Beynon, a Tsimshian hereditary chief. The anthropologist Wilson Duff (who in the late 1950s was entrusted by Barbeau with organizing the information) has called these three months "one of the most productive field seasons in the history of [North] American anthropology." Barbeau and Beynon had a decades-long collaboration. Barbeau wrote an enormous volume of field notes—which are still mostly unpublished. Duff has characterized this as "the most complete body of information on the social organization of any Indian nation". Barbeau eventually trained Beynon in phonetic transcription, and the Tsimshian chief became an ethnological field worker in his own right. Barbeau and Beynon conducted field work in 1923–1924 with the Kitselas and Kitsumkalum Tsimshians and the Gitksan, who lived along the middle Skeena River. In 1927 and 1929, they had field seasons among the Nisga'a of the Nass River. In 1929, Barbeau removed the Ni'isjoohl memorial pole, hand-carved in the 1860s, from a Nisga'a village. The pole depicts the story of Ts'wawit, a warrior who was next in line to be chief before he was killed in a conflict with a neighbouring nation. The Nisga’a nation says the pole was taken by Barbeau without its consent while members were away from their villages for the annual hunting and food harvesting season, and it was later sold it to the museum in Scotland. In August 2021, a delegation of Nisga'a leaders travelled to Edinburgh to request the transfer of the 11-metre pole back to their territory. The museum said its board of trustees approved the First Nation's request to transfer the pole to its home in northwest B.C. Chris Breward, the director of National Museums Scotland, said in a statement the institution is pleased to reach an agreement allowing the pole to be transferred to its people and the place where its spiritual significance is most keenly understood. Barbeau is a controversial figure as he was criticised for not accurately representing his Indigenous informants. In his anthropological work among the Tsimshian and Huron-Wyandot, for instance, Barbeau was solely looking for what he defined as "authentic" stories that were without political implications. Informants were often unwilling to work with him for various reasons. It is possible that the "educated informants," whom Barbeau advised his students to avoid, did not trust him to disseminate their stories. Academic career In 1942, Barbeau began lecturing at Laval and at the University of Ottawa. In 1945, he