interpreter when the anthropologists Wilson Duff and Michael Kew brokered an agreement with the nearby Gitksan community of Kitwancool (a.k.a.

Gitanyow), arranging for some of the village's totem poles to be removed to the Royal British Columbia Museum for preservation.