Assembling evidence from various ethnographies, To Impersonate the Supernatural - Music, Ceremony and Culture of the Bella Bella shows that the Heiltsuk may properly be considered to have been the most significant musical and ceremonial group on the Northwest Coast during the 19th Century. Destructive changes to coastal lifeways in the first half of the 19th century sparked the widespread adoption of the hámáca dance complex from its origins in the Bella Bella? Rivers Inlet area. Kolstee's exploration of the winter dancing societies of Northwest Coast tribes offers a rare look at the poorly understood history of the tribes of the area. Chapters devoted to music analysis examine the characteristics that musically encode song types of the region, as well as the separations between ceremonial and nonceremonial songs. They also reveal that the ceremonial song repertoire of the Bella Bella Heiltsuk is essentially made up of four distinct musical styles and that four-part organization is ubiquitous in musical patterning.

Anton Frederick Kolstee's profile page

Anton Kolstee was born in 1949. He earned his Masters in Ethnomusicology in 1974 from the University of British Columbia studying the music of the Bella Coola and was awarded the Prize for Musicology. A songbook of the Bella Coola was published using much of his transcriptions. In 1977, he was granted a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship and obtained his PhD from the University of Illinois with his study of the music and ceremony of the Bella Bella/ Heiltsuk Nation. During this period, he taught music at the Bella Bella Community School in 1978-1979. Kolstee taught Native Studies at Carson Graham Secondary School in North Vancouver and was a sessional lecturer in Ethnomusicology at UBC. He has published numerous articles, including "A New Strategy for Native Indian Music Pedagogy" and "Teaching Along Shamanic Lines." He also provided a music entry for the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada.