Indian Tribes of the Northwest Coast: An Affluent Anomaly

The Native American tribes of the northwest coast led more affluent lives than American Indians of any other region north of the Rio Grande River. But despite their wealth, development, and power, their cultures did not enter the broader American imagination through novels and cinema like the Native American tribes of the East, the Plains, and the Southwest. 

Much of this owes to their limited geographical region, which stretched along the Pacific Coast from northern California to southern Alaska. But the primary reason lies in that English-speaking settlers never saw these tribes at their height. Diseases, for which the natives had no immunity, wiped out as much as 90 percent of some of these peoples in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So, the violent conflicts between them and the U.S. government—for which the Plains became famous—never occurred here.

Despite the steep mountain ranges, Indian populations were extremely dense in this region before European exploration. One reason for this is that a warm current pushes in below the Aleutian Islands, producing a moderate climate and intense rainfall. This fair weather and heavy watering combines to produce rich vegetation beneficial to hunter-gatherer societies.[1]

Forest and aquatic game were available in abundance, but, because of the rugged terrain, hunting was not as easy or as profitable as fishing. Feeding large populations through fishing requires the development of technological knowledge—in which the coastal tribes excelled.

Although the environment of the Northwest Coast remained fairly constant from the modern San Francisco Bay area until the southern Alaskan coast, the technologically and culturally-advanced area discussed here did not extend that length. North of the Yakutat Bay in southeastern Alaska, the Indian cultures became less advanced, and the same was true with cultures south of Cape Mendicino, California, which is well north of San Francisco. This refutes the environmental determinist theory that cultures’ advancement or simplicity is solely the result of adaptation to their surroundings. Historical, cultural, and ethnic differences must be taken into account when one searches for an explanation for the difference in technology among the tribes of the Pacific Coast.[2]

The Tribes

To the far northern section of this region lived the Tlingit and Haida tribes, who were a part of the Athabascan family along the southern Alaskan coast and on Queen Charlotte Islands. These were the most advanced of Northwest Coast societies. The posts supporting their wood houses were carved with different forms of art and
eventually evolved into the free standing totem poles for which the tribes of the Northwest coast are so well-known.

The Tsimshian were a part of the Penutian family, who lived just south of the Athabascans, in northern British Columbia.

The central region, which is today Vancouver Island and British Columbia, were inhabited by the
Kwakiutl people who spoke a Wakashan language, the Chinook, the Nootkans, and to a lesser extent the Bella Coola who were a Salishian tribe.

These coastal Salish were related to Indians on the Plateau further east and are believed to be late arrivals along the coast, who misplaced former inhabitants.[3]

The southern groups were the Wakashan and Salish-speaking tribes in today‘s Washington and Oregon.[4]

Diet

Agriculture has traditionally been considered a necessary component of advanced cultures, but the northwestern tribes produced affluent cultures without it, relying mainly on fishing, hunting, and limited gathering for food.

According to historian Harold Driver, no other area of equal size without agriculture anywhere in the world enjoyed as
much material prosperity as did the Northwest Coast.[5] The only crop raised among the tribes of northern California was tobacco. This was used in rituals and for its psychotropic effect. This was the only region of North America where tobacco was grown but not smoked. These tribes chewed it with lime.[6]

It is possible that the Indians of California never developed agriculture because the amount of time irrigation, planting, and harvesting would have taken. It took far less time to collect and process acorns. Furthermore, acorns could be collected and processed by the women, freeing the men to hunt and fish. Although acorns did not grow in abundance in this region the way they did among the tribes in the central and southern parts of California, berries were abundant throughout the entire Northwest Coast.

A lack of starchy foods in the flora was made up for by whale oil and fat. Grilling, boiling, and steaming in pit ovens using wooden bowls and
certain types of cooking baskets were the means that these tribes used to cook their food, and they almost never ate their food raw. [7].

It was the abundance of fish that allowed central California to grow the densest population in all of North America.[8] Because of the abundance of edible fauna and the rich flora, the Northwest Coastal tribes developed the most advanced hunter-gatherer society the world has ever known. They practiced every form of hunting and trapping
practiced elsewhere in North America. But because of the abundance of seafood, hunting was given less attention, although this varied depending on how far inland a tribe was. From May to September, they stored enough food to feed themselves and trade for an entire year, and the rest of the year they devoted to pleasure and
other tasks. The result was the development of a complex, social, class structure in which wealth was highly regarded and caused a person to gain considerable influence in the community.[9, 10]

Manufacturing and Architecture

The northwestern tribes were excellent woodworkers, attaining an advancement in in this craft that surpassed all other native peoples of North America. The red cedar of the coastal region was soft and pliable, making woodworking much easier for these tribes than for others. Hardwoods were used for small items such as crafts that
demanded toughness and durability.

The Indians of this region possessed iron knives and ornaments of copper and knew how to work both. Copper came from deep within the Alaskan mainland, but it is unknown whether the iron was traded from Asia by the Eskimos, who are known to have traded with eastern Asian peoples as early as 1,000 A.D.[11]

Using stone and bone drills, axes, chisels, and knives, Northwest Indians were also able to fell and carve the red and yellow cedars found in their region. They were especially skilled canoe builders. Most of their canoes were dugouts, which they carved from one log. They came in many different shapes and sizes, depending on the purpose of the boat. They used these canoes to fish, travel, and fight. A fishing canoe could be only big enough for two men to fit in, while a war canoe—or their version of a war ship—could fit 50 men and be up to 65 feet in length. These larger canoes were also used to ferry important nobility to feasts, or potlatches as they were called. They also sculpted large, troughs from which they ate, large storage boxes, baskets, and hats.[12] Other wood implements made by these tribes were cradles, drums, sea hunter‘s quivers, and chamber posts.[13]

The most advanced architectural feat of the Northwest Coast tribes was their multi-family houses. These houses were supported by log posts which were filled in with planks, stretching horizontally or vertically. The logs remained in place, but the planks used for walls and roofs were transported to other locations when a village moved. Some houses were built with a one-pitch, shed-like roof, and it is believed these were how the plank houses began. They often added on to these houses after they were built.[14]

Along the Oregonian coast, rectangular houses of cedar planks
between post frames with sloping roofs were built. These tribes also built thatched storehouses or barns.[15] Their houses ranged in size from 30 by 45 feet to as large as 1,000 feet long in which an entire village would live.[16]

A description of a Kwakiutl village, in 1792, revealed a village of about 350 people, containing 12 houses of split log planks, in each of which several families were housed. About 90 dug-out canoes were drawn up to the houses or were being used in the water.[17]

The Nootkas built their houses in such a way that
dismantling them before winter, leaving only the stakes and moving on with the planks, was no difficult task.[18] The possession of whale oil on the upper storage shelves was a source of pride for Nootka individuals whose families had taken part in the whale slaying.[19]

A typical Chinook house was about 60 by 40 feet and housed four families. Two sets of shelves ran along the walls—the upper for storage and the lower for bunks. Each family had its own hearth in the center of the house and closeable smoke holes were built into the roofs. Most villages had one extremely long house, usually up to 300 feet in length for potlatches and other ceremonies. Sometimes the village chief and his family would live in it. Most villages were fortified.[20]

The tribes who lived more towards the interior tended to build their houses underground, with only the roof and gable with a window above ground. This was most likely influenced from the Plateau and Basin pit house cultures.[21]

In addition to being excellent wood workers, the Northwest Coast natives were also expert weavers. Mountain goat wool, tree bark, and bird down were the main tools in this industry. Matting was the primary textile of most of these tribes. Their mats were made for furniture, sails, wallets, mattresses, and tablecloths.[22]

Art 

The Northwest Coast has been identified by one recognizable art style. Pictures of animals, monsters, and humans were carved and painted on houses, canoes, boxes, and especially totem poles, which were set up in front of houses and graveyards as memorials to the dead.[23] All carving and works of art were painted red and black. The images painted were representations of supernatural beings, which had supposedly made themselves known to the ancestors of the artists doing the painting. The art of the northern tribes, such as the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian were distinctive for their emphasis on the object’s face and stylization, whereas, the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and
Salish were more natural and realistic.[24]

Unlike the Wakashan-speaking tribes to the south, who buried their dead in boxes inside caves, the Tsimshian mostly cremated their dead. Poles and sometimes new houses were built as memorials for the important, upper class deceased, with all expenses paid by the family. The Tsimshian were especially renowned for their creative art, which
they painted on necessary objects such as utensils, house posts, and storage boxes. These images usually included animals, supernatural beings, or monsters.[25]

Division of Labor

Ninety-five percent of the labor was performed exclusively by men, which was the most intense division of labor by gender anywhere on the North American continent.

In Northwest Coast societies, ownership of property, such as houses or fishing holes, was different from the modern concept of private property and mainly meant the right to oversee the use of it. [26]

Slaves made up an estimated ten to twenty per cent of the Northwest Coast and were generally treated poorly by their owners.[27] Part of the value set on slaves involved what kind of labor skills they had. Wealth, such as lands and houses, was the collective property of a family or clan, even though it was spoken of often as belonging to the individual who acquired them. Wealth was accumulated to provoke envy in outsiders and pride in members of one‘s own family and clan or allies.

The ability to dispose of or destroy wealth was considered a luxury of which one was proud. This resulted in many slaves being murdered as masters wished to show off to others that they were wealthy enough to throw away the life of a slave.[28] Slavery was highly shameful for those captured and their people, and if they belonged to a nearby tribe, that tribe usually offered vast amounts of wealth to buy them back.[29]

The Potlatch

Potlatches were huge feasts, often celebrating the bequeathing of a title onto someone or as an announcement of one‘s claim to a title or rank. In it, the host would give lavish gifts to his guests to prove his worth through his wealth. Guests would extol the abilities of the subject of the celebration and both the subject, who was often the host, and the guests would brag on their ancestors and admonish the young men to emulate their virtues.

Dances and performances were common features of these feasts.[30] Wrestling, tug-of-war, weightlifting, and foot races were common forms of competition among the men, while gambling and mythtelling were forms of amusement participated in by both men and women.[31]

After the potlatch, one’s neighbors would give him the respect due his new title or position. Many of these celebrations were attended by hundreds of people, some of them travelling for days to arrive.[32] The more titles a tribe had, the more potlatches its people attended. For instance, among the 13 divisions of the Kwakiutl, there were 658 titles, some of which were “creating trouble all around,” “throwing away property,” “about whose property people talk,” and even “getting too great.”[33]

Government and Marriage

The people of the Northwest Coast formed a very class-conscious society. Lineages were highly respected and arranged marriages were performed among the aristocracy from which the chiefs came, so as not to pollute noble blood.[34]

In most Northwest Coast nations, governance was based on wealth, making the richest man in a tribe or village its ruler.

The exception to this was the tribes living further to the south in this region: the Yurok, Karok, Hupa, Klamoth, and Madoc. These tribes lived in virtual anarchy. They developed a more organized and observed pattern of solving crimes with blood money, only because they spent a good deal of their time in feuds. Private property was jealously guarded and adultery was a serious
offense, because it was viewed as a serious violation of property rights.

Although, their wealth paled in comparison to their coastal neighbors farther north, they were extremely obsessed with riches and spent much of their leisure thinking about and praying for riches.[35]

Brides were paid dearly for, and it was common for girls to be confined in separate rooms for long periods of time before marriage so that their fair skin would attract a higher price and a marriage with a higher-ranking young man on the social ladder.[36] The more possessions the family of a man gave to his future bride’s family as a
dowry, the more his family could expect to receive from her relatives at a later potlatch.[37]

Clothing

In clothing, the Northwest Coast tribes made extensive use of furs and pelts and had an abundance of rain clothes, particularly protective hats and waterproof ponchos of plant materials. During warm weather, men usually went naked except for ornaments and hats, while women always at least wore skirts, except in rare ceremonial
circumstances.

Tattooing, body piercing, and the wearing of ornaments were common among both genders [38] Most of the coastal tribes were aware of buckskin and moccasins and owned them through trade, but these were mainly used by the more northern tribes in cold weather.[39]

The proximity of the northwestern, coastal tribes to Asia and the islands of the Pacific produced an obvious, shared culture. There have been many examples of shipwrecked Asian ships off the Northwest Coast. Although the major Asian powers are not known to have established any regular trade, certain cultural similarities have been found in tattooing, hat styles, wooden armor, and the Indians familiarity with iron.[40]

Law and Warfare

Among all the Northwest Coast tribes, ruling was based on wealth and heredity. It was common for one family to own an entire village, but this only meant that they—and more specifically—whoever the head of that family was at the time were the overseers of that village. The larger the village, the more power and influence that family and that family‘s head had in the tribe. Multiple villages were united in tribelets, and the size of these affected the power and influence of its main family among that tribe.[41]

Except for brief, military alliances, local clans or families were governed internally and autonomously and dispensed their own justice. If a member of one clan murdered someone of another, the offended clan would demand the life of someone of equal social standing in order to restore peace. This arrangement was accepted willingly sometimes, but other times, inter-tribal warfare, or the payment of blood money, solved the issue.

Warfare occurred often and was usually fought over land rights. Extermination or total enslavement were generally the goals in warfare, because leaving part of the enemy alive and free could mean having to fight the same tribe again in the future. Shortly before the arrival of Europeans, an Eskimo group on an island, in the Gulf of Alaska, was exterminated by an alliance of other tribes in the region.[42]

Northern tribes wore wooden helmets, and weapons were made for close combat. When an enemy had been slaughtered, their homes were looted and burned, and their heads displayed on poles as trophies in front of the victors’ villages.[43]

Although most of these tribes possessed large war canoes, they were mostly for transportation, pursuit, and retreat, and rarely did engagements happen at sea. If a tribe could not defend itself through conventional warfare, it would split into various groups, head for the forest and form a subsistence lifestyle, mixed with guerrilla warfare.

The Xaihais were one such tribe that was nearly exterminated and forced to hide in remote areas. They had to resort to eating raw meat for fear of revealing their location through fires. They would likely have been exterminated by neighboring tribes after their hunting and fishing land if it had not been for the Pax Britannica that put an end to tribal warfare.[44]

Sometimes, an endangered tribe would join a neighboring tribe. A few decades before European contact, some Tlingit groups joined the Tsimshian, who gave them tracts of land to live in. These Tlingit adopted the language of their new neighbors and together extinguished an Athabascan-speaking Tahltan tribe through annihilation and slavery.[45]

Trade and Slavery

Trade with groups from other geographic regions was fairly limited unless a tribe had access to a river that led beyond the mountains. The Dalles served as the trade hub for these tribes. It lay along the Columbia River, at a boiling falls and rapids that was not a vertical drop, but a slow series of rapids that
made it difficult for fish, because when salmon traveled, it forced them into shallow pools near the banks. Tribes from hundreds of miles to the east would make the trip to barter for dried salmon. It was mainly the result of this trade that Lewis and Clark on their expedition used a Shoshone woman as an interpreter on their quest to find the river that they had heard emptied into the Pacific.[46]

The Chinook were the dominant tribe along the Oregon and Washington coast, mainly because they controlled the mouth of the Columbia River where most of the trade flowed outward. As a result, their language became the basis of the common language of the region. This came to be known as Chinook Jargon and eventually borrowed aspects of Nootka, English, and French.[47]

The Nootkans produced dentalium shells, which was the monetary unit of the Northwest Coast. The only other tribe known to gather the shells was the Southern Kwakiutl, and they frequently intermarried with the Nootka.[48] The gathering of dentalium shells and their processing was a slow, tedious process, which ensured it a stable
value.[49]

The Nootkans‘ superb boat-building and their near monopoly on the production of currency caused their language to influence the Chinook jargon. This ensured them a high standard of living and high fertility. They were among the most numerous of the Northwestern tribes, numbering around 10,000 at the end of the 18th century.[50]

The Klamoth and Madoc tribes were on the border region between the Northwest and Plateau cultures. They lived in Earthcovered pithouses in winter and wigwams in summer like the Plateau tribes.[51] Although these tribes were not as affluent as the coastal tribes, they put more emphasis on the accumulation of wealth than did the Plateau tribes, and personal wealth determined their leaders.

The Klamoth and Madoc frequently raided a
neighboring tribe for slaves, keeping however many they needed and selling others at the Dalles. This continued until 1869, even after slavery had been outlawed in the U.S. As in most slave societies, the captives were denigrated and given much poorer quarters than the masters, and female captives were regularly treated as concubines.[52]

 ….

The Northwestern Indian tribes differed greatly from the tribes in the rest of North America. By comparison, the Plateau and Rocky Mountain tribes were quite primitive. Rather than live in tepees, wigwams, or pits, Northwest Coast peoples took advantage of the abundance of natural resources they had access to and built large, comfortable houses of wood planks. They also built sophisticated totem poles, canoes, and elaborate crafts.

The wealth, prosperity, and leisure experienced by these people—isolated from the eastern part of the continent by the Great Divide—made their advanced existence all the more intriguing. But perhaps the greatest anomaly of the Northwest Coast Indians is the fact they reached this
level of wealth as hunter-gatherer societies.[53]

Originally published in the North Alabama Historical Review

Notes

1. Alice Beck Kehoe, North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account,
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981), 1-2.

2. Kehoe, North American Indians, 7-8.

3.  Phillip Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, (1965: Chandler Publishing
Company, San Francisco, CA), 107.

4. Kehoe, North American Indians, 402-403.

5.  Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America, (1961: The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago), 529.

6. Driver, Indians of North America, 90.

7. Driver, Indians of North America, 20. 

8. Kehoe, North American Indians, 377-378

9. Kehoe, North American Indians, 290. 

10. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 15.

11. Kehoe, North American Indians, 427.

12.  James A. Maxwell, America’s Fascinating Indian Heritage, (New York: Reader‘s Digest, 1990), 298.

13. Maxwell, America’s Fascinating Indian Heritage, 31.

14. Driver, Indians of North America, 109-110.

15. Kehoe, North American Indians, 417.

16. Kehoe, North American Indians, 301.

17. Andrey Zlobin, “Car Market of Russia,‖ Forbes,” June 20, 2012,
http://www.forbes.ru/sobytiya/rynki/83283-avtorynok-rossii-kogda-sokratitsyaotstavanie-ot-ssha.

18. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 144-145.

19. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 149.

20. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 420.

21. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 26-27.

22. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 34-37.

23. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 22.

24. Driver, Indians of North America, 189-191.

25. Driver, Indians of North America, 126-131.

26. Driver, Indians of North America, 531-533.

27. Driver, Indians of North America, 531-533.

28. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 50-52.

29. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 50-52.

30. Kehoe, North American Indians, 410.

31. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 67-68.

32. Maxwell, America’s Fascinating Indian Heritage, 290.

33. Driver, Indians of North America, 226.

34. Kehoe, North American Indians, 408-409.

35. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 177-179.

36. Driver, Indians of North America, 267.

37. Driver, Indians of North America, 530.

38. Driver, Indians of North America, 138.

39. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 41.

40. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 428.

41. Driver, Indians of North America, 333.

42. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 70-76.

43. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 79.

44. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 80-82.

45. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 105.

46. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 169.

47. Kehoe, North American Indians, 419.

48. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 151.

49. Kehoe, North American Indians, 425.

50. Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast, 144-145.

51. Kehoe, North American Indians, 416.

52. Kehoe, North American Indians, 416.

53. Driver, Indians of North America, 529