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An immersive opening vignette shows how cedar shapes daily life, from birth and fishing to housing, tools, and ceremony. It establishes cedar as the essential material of Northwest Coast cultures.
In a small clearing in the forest, a young woman is in labor.Two women companions urge her to pull hard on the cedar bark rope tied to a nearby tree.The baby, born onto a newly made cedar bark mat, cries its arrival into the Northwest Coast world.Its cradle of firmly woven cedar root with a mattress and covering of soft shredded cedar bark is ready.But first, the baby must remain on the cedar mat until its umbilical cord withers.The young woman's husband and his uncle are on the sea in a canoe carved from a single red cedar log and are using paddles made from lengths of knot-free yellow cedar.When they reach the fishing ground that belongs to their family, the men set out a net of cedar bark twine weighted along one edge by stones lashed to it with strong flexible cedar withes.
Cedar wood floats support the net's upper edge.Wearing a cedar bark hat, cape, and skirt to protect her from the rain and the cold, the baby's grandmother digs into the pebbly sand of the beach at low tide to collect clams.She loads them into a basket of cedar withe and root, adjusts the broad cedar bark tumpline across her forehead, and returns home along the beach.The embers in the center of the big cedar plank house leap into flame as the clam gatherer's niece adds more wood.Smoke billows past the cedar rack above where small split fish are hung to cure.It curls its way past the great cedar beams and rises out through the opening between the long cedar roof planks.The young girl takes red-hot rocks from the fire with long tongs, dips them into a small cedar box of water to rinse off the ashes, then places the rocks into a cedar wood cooking box to boil water for
the clams her aunt has gathered.Outside the house stands a tall carved cedar memorial pole bearing the prestigious crests of her family lineage.It had been raised with long strong cedar withe ropes and validated with great ceremony.The house chief and noblemen had taken out their ceremonial regalia from large storage chests of cedar wood.Dancers had worn cedar wood masks adorned with cascades of soft shredded cedar bark and performed in front of screens made from cedar planks.Guests had been served quantities of food from huge cedar wood bowls and dishes, wiping their hands clean on soft shredded cedar bark.A young slave woman coils two fresh diapers from soft shredded cedar bark and goes to tend a crying baby.While the child's father prepares long slender cedar withes to lash a stone hammer head to its shaft.When the hammer is finished, he uses it to pound wedges into a cedar log and split off a plank for a tackle box to fit into the bow of his canoe.
He will use the other withes he prepared to sew the corner of the box once he bends the plank into shape.In a year or more, he will make a cedar wood cradle in a similar fashion for his sister's new baby when it grows too big for the woven cedar root cradle.He smiles at the reassuring cries of the newborn infant resounding through the forest.
The speaker explains that the passage is an introduction to the Pacific Northwest Coast as a distinct indigenous culture area. He outlines the video’s purpose, scope, and approach to modern cultural zones.
That was an excerpt from Hilary Stewart's book Cedar, where she documents the central role of the cedar tree in the lives of the Pacific Northwest Coast indigenous peoples and the truly absurd amount of uses they found for thistree.This video is not about cedar specifically, but I love this passage because it's such a succinct and immersive introduction to the beautiful and unique culture zone that is the Pacific Northwest Coast.This video is the start of what will be an ongoing series on this channel, exploring the major culture areas of indigenous American peoples.Now, every nation and community has their own distinct culture and history, and that fact will certainly never be overlooked on this channel.But there are shared cultural trends, beliefs, practices, and institutions that hold across whole regions, and that's what we'll begin exploring today.As a side note, we'll be analyzing culture zones as they hold in their modern forms.
Cultures change over time, and it's quite possible that a given region had a very different culture several thousand years ago than today.So, we'll be focusing on the most recent iterations as held by modern indigenous peoples.We'll describe them as they stood immediately prior to colonization and follow any changes that occurred between colonization and the present day.For this video, as will certainly be the case in all the others, I am going to try to be as detailed as possible while keeping the video within semi-reasonable length.There's a lot that could be said that I'm going to have to cut.So, I highly encourage interested viewers who want to learn more to check out my sources in the description.Now, without further ado, let's get started.
This section describes the region’s mountains, rainfall, temperate rainforest, and extraordinary ecological productivity. It also introduces natural copper and its role as a prestige material.
To a certain extent, every culture is defined by its geography, and that certainly holds true in the Northwest Coast.To understand Northwest coastal cultures and what makes them so unique, we need to understand the terrain.Along the Pacific edge of North America, various mountain ranges rise just inland of the coast, from the Wrangell-St.Elias and Chugach ranges in southern Alaska to the Coast Ranges of British Columbia, the Cascades of Washington and Oregon, and the Coast Ranges of Oregon and California.They form a nearly continuous wall of mountains about 2,000 mi long, 3,200 km, that leaves a narrow strip of land between them and the coast that is on average only about 100 mi wide, 160 km.For anyone who passed middle school science, this should look like a recipe for trapping moisture on the coast side of the mountains, and you would be exactly right.
In fact, so much moisture gets trapped in this thin strip of land that the area is a temperate rainforest, by some definitions the largest temperate rainforest in the world, receiving anywhere from 7 to 14 ft of annual precipitation.That's 2.1 to 4.3 m.Nowhere else in North America outside the tropics gets this much precipitation.More than any other factor, abundance defines the region.The high rainfall supports forests that are lush, dense, and teeming with wildlife and trees that are huge.Three of the 10 tallest tree species in the world and four of the 10 largest are found in this rainforest alone.The waterways team with life year-round, but especially during the annual salmon spawning when millions of salmon return to their birthplaces to reproduce.All of this abundance supported a large human population.The Northwest Coast was the second most densely populated region in North America and one of the most densely populated non-agricultural regions in the world, supporting a pre-contact population of about 200,000.
Communities could range in size from small villages of less than 50 to a full-blown town of well over 1,000.The habitable zone along this coastline isn't just surrounded by mountains, in most places it's completely overrun with them, a fact that made land travel very difficult.This, combined with a high population, served to make the region a hotbed of diversity.Historically, over 40 languages were spoken here from over a dozen language families, making it linguistically the second most diverse area in North America behind only California.It's also only California that surpasses the Northwest Coast in population density.Many of these families are very distinct from one another, sharing few observable traits or relations between them, and there are even few language isolates like Haida that are completely unrelated to their neighbors.When you also consider that the coast is dotted with thousands of islands and littered with countless inlets, bays, and rivers, it probably will come as no surprise that water travel was the preeminent form of transportation.
The interplay of the mountains and the water is such an important component of this region's geography that it affects the way Northwest Coast languages talk about direction.Most, if not all of the region's languages, don't have words for the cardinal directions of north, east, south, and west.That paradigm was not the important one.Rather, these languages couch direction in relation to the landscape, describing whether a person is moving towards, along, or away from a body of water or towards, along, or away from the mountains.The Northwest Coast is one of the few places in North America, indeed in the world, where you can find natural copper.This is copper ore so pure that it can be worked without smelting.Consequently, it was worked by the local inhabitants into knives, spear points, and artistic items.It could be a little hard to come by, though, so it was most commonly held as an item of wealth and status by elites rather than being an item of common use.
This purpose is seen in the practice of fashioning decorative shield-shaped plates known by anthropologists simply as coppers.We'll talk more about pre-contact indigenous metallurgy in a separate video.
The speaker explains why Northwest Coast peoples are classified as complex hunter-gatherers rather than simple foragers. He defines the traditional hunter-gatherer model and contrasts it with the region’s social and economic complexity.
A theme we're going to run across repeatedly on this channel, especially within the next few ancient history videos, is the fact that the more we learn about them through anthropology, archaeology, and ethnography, the more we realize that hunter-gatherersocieties are often much more complex and sophisticated and much less simplistic than we've previously given them credit for.Certain hallmarks that have traditionally signified the transition away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle towards an agricultural one like sedentism or advanced horticulture are popping up not infrequently in firmly hunter-gatherer contexts.A good example of this is the 16,000-year-old village of Monte Verde in Chile, where the population appears to have been rather sedentary several thousand years before agriculture arose anywhere on the planet.Go my Land Bridge part two video for more detail on that.We are having to redefine our image of hunter-gatherer societies as features emerge that blur the line between hunter-gatherer and farmer.
I mention this here because the Northwest Coast cultures break so many of the traditional hunter-gatherer rules that anthropologists had to create an entirely new category of hunter-gatherer to account for them.The complex hunter-gatherer.So, what defines a hunter-gatherer society?Well, traditionally, there are a couple major points.First, they haven't developed domestic agriculture.The economy is focused on hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants.Second, they tend to be pretty nomadic, following the migration patterns of animal herds and growth cycles of plants in different areas.As a result, the people tend to have few possessions and a relatively less developed and more practicality focused material culture.Third, communally held land rights and no private ownership of land.You can also find communally held land in agricultural societies, but so far as I'm aware, you will never find private ownership of land in traditional hunter-gatherer societies.And lastly, socially, they tend to be pretty egalitarian and democratic.
There is very little social hierarchy or stratification, and where it does exist, leaders have little authority to make people do something they don't want to do.As a result, political structures tend to be very decentralized, and you'll find little organization above the village level.All around, hunter-gatherer societies are traditionally seen as less complex than agricultural ones.Social, political, financial, economic, and religious institutions all tend to be less developed and intricate.You don't see things like written language, empires, rigid and complicated class structures, advanced banking practices, tax codes, bureaucracy, printed currency, etc.Now, I want to make a point before we move on.Agricultural societies have always seen themselves as better than hunter-gatherer societies, and they really don't need to point out that Euro-American society has especially held cultural supremacist views towards indigenous American societies.We can all agree that savage is only a slur because agriculturalists view themselves as superior to hunter-gatherers.
This long history of cultural chauvinism has imbued words like complex, simple, sophisticated, developed or development, etc.with certain airs of moral judgment.This is why I try to avoid progress narrative type words like this as much as I can, but sometimes they're just the best words for the situation.Whenever I use these words, I am just trying to describe the state of one people group in relation to another.I mean absolutely no moral judgment, good or bad, towards the status of either group.Just because something is technologically complicated, absolutely, positively, in no way whatsoever makes that thing morally superior.Let us rid ourselves of those ideas as we continue our conversation.So, how does a complex hunter-gatherer society differ from the traditional hunter-gatherer model?Side note, a traditional hunter-gatherer is better known as a general or generalist hunter-gatherer.This helps distinguish them from the complex hunter-gatherers, who you will also see described as affluent foragers.
Basically, complex hunter-gatherers display a hunter-gatherer economy with lots of elements from a more agriculturalist society.Let's analyze each of these points and how they relate to the Northwest Coast societies to get a better understanding.
This chapter covers hunting, gathering, marine subsistence, and the deliberate management of forests through silviculture. It also introduces woolly dogs as a rare example of domestication in the region.
It is true that Northwest Coast societies didn't have agriculture in the traditional sense, with one exception that we will discuss in a bit.The forests and waterways around them provided a wealth of foraging options as they were.On land, they would hunt mostly deer and elk, but smaller species like mink and beaver were also targeted.Additionally, over 70 varieties of berry and vegetable plants were harvested, such as salmonberry and thimbleberry, both of which are objectively the superior berries, huckleberry, currants, and root plants like camas.However, it was the riverine and marine resources that made up the majority of the diet, with coastal tribes like the Makah obtaining anywhere from 70% to 90% of their food from the ocean.From the water, they would harvest clams, oysters, urchins, kelp, hunt sea mammals such as seals, otters, and among some groups whales, and fish for species such as halibut, herring, eulachon, and the big one, salmon.
However, they didn't eat entirely at the mercy of Mother Nature, and they certainly didn't leave the landscape around them a pristine untouched wilderness.This is because Northwest Coast peoples practiced what is known as silviculture.I am going to be making a whole video about indigenous silviculture in the not-too-distant future, so I won't go into excruciating detail here.Just know this is a brief overview of the practice.There is a lot more that can be said on the topic.Silviculture is when people manipulate the natural environment around them to increase productivity of certain resources.This can be done in many ways, but by far the most common method, and indeed widely used here in the Northwest Coast, is controlled burning.Forests regrow after fires in predictable stages.By understanding this and intentionally setting fire to a space, people can encourage the growth of desired plant species and discourage the growth of undesired ones.
Do this enough times, and you can turn a wild patch of forest into a veritable garden with a high concentration of edible or otherwise useful plants.Clearing out underbrush also increases the population of game species such as deer and elk because they're attracted to the specific plants that regrow first after fires.It also makes travel through forests easier for both humans and animals.Northwest Coast peoples would also take it a step further and use fires to prevent forest growth at all, instead opting to create meadow spaces.In fact, many of the lowland meadows in this region didn't occur naturally, but rather were intentionally created and maintained by anthropogenic fire.And we know this because we can tell the difference in soil ecology between a forest fire and a controlled burn.Meadows are advantageous not only for their unique plant species, but also because the meadow-forest interchange is another attractive environment for game.
Taking things even further, sometimes, instead of allowing a burned area to regrow naturally, Northwest peoples would intentionally replant it with chosen species.This was the case with camas, as attested in numerous accounts.They even took these silviculture practices into the ocean, developing techniques to encourage kelp growth, thereby creating cultivated kelp forests.Hunting and harvesting done purely at the mercy of natural cycles can be very unpredictable.A bad year, unusually inclement weather, interference from animals, etc.can all conspire to reduce food yields and threaten a village's survival.By managing their environments like this, Northwest Coast peoples constructed highly productive orchards of harvestable resources concentrated in chosen areas, often near habitations.Thus, reducing the unpredictability of natural food sources and increasing food security.This isn't agriculture, since that is the cultivation of domesticated species, whereas this is the manipulation and cultivation of wild ones, but it is similarly complex, no less impressive of an innovation, and accomplished the same results that of increasing
food productivity and security.One side note, which I will elaborate more on in a separate video, all of this environmental manipulation was incredibly healthy and sustainable for the forests.Silviculture done right doesn't damage forest ecosystems.It actually makes them stronger, healthier, and more biodiverse.The more we study and learn about silviculture, the more widely we see it in hunter-gatherer societies.It's becoming less of a diagnostic marker to distinguish complex hunter-gatherers from general hunter-gatherers, and more of a tool that seems to have been accessible to all hunter-gatherers.But so far, we still see it more commonly on the complex end of the spectrum.Now, there is one example of, in my opinion, a pretty undeniable practice of full-blown agriculture in the Northwest Coast.Their woolly dogs.You heard that right.Woolly dogs.Prior to contact, there was a breed of domesticated woolly dog, which is tragically now extinct, whose wool could be sheared and fashioned into linens the same way sheep and goat wool can.
And there are accounts of communities raising whole herds of dogs specifically to harvest their wool the same way agriculturalists do with sheep.Now, this is a topic that has been criminally under-researched in the region and definitely deserves more attention as we have no idea how widespread this practice was and to what extent it was developed, but for my part, Iwould say it's definitely a case of agriculture.We have a domesticated crop being intentionally cultivated for human use.I would not, however, reclassify the Northwest Coast economy from a hunter-gatherer economy to an agricultural one solely based on the farming of woolly dogs.It wasn't so important of an innovation that it changed the nature of their whole economy and their societies did not revolve around it.I've spent the last few minutes detailing other non-agricultural resource harvesting practices that were much more important socially and economically than woolly dog farming.
I would, however, definitely add this to the list of features that made Northwest Coast societies more complex than generalist hunter-gatherer societies.
The speaker explains how permanent settlements replaced nomadism and how longhouses, stored food, and property rights structured daily life. He also details the region’s unusually developed system of personal and intellectual property.
You can probably assume that investing this much effort into terraforming the landscape would make Northwest Coast peoples less nomadic and you'd be exactly right.Nomadism is traditionally a hallmark of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as opposed to the sedentary agricultural life, but Northwest indigenous peoples were not nomads.They split their time between two permanent sites.The main village, generally along the coastal lowlands where the whole town would come together for the winter, and satellite villages, generally farther inland and uphill, where family and clan groups would splinter off for summer harvesting.As mentioned, these sites were permanent.Unless something made them uninhabitable, the village locations would not change.Thus, Northwest peoples couldn't closely follow migrating herds of game to stay near their food supply like generalist hunter-gatherers.Instead, their food economy revolved around harvesting large quantities of staple foods and storing them for when they went out of season.
By far the most important food staple was salmon, which was so significant it's going to get its own segment in a few minutes.Since they lived in permanent towns and villages, Northwest peoples didn't need to have mobile dwellings like teepees, instead building sedentary wooden longhouses.There were several different styles of longhouse seen up and down the coast, as to be expected in an area of such high diversity, but they all generally consisted of a cedar log frame overlaid with cedar planks.These planks could be easily moved to let the breeze in during summertime, keep the rain out during the winter, or let smoke out from the central fire, around which the interior was organized.Woven cedar mats could be hung strategically to act as room dividers, which could then be easily removed for feasts or ceremonies.These structures could be quite large, capable of housing anywhere from a couple dozen to over 100 inhabitants, and were often and ornately carved and painted in the characteristic local art style.
Northwest peoples also had a much different relationship with their personal property than generalist hunter-gatherers.That is to say, they had a lot more of it.Take it from someone who knows, there's no greater activity for reducing the amount of clutter you own than constantly moving.But more significantly, they had, and still have today, a highly developed system of property rights.Individuals owned their personal items and items for their work.A fisherman would own their nets and their hooks, an artist would own their carving and painting tools, etc.And taking somebody's property without permission did require restitution.But also, items of import to whole families would be owned by that family.A family would own their canoes and their paddles, and a family or clan would own the longhouse that they dwelt in.This system of property rights extended even further to intellectual property.And this is probably where it was the most rigid.
The rights to sing certain songs, dance certain dances, use certain crests and designs in artwork, and even claim or give a certain name were all treated as property owned by an individual, a family, or a clan.A person could not, without explicit permission, perform a song or a dance or use a crest or a name to which they did not have the rights.Items of intellectual property were very intimately associated with ceremony, so improperly using them without the necessary privileges was a serious offense.It was not uncommon then, and in traditionalist communities still is not uncommon now, for offended parties to very publicly halt ceremonial proceedings and express their offense when someone tried to, for example, perform a dance that they didn't havethe rights to.And if you wanted to perform or use a piece of intellectual property, you had to first produce the receipts to establish your right to that intellectual property.
Failure to do so would result in your claim getting challenged.Intellectual property rights were mostly passed between family members by birth, marriage, or inheritance, though they could also be given to unrelated persons as gifts.To establish your claim to a given item, you had to be able to recite the chain of marriages, inheritances, gift-givings, etc.that brought it into your hands.Other people would be able to verify your claim because all of this passage of rights happened at public ceremonies known as potlatches, which we will talk about at length later.This system of property rights is significantly more complex than those present in most generalist hunter-gatherer societies, though pretty recognizable to an agriculturalist.
This section explains usufruct rights, family-based land control, and the role of title holders as custodians of territory. It also describes tribute and the expectation that wealth be redistributed rather than hoarded.
Related to the property rights system, there were also land use rights.It's pretty common knowledge that hunter-gatherer societies don't have a concept of private ownership of land.In these cultures, land isn't something that can be owned, bought, or sold by humans.This was also true here in the Northwest Coast, but that doesn't mean land isn't divided up between people at all.What is far less well known is that complex hunter-gatherer societies do have a concept of usufruct rights of land.Usufruct is the right to use and benefit from a piece of property that doesn't belong to you.We see this all the time today, especially with anything that involves mining or drilling.For example, you could own a piece of property that turns out to have oil on it, and the oil company will either buy the land from you outright or buy the drilling rights, while you still maintain possession of
the property, typically receiving some cut of the oil profits for the use of your land.Usufruct rights amongst indigenous American peoples were different in every society.In the Northwest Coast, they were held by chiefs.A more accurate term would probably be high-status individuals or elites.Okay.We'll elaborate more on the social structure in a few minutes, but we need to lay down some basic concepts before we can move on.Northwest Coast society was organized around the family unit.This wasn't the nuclear family like American society, but the extended family, including relatives so distant that family groups within a town could be several hundred individuals in size.All members of a family group generally resided within the same longhouse.Thus, a town would have separate longhouses for each family group.Though, if a family group was big enough, they would build additional longhouses for their members.
Sometimes, if a town was small enough, it could consist of only one family group, but often there were multiple.These family groups were headed by high-status individuals who held a number of titles and privileges and were responsible for directing the economic activities of their family group.All of the land surrounding a town, and also all of the water, yes, that includes the ocean, within sight of that town was divided into separate tracts whose usufruct rights were owned by these title-holding family heads.Thus, all economically viable land and water along the entire Northwest Coast was parceled out and administered by elites within the different towns and villages.These usufruct rights included all economic activity within a certain tract of land or water, hunting, fishing, gathering, whaling, etc., but also any of the preparatory work needed for those activities, like building fish weirs over rivers or conducting controlled
burns.Anybody who wanted to harvest on a certain tract of land needed first to gain permission from the title holder, but here's an important point.The title holder could not withhold permission from people if they were part of the title holder's family group.Group members had an inalienable right to harvest on their family's land, though they were still required to seek permission from the title holder before exercising that right.The title holder could deny permission to people outside of their family group.Thus, the title holder's ownership did not mean exclusive right of personal use.It was more a case of stewardship and the right to direct the economic management of a tract of land by their family group.They were the custodian of that land and responsible for ensuring it was harvested properly and not over-exploited.In addition to seeking permission, harvesters would also pay tribute to the title holder in the form of a portion of their harvest.
Title holders would thus get very wealthy by essentially taxing the use of their land.However, the tribute demanded was never excessive, and title holder's wealth was expected to be regularly redistributed to the community in potlatch ceremonies.Nobody in the Northwest Coast was going poor or homeless off of making somebody else rich.And by expected, I do mean expected.A title holder could lose their status and privileges if they went too long accumulating wealth and not redistributing it.And even when they were upholding the redistribution cycle, if the community felt they were being stingy and not generous enough, they would be publicly shamed.We'll talk about this more in the next section.
The speaker explores the region’s rigid social hierarchy, including slavery, inherited privileges, and the subtle gradations of status. He also explains family groups, clans, and the limited authority of elite leaders.
The social structures of Northwest Coast societies, how can I put this?Have been absolutely obsessed over by anthropologists for decades.Reams upon reams of paper have been exhausted documenting and trying to understand what one anthropologist described as, quote, "The most socially complex hunting and gathering societies known on Earth."There is so much I could say here, and it's such a fascinating topic, but for the sake of time, we can really only scratch the surface today.I'll leave some links in the description for interested viewers to check out more.It is in the incredible complexity of their social structures, perhaps more than any other single factor, that Northwest Coast societies differentiate themselves from general hunter-gatherer societies.Rather than being classless and egalitarian, there was a rigid social hierarchy that stratified society on the basis of titles, privilege, and status, where upward social mobility was quite difficult, and slavery was practiced.
Let's talk about slavery first.In the Northwest Coast, slavery made up an important part of the regional economy.Estimates differ on how much of the population was enslaved, from as little as 4% to as much as 30%, but everyone agrees it was practiced in every tribe, and that slaves were a high-value trade commodity.Slaves could be acquired through purchase or taken as captives in war.In fact, slave raiding was the most common factor motivating warfare.Also, the children of slaves were born slaves.Slaves were not considered members of society, and therefore excluded from ceremonial and religious life.Just as in Euro-American plantation slavery, they were seen as property, and their masters could treat them however they pleased, including beating or killing them at will.It wasn't uncommon for the slaves of very high-status masters to be ritually killed upon their master's death or upon the dedication of important structures like a new longhouse.
Unlike European slavery, however, the labor of Northwest Coast slaves was not especially brutal, and the function of the entire economy did not center around the practice.These were economies with slavery, they were not slave economies.Slaves mostly did the same labor as lower-class free folk, menial tasks around the house that their masters just didn't want to do.For other jobs, high-class slave owners would themselves pitch in, in which case the slaves would work alongside them as a helping hand.Things like cutting down trees to build a canoe or a longhouse.There was no such thing as work that only slaves and no freeborn person did.Furthermore, slaves generally slept and ate in the longhouse with the freeborns, rather than in separate slave quarters, and were given the same food.Though slaves had no formal rights, their rights to marry and own personal possessions were generally respected.
A slave could buy their freedom if they'd accumulated enough wealth, or their master could grant it at will, both of which were fairly common occurrences.In fact, many masters treated slavery more like indentured servitude, granting their slaves freedom after a certain period of time, rather than enslaving them for life, though the treatment of slaves varied drastically from master to master.Upon obtaining freedom, slaves were largely equal to any low-status freeborn, though there was still social stigma attached to having been enslaved.The free class is often described as being divided into two further classes, nobles who held titles, privileges, wealth, and status passed on to them through inheritance, and commoners who did not.However, this is a bit of an oversimplification and can leave a false impression of how rank and status worked in Northwest Coast societies.So, let's get into it.Northwest Coast societies were not stratified on the basis of rank as in European feudalism.
There was not a finite list of inheritable positions with a determined hierarchy and vested authorities.Nothing akin to a king, prince, duke, etc.Rather, status in the Northwest was determined by the inheritance of titles, privileges, and wealth, which was stratified in relation to each other.In other words, rank did not determine the privilege, privilege determined the rank.For example, the order of seating at a public feast was an inheritable privilege, and a more prominent seating position granted a person higher status.They were high status because they had a better seat.They did not have a better seat because they were high status.The order of receiving gifts at or invitations to public feasts were inheritable privileges.The higher one was in the order, the more status they obtained.The right to certain names, crests, dances, and songs were all inheritable privileges.Names and crests were particularly important status symbols as they were imbued with the status of all people who'd previously held them.
For example, a name which had been held by a revered and highly regarded ancestor would confer great status upon the inheritor.Use of work rights to land were inheritable privileges, and although one particular tract of land didn't necessarily confer more status than another, a more productive parcel would make its titleholder wealthier, and that would impact their status.The list of all possible titles and privileges that one could hold would be massive and probably impossible to exhaustively enumerate.One's position in society was thus determined by a complex interplay of all the different titles and privileges they held in addition to their wealth.These privileges were all graded in relation to each other, and no two privileges carried exactly equal status.Thus, no two people carried exactly equal status.This minute gradation displayed itself most prominently at potlatches, public gatherings of feasting, gift-giving, and ceremony.Gifts were handed out at potlatches one at a time, and the order of receiving gifts was a very public display of one's position on the status hierarchy, every recipient being lower than the previous, but higher than the next.
It was not possible for two people to have exactly the same status, as this would require the names to be called out to receive their gifts at exactly the same time.As one anthropologist puts it, every person was in a class of their own.Privileges and titles were inherited, but could also be obtained by marriage, given as gifts, or taken as spoils of war.Inheritance practices differed across the region, with some tribes passing things down strictly patrilineally, others were strictly matrilineal, and others allowed inheritance through both parents.Primogeniture was not a legal requirement, and inheritances could be split between heirs however the titleholder saw fit.Men were preferred in inheritance, but there don't seem to have been formal prohibitions on women gaining privileges and status.One's status was not a stagnant and guaranteed thing.It could be gained or lost.Thus, a high-status individual could not simply rest on the laurels of their inheritance, but had to constantly reaffirm their prestige through concrete actions.
Neglecting to do so would result in loss of social standing and even inherited privileges.Likewise, a person born with no inherited titles and privileges could gain them and thus increase in status.There were no formal barriers to titleless individuals gaining titles as in European society.One of the most important factors in gaining and preserving social standing was wealth.One could climb the social ladder and gain more privileges and status by accumulating wealth.However, wealth was not accumulated to be hoarded, but specifically to be redistributed.Wealth only served as a status symbol if it was flaunted.And in the Northwest Coast, it was flaunted by being given away in gatherings known as potlatches.We will talk at length about potlatches in a few minutes, but essentially they were public events put on by wealthy sponsors to assert their status and prestige by giving away all their wealth.
And I do mean all their wealth.A good potlatcher would have absolutely no possessions save probably their longhouse and a pair of clothes the day after they threw a potlatch.Contrary to the perceptions of some Westerners, this did not condemn them or their family to destitution, as their public prestige was never higher than after a potlatch.Thus, the community would gleefully provide for their family's material needs until they'd built their wealth back up again.There were very strong social expectations for status individuals to throw potlatches at regular intervals, and to be very generous with their wealth redistribution.The higher in status a person was, the more frequently and extravagantly they were expected to potlatch.Failure to put on regular potlatches and stinginess of gift-giving would result in the loss of social standing and even hereditary privileges.On the flip side, a person of low or no privilege could increase their prestige and gain privileges by accumulating enough wealth to throw a potlatch.
As mentioned before, there were no formal barriers to this sort of social climbing.Practically though, it was a very difficult thing to do.As inherited privileges gave one access to more wealth, either by receiving tribute for someone's use of your land, by getting invited to lots of potlatches, etc., the fewer privileges you were born with, the less access you had towealth creation.It wasn't too difficult for an already statused elite to increase the grandeur of their potlatches and thus gain more prestige, but for most people born with no privileges, they were unlikely to ever accumulate the wealth necessary to breakinto the potlatch cycle.Marriage was also not much of a social climbing option.Title holders tended to marry title holders of similar status with an eye towards marrying up rather than down.So, the best anybody on the social scale could hope for would be an incremental increase in status through marriage.
A titleless individual could conceivably marry someone with a handful of low-ranking privileges, but any larger of a gap was unlikely to be bridged.No marriages are recorded between a titleless person and an extremely high-status person.Thus, even though there was no formal barrier between unprivileged and privileged, there was very practically a gap in wealth and social clout that increased in size and rigidity the further up you look on the privilege scale.Still, looking at this gap as a gap between classes is misleading and overshadows the incredibly minute gradation of the Northwest Coast social scale.A few more notes about the social structures that need to be mentioned.Privilege and status carried with it much social prestige and wealth, but it didn't honestly carry a whole lot of authority.Only certain figures within a town, family, clan, and village heads held much real-world authority, and even then, they couldn't force free people to act against their will.
This was more persuasive authority than coercive authority.The vast majority of wealthy status holders held social clout, but nothing akin to legal authority over lower-status free people.This lack of authority, however, had no impact on their social standing.As mentioned before, Northwest Coast societies were organized into family groups.These family groups consisted of a high-class family, their extended family as far as could be traced of any status level, all the slaves owned by group members, and finally, a collection of low-status free retainers who claimed lineage withthe noble family.Whether or not there was actually any blood relation between the retainers and the noble family was immaterial.The system was ostensibly organized around the extended family, so a family relationship was nominally maintained between everybody in the group.These retainers submitted themselves to the authority of the noble family, but they were not bound to the noble family or the land in any way like a serf.
They had freedom of movement and could move to another village and establish themselves with another family if they so desired.A family group could hold property and privileges, which were administered primarily by a family head.This was not a rank that could be inherited, but rather an honor bestowed on the most status member of the family.Among certain tribes, the family organization extended further into a clan structure.Clans were ostensibly distant relations, but again, actual blood connection wasn't really the basis of clan organization.In fact, nobody really knows how the clan systems began or what motivated their initial formation.Clans extended across villages and incorporated multiple family groups within them.Just like family groups, clans have a clan head, who is the highest-status clan member and can hold privileges on behalf of the whole clan.The most common privilege held on the clan level is the crest or totem.
Unlike other indigenous totemic systems, however, in the Northwest Coast, having a certain totem did not express any sort of special spiritual relationship between the clan and the animal of the totem.The importance of clan systems changed as you moved north and south and seems to correspond with strictness of inheritance structures.In the southern portion of the coast down in Oregon, inheritance tended to be allowed from both the mother's and the father's side.Here, clan affiliations were quite weak as a person could choose to identify more with the clan of their mother or father.Up north in Canada and Alaska, however, inheritance tended to be strictly associated with a specific gender, whether mother or father depends on the tribe.Thus, a person could only associate with one clan, and the importance of clan identity is more firmly established.Marriage in these communities was strictly outside the clan, whereas in Oregon, one could marry within their clan so long as they were sufficiently distant relation.
And in Washington, we see a gradation between these two extremes.I'm doing a massive disservice to the clan system for the sake of time.Just know there's a lot more that could be said, and you can find info in my sources.Finally, each town or village also had a town head.This person tended to also be the family and/or clan head of the most prominent and powerful clan and family within the town.
This chapter introduces Northwest Coast spirituality, guardian spirits, healing practices, and the idea that all beings are part of a living web of relations. It shows how harvesting, ceremony, and sustainability are tied to religious obligation.
If you grew up in the United States like me, you were probably taught that spirituality for all indigenous Americans revolved around guardian spirits and spirit quests.That a person would go on a solo spirit quest where a certain animal would reveal themselves to that person as their guardian spirit, and the two would maintain a special connection for the person's entire life.Now, to say this was the nature of religion for all indigenous peoples across the entire continent is grossly inaccurate.However, to be completely honest, it isn't that far from a faithful description of Northwest Coast religious systems.In fact, given how much literature about this region anthropologists produced in the late 19th early 20th centuries, I wouldn't be too surprised if this is where that perception came from.It wouldn't be the first time a cultural element from a specific region got misapplied by Americans to all indigenous peoples.
So, let's take a look at what's actually going on.Northwest Coast spirituality can be described as a form of animism.Everything in the universe is believed to be a living, sentient being with its own spirit power, no different from the condition of humanity.Every animal, every plant, as well as inanimate objects and forces of nature, such as rocks, water, the wind, or the force of a wave.In fact, in most Northwest mythologies, all of these entities are actually people who live in another skin, and that's how they're commonly referred to.Salmon are called salmon people, rocks rock people, etc.You can probably deduce that there is no separation between the physical and spiritual worlds in Northwest Coast cosmology.Spiritual forces interact with the physical world and each other all the time, and it is this interaction of the spirits that makes the physical world function.
A balanced web of spiritual and physical relationships ties everyone and everything together, and the healthy functioning of the world depends on proper maintenance of these relationships.We'll talk about how this is done in a second.First, I want to talk about guardian spirits.Each person develops an individual relationship with a specific spirit power during their life.Parents encourage their children at a young age to begin exploring the spirit world and preparing this connection.At some point during adolescence, a person will venture on a solo spirit quest to formalize this relationship.It can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, during which time the person fasts from eating and sleeping, spending their time in prayer and ritual bathing.A spirit power will eventually reveal themselves to the person, typically in the form of an animal, and the two will be linked for life.
Spirit powers do many things for people.They protect their person from illnesses, misfortune, and death, and can give their person success and prosperity in human ventures, hunting, fishing, gathering, healing other sicknesses, skill in basketry and carving, ease in childbirth, ease in obtaining wealth, etc.All of this is repaid by proper expressions of respect and reciprocity.One respects their spirit power by honoring ritual obligations and restrictions.The relationship is a very close and intimate one.Thus, to speak openly about your spirit power would be very disrespectful.This doesn't mean nobody else can know what your spirit power is, though, as another way to honor your spirit power is to represent them in artwork.For example, painting a representation of them on the bow of your canoe or carving their likeness into a post in your longhouse.Another form of respect would be to refrain from eating the animal that is your spirit power.
Thus, if your spirit power was a deer, you wouldn't eat venison.Reciprocity mainly takes the form of gratitude expressed through ceremony.In the Northwest Coast, winter is the primary season for potlatches and religious ceremonies with an annual spirit power honoring ceremonial cycle being observed.These winter ceremonies, as they're called, are public gatherings where people come together to sing songs and perform dances to pay homage to their individual spirit powers.They last for weeks and are critically important in renewing the spirit power relationship.Less frequently, a person may also repeat their solo spirit quest at certain points in their life where close communion with their spirit power is very important.Women typically do this during pregnancy, for example, and among the whaling cultures of the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth, a very dangerous occupation, whalers would do this before a hunt.One side note that I need to discuss.
As mentioned, the spirit power relationship is a very personal and intimate one.Thus, indigenous Northwesterners today who observe winter ceremonies consider them sacred and closed to outsiders.They will also rarely discuss details of their religious practice and experience.Spirit powers could also be called upon to enact malevolence on other people.Illness in the Northwest Coast was thought to be a physical manifestation of a spiritual imbalance, often an attack by a hostile spirit power that removed part of a person's soul.Another source of imbalance could be that a person had disrespected their own spirit power, who then removed their protection.Medicine men thus acted as both doctor and spiritual healer.They would both treat the physical wound as well as perform spiritual cleansing through song, dance, or other rituals in order to retrieve the lost and restore balance and health.Medicine men relied heavily on their own spirit powers to assist them in healing.
Thus, medicinal practices were highly individualized and no two doctors performed exactly the same rituals.One may touch and massage the patient, another simply sit and sing, another burn cedar, etc.Beyond the individual level, human society maintained proper balance with the spirit world as a whole through the same key methods of respecting obligations and restrictions and ceremonial reciprocity.This was most on display in Northwest Coast harvesting practices.Now, you may be wondering if Northwest peoples considered all plants and animals to be humans in another skin, how did they justify harvesting and eating them?This is a very fair question.The answer is this.Among the web of relations that is Northwest Coast cosmology, most, if not all, beings rely on others for their livelihoods in one way or another.The tree people must drink people to survive.The deer people must eat the tree people to survive.
The bear people must eat the deer people to survive, etc.This is how the world was created and everybody understands this.Thus, the water people willfully give themselves as a gift of life to the tree people.The tree people give themselves to support the deer people, etc.And as recompense, the givers ask the gifted for something in return, usually permission to make use of their gift and gratitude for the offering of it.Humans being a part of the web of relations, they are bound by the same system.Thus, salmon, oysters, berries, kelp, etc.all willfully give themselves to support the lives of people.Cedar and spruce trees, recognizing that food is not all that is required for human flourishing, give their bodies so that humans can make houses, canoes, clothes, art, and so on.What is asked in return are three things.First, that humans seek permission before harvesting and respect the answer.
You'll see some people still doing this today.If someone needs to make a canoe, for example, they'll go up to a tree and ask in prayer for it to offer itself.They'll then wait and listen.If the tree says no, they'll find another tree.If they can't find a tree that will be give permission, they'll go home and come back another day.Second, that humans express gratitude for the gift through ceremony.Just like how winter ceremonies honor the relationship with spirit powers, harvesting-related ceremonies honor the relationship between people and their harvested counterparts.For example, when the salmon people begin their annual migration, an initial catch of a small amount will be made and a feast known as the first salmon ceremony held.The bones of the consumed fish are saved and ritually returned to the water.These dead salmon, it is believed, then return to their people and attest to the honor and respect they were given.
If the first catch is not properly honored, it's believed the salmon people will refuse to allow themselves to be caught.Third, and perhaps most importantly, humans must only take what they need.Not only would it be disrespectful to say to the salmon people to catch more than you can eat and have taken advantage of their generosity, it's also robbing from the livelihoods of the bear people and the eagle peopleand all the others who rely on salmon's gift.So, they are going to be less likely to share their gifts with humans.Thus, over-exploiting even one resource damages a whole set of relations and sets the world out of balance.This principle quite literally makes environmental sustainability a factor of Northwest Coast religion.As a result, there were a whole set of practices and social pressures to regulate human behavior away from excess and towards sustainable levels of consumption.
For example, just the simple requirement of holding a first salmon ceremony takes several days to fulfill.During this time, no salmon are being caught and thousands of fish are allowed to swim upstream unhindered and fulfill their roles in the environment.As I mentioned before, title holders who held land usufruct rights were seen as custodians of their tracts of land.They were responsible for ensuring their land was harvested sustainably, and if they allowed their parcels to be recklessly over-exploited, or worse, demanded it in order to build wealth off the tribute, they were liable to lose public prestige.We'll talk about this sustainability a bit more later.
The speaker explains the many purposes of potlatches, from feasting and gift-giving to legal validation and public memory. He emphasizes how these ceremonies reinforced status, inheritance, and social contracts.
All right, it's finally time to talk about the much-alluded-to potlatch ceremony.The potlatch was an extremely important component of Northwest Coast public life, though there are regional variations in the significance.Similarly to clan structures, the institution waned in importance the further south one traveled.Potlatches served many and varied purposes.Almost anything you can think of that would warrant public attention and a bit of ceremony was done in the context of a potlatch.There were wedding potlatches, funeral potlatches, coming-of-age potlatches, birth potlatches, potlatches for the dedication of a longhouse or a totem pole, potlatches for legal functions such as investing a new chief with their inherited titles.You name it.They weren't primarily religious ceremonies like the winter ceremonies were.Religion was present in potlatch ceremonies, and in some areas like the Central Coast of British Columbia, was a more significant component than in other regions, but it was never the primary purpose of potlatch as a ceremony.
Rather, economic, political, legal, and cultural purposes took precedence.They were pretty much the default public gathering.As mentioned in the section on social stratification, potlatches were put on by wealthy sponsors and served the critical social role in Northwest Coast economics of wealth redistribution.As a potlatch's extravagance was a direct reflection of their sponsors' available wealth and social pressures, they ranged in scale quite widely and no two were equal.Potlatches could be put on just for the local community, redistributing local wealth and cementing a title holder's position in their own community, or they could be more competitive events where high-status title holders from neighboring towns were invited inorder to establish an elite status in relation to their peers.In this way, wealth was not only redistributed from the rich to the average within a single community, it was also redistributed between the wealthy elites of distant communities.
Thus, being invited to many potlatches was another way to accumulate wealth.And by extravagant, I do mean extravagant.The most flamboyant of potlatches could see several hundred guests and last easily for a week or several with the host providing everybody with gifts and food every single day.When hosts were really trying to flaunt their wealth and build status, they would even throw items in the fire and destroy them as a demonstration that they had so much they could afford to do that.Blankets, coppers, and unfortunately, sometimes murdering slaves.There is probably no institution of Northwest Coast societies that has received more attention from Western anthropologists than the potlatch.But even then, scientists have tended to document only the most opulent and extravagant ones.It's quite likely that these grand-scale events of elite competition about which so much has been written were much less common than the potlatch that just fed the hometown.
So, what actually happens in a potlatch?The two main components are feasting and gift-giving.These are interspersed with periods of performance, singing, dancing, speech-making, storytelling, as well as whatever other ceremonial function the potlatch is achieving, the wedding, the title investiture, the funeral, etc.Funeral potlatches are naturally more somber events than others and are often referred to as wailing potlatches as they afford people the opportunity to express their grief without restriction.All of these parts are done very ritually and a potlatch can be a very grand and impressive spectacle.They're held within a longhouse, so you can imagine how immersive the singing and dancing is in an enclosed space.Another critical function of the potlatch was as a repository of public memory.Remember the discussion about intellectual property rights and everything we've talked about regarding inheritance.These were cultures with no written languages.There wasn't a county clerk who could hold the record of births, deaths, who holds the rights to what tracts of land or what crests or names or whatnot.
The potlatch was where all of this was done.Anytime intellectual property rights were being passed from one person to another, it had to be done at a potlatch so that there were witnesses who could attest the recipient legitimately inherited those items.If you'll recall, I mentioned how people would sometimes lay claim to rights and privileges that weren't theirs and that they'd get challenged on this.The only way anybody could know who legitimately possessed what rights was for those transfers to be made in public ceremony.Potlatches were times for hosts to bring out everything they laid claim to.Not only would they flaunt their wealth, but they'd tell their stories, sing their songs, display their crests, etc.as an assertion of all the different rights they held.Guests would demonstrate their validation of the host's claims by accepting their gifts.This formed a contract.Those guests would then return to their communities and vouch for whatever claims to rights a host made at their potlatch.
If a host made a claim to a right that a guest did not agree with, they would refuse to sign the contract by refusing their gift.Of course, it didn't just stay that subtle.The host could expect to be verbally challenged as well.
This section surveys the region’s famous formline art, regional stylistic differences, and the role of specialization in artistic production. It also covers totem poles, memorial poles, and shame poles as public expressions of status and accountability.
No discussion of the Northwest Coast would be complete without mentioning their art.Without a doubt, the most recognizable element of Northwest Coast material culture to outsiders.This gorgeous art style with its black form line, its abstractness, its signature repertoire of motifs and colors has gotten so much outside attention that many Americans, again, have a perception that this style was present throughout much of thecontinent.That it's a general indigenous American art style, not just a Northwest Coast one.I myself was surprised to learn as late as 11th grade that it's specific to this region.In fact, the Seattle Seahawks football team took their name and branding inspiration from a Northwest Coast style Seahawk mask housed in the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington.The designs on their logo and uniforms take inspiration from the Northwest Coast art style.And yes, I use this style for the artistic aesthetic on this channel.
For the sake of both the length of this video and because I want to do a full artistic treatise of this style, I'm going to make a separate video about it.Here, we'll just cover some of the highlights.Again, there's regional variation in style.In fact, the styles change so dramatically as you move north and south that it should be divided into a northern Northwest Coast style and a southern Northwest Coast style with the boundary around Vancouver, Canada.The northern style is the one that's traditionally gotten all the media and scholarly attention and it isn't hard to see why.The solid black lines that weave and connect throughout a piece are called by scholars form line for the main thicker lines and fine line for the smaller thinner ones.This is where the art style gets its academic name of form line art.In the northern region, this form line plays a more significant role than in the south and there are more strict rules governing the components of a piece in the north than in the south.
Thus, in the north, figures which represent animals, humans, and sometimes plants like trees tend to be more stylized and abstract and less lifelike than their southern counterparts.The southern style makes use of similar design motifs as the north.You'll see similar T and U shapes, similarly thick eyes and eyebrows, similar ovoid shapes, etc., but their unification through the form line is less of a priority.Another side note, you may have noticed by now a familiar pattern along the coast of cultural transformation as you move north or south.There are many reasons for this, but perhaps most significantly, the southern nations in the United States had much deeper ties with people in the interior outside the coastal culture area.The Cascades in Washington and Oregon are much narrower and easier to cross than the Rockies in British Columbia, so it makes sense that there was more transit into the continent.
Another figure of the Northwest Coast economy that helps distinguish it as a complex hunter-gatherer society is specialization of labor.People didn't tend to be labor generalists, but tended to focus on one or a handful of crafts.There was already a gendered division of labor common in all hunter-gatherer societies with men doing the hunting and fishing and women doing the shellfish and plant gathering, but even within a single gender, people specialized.Fishermen tended to focus on certain fish and leave the hunting of seals and otters to sea mammal specialists.Whales were a specialization all of their own in the societies that hunted them and art was a specialization.Artists studied and honed the skills of their craft from a young age, learning the style, how to carve, how to paint, the qualities of the different materials they worked with, how to make the paints, etc.And good artists earned high social prestige on top of usually being high status to begin with.
Artists were employed using a patronage system very similar to the one in Renaissance Italy.They wouldn't freelance their work as is common today, rather they would receive commissions and all necessary support from wealthy patrons.Just about everything that had a surface was decorated.Longhouses were painted both inside and out, their support columns were often carved, canoes were painted, there were carved and painted knives, bowls, spoons, boxes, hats, blankets, coppers, paddles, headdresses, ceremonial masks, and of course, totem poles.Another very well-known and highly recognizable component of Northwest Coast culture, totem poles are monuments usually serving as another status symbol for elite families by publicly displaying the powerful lineage and privileges of that family.They're made out of vertically erected cedar logs that can be anywhere from 10 to 60 ft in height, but sometimes over 100.3 to 18 m, but sometimes over 30, and are carved with a number of figures, usually animal or human.
Contrary to popular belief, a pole does not necessarily tell a single story.Rather, it serves to document the different stories about or familiar to a community or family.For example, a pole can be commissioned as a general celebration of a certain wealthy family or individual.Thus, this sort of pole is decorated with status items to demonstrate the privileges owned by the sponsor.Owned family crests, scenes from owned stories, depictions of ancestors or crest of the family's clan.For obvious reasons, this was commonly the purpose of the entrance poles that adorned the front of family longhouses.A totem pole's direction is marked by ceremony and potlatching where the meanings of the different depictions and the purpose for the pole's construction are explained, thereby ensuring public knowledge of what the monument represents.Totem poles may be freestanding or as just mentioned, they may be one of the external or internal house poles holding up a longhouse, in which case they serve artistic, commemorative, and architectural purposes.
There were memorial poles erected to commemorate the death of a significant individual and even mortuary poles that actually housed the deceased person's remains in a grave box, thereby serving as both tomb and tombstone.And then there is my favorite class of totem pole, the shame pole.I mentioned a while ago that privilege holders who were stingy with their potlatching could be subject to public shaming.This is how it was done.A guest who was dissatisfied with the host's generosity would return home and commission a shame pole.These were generally pretty simple in construction featuring little more than a representation of the shaming victim and some other elements emblematic of that person to make it pretty clear who the intended target was.It was then either erected in a very prominent position in the guest's village or, if possible, hauled to the host's village and erected pointed at the host's longhouse.
Shame poles were meant to attract lots of public attention to this person's breach of honor.The victim of a shame pole could not take it down.Only the constructor could.In order to rid themself of this very public embarrassment, the shaming victim needed to throw a more generous potlatch and only when the guest was satisfied with the host's newfound sense of generosity, they would take it down.A shame pole could also be targeted at an entire town if the offensive behavior was widespread enough.In more recent times, some people have utilized the tradition of shame poling as an act of political resistance to draw attention to the loss of traditional territory and other grievances against colonial governments and actors.One famous example of this is a shame pole in Cordova, Alaska commissioned by Tlingit fisherman Mike Webber as a protest against the environmental disaster and political mishandling of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.
The speaker discusses Chilkat blankets and button blankets as important ceremonial textiles. He explains their materials, designs, and how they functioned as status symbols across the coast.
We're going to end this section on art discussing two kinds of ceremonial clothing, Chilkat blankets and button blankets.There is a long and rich history in the Northwest Coast stretching back well before European contact of weaving wool into clothing.Wool could be obtained from the wild mountain goats in the region as well as the domesticated woolly dogs, who most certainly were all very good boys.Out of this wool was woven many items of clothing including a particular style of ceremonial blanket known as Chilkat blankets.These are mostly present in the far north from about the central British Columbia coast continuing through the Alaska Panhandle.They're elaborately decorated with a representation of a personal or family crest done in form line art, but it is quite a distinct style of form line.Straight lines, boxes, and 90° angles are everywhere and these don't appear in form line art done on any other medium.
It's usually an obsessively curvy art style.Another ceremonial blanket with a more recent history is the button blanket.These are also wool blankets, but unlike the locally woven Chilkat, the wool material used in button blankets was acquired from European traders, making button blankets a very modern addition to the Northwest Coast material culture.They consist of a blanket almost exclusively dark blue, bordered on three sides in red, and decorated in the center with a design also in red.Like the Chilkat, these designs are typically personal or family crests.Unlike Chilkat, they're done in standard form line style, not a unique blanket style.The blankets are also decorated with abalone shells, which can act as simple accent pieces to the borders and crest or can form elaborate designs of their own.As mentioned, blue is the most common blanket color as it was the most available color in trade blankets during the fur trade era.
Less often encountered was gray and most rare, green.Thus, these colors were more valuable and affordable only to very wealthy individuals, becoming a status symbol.Button blankets have a much wider distribution than chilcats being used all along the coast, though I don't know how prevalent they are south of the Columbia River.
This chapter details the many uses of cedar in construction, carving, weaving, and rope-making. It highlights how cedar bark, roots, and withes supported nearly every aspect of material culture.
There are two items that define the material cultures of Northwest Coast peoples more than any other.Salmon was the staple food resource and cedar provided a construction material for pretty much anything you can think of.As seen in the passage I opened this video with, if you were to walk around a Northwest Coast town for just 5 minutes, you would be astounded at all the different things a person can do with one plant.Well, okay, two.The western red cedar and the yellow cedar were both harvested.The wood served as the primary construction material for larger items and anything carved.Canoes were made by hollowing out a single cedar log.Logs also served as the frame for longhouses and other buildings like smokehouses, as well as for carving and totem poles.Cedar wood splits very consistently, so one can make planks by driving wedges into one end of a log and working the split down the log's entire length.
These boards were then used for roofing and siding structures, making decks and platforms, smoke racks, and even plank drums.Smaller items were also made out of the wood.Storage boxes, plates and bowls, spoons, canoe paddles, arrow shafts, quivers, hammer axes and adze handles, mallets, rattles, decorative or ceremonial figurines, ceremonial masks, spears for hunting or fishing, digging and torch sticks, cooking spits, weaving looms, toys and trinkets,whistles, and on and on and on.Boxes were usually constructed in a style called bentwood because a single cedar plank would be steam treated and bent to 90° in three points.The ends would then be joined together with either rope or dowels and a bottom attached in a similar manner.These boxes could be so tight that they could hold water and were often used for cooking.The bark of cedar has two layers, a hard outer bark and a soft inner bark.
This inner bark was removed and had its own long list of uses.In an unprocessed state, it could be used for making small structures like lean-tos and even emergency canoes, as well as smaller items, boards, bowls, boxes, baskets, design templates used in carving, and weak makeshift strings or rope.For most uses, the bark had to be shredded by pounding it between two hard surfaces.In this processed state, it was softer and a prized material for anything braided or woven.Baskets, mats, canoe sails, netting, stronger rope, and clothing items like hats and shawls.To make it even softer, it could be shredded again through a variety of methods that usually involved wringing shredded bark in your hands and treating it with oil, sometimes soaking it in oil or water for weeks.It could even get soft enough to make into comfortable mattresses, blankets, and diapers.Cedar roots, as well as spruce roots, were another prized weaving material, usually being used for baskets or hats.
Whatever the material, weavers and basket makers could achieve weaves so tight as to be waterproof, thereby weaving waterproof clothing and watertight baskets.For rope making, the most valued material was the whites, the lower branchlets that hung from the main branch in long drooping curves.This is because they have an incredibly strong tensile strength, up to 10,000 lb per square inch.They could be processed in a variety of ways to create ropes and nets of differing strength and flexibility.
The speaker explains salmon as the region’s central food staple and describes the seasonal economy built around its harvest. He also outlines the construction and efficiency of fish weirs.
As mentioned repeatedly, salmon was the major food source throughout the region.I talked in the section on sedentism about these economies being storage economies, that rather than following migrating herds of game, they would build up stockpiles of processed and preserved staple foods for out-of-season consumption.Due to the sheer volume of salmon available and their well-known annual migrations, salmon, smoked and dried, was the most stockpiled food resource by far.The timing of the salmon runs varies throughout the region and according to species, but generally occur in late summer through the fall, perfect timing to stockpile for winter.Even today, these runs are massive with millions of fish returning, but before large-scale Western colonization, habitat destruction, and commercial fishing, accounts attest that the numbers of the past were much, much higher.Multiple sources describe rivers choked with fish for weeks on end, so much fish that one could almost walk across a river on their backs.
It's not hard to see why this was such a valuable resource, and at least economically speaking, the Northwest Coast year centered around the fall salmon runs.I mentioned before how labor was specialized in Northwest Coast societies, but the salmon runs were such an important time that it was an all-hands-on-deck scenario with all the men required for fishing and the women for processing the catch.Many different techniques were used to catch the salmon, but perhaps the most efficient was the construction of fish weirs.These were platforms built across the entire length of a river with barred fences extending beneath them into the water to halt the salmon's progress.At regular intervals across the weir, gates in the fencing were installed that funneled the salmon into pens where the fishermen could net or spear salmon in droves from atop the platform.These weirs were so well constructed that they could halt the entire salmon run of a river at a single location.
This final substantive section argues that Northwest Coast societies solved resource-management problems through usufruct rights, cultural sustainability norms, and wealth redistribution. The speaker uses these systems to challenge the tragedy of the commons and concludes that the model supported both abundance and social stability.
It's here that I want to mention something that ties together a lot of what we've discussed.There's a concept in Western economics which many of you are probably familiar with called the tragedy of the commons.Traditional economists are generally very supportive of private land ownership as opposed to communal land ownership because they say communal ownership is less efficient and can easily result in overexploitation.The scenario goes as follows.They say that when land is communally owned and available to be harvested by everyone, there's nobody to regulate how much of the land's resources people take.Thus, people will overharvest out of fear that everybody else is overharvesting and that if they don't take a lot now, they may get none later.This cycle of fear results in a race to the bottom that actually creates the scarcity everyone was so afraid of.To remedy this, so say the economists, the land should be privately owned.
This creates an entity, the landowner, who can impose limits on harvesting or, better yet, exclude people entirely and have complete control over what is done when with the parcel.The landowner is incentivized to harvest responsibly as overextending their land's resources would deplete their future earnings.However, I think we have all the evidence in the world that this system doesn't quite work as intended.Exhibit A, climate change.We have plenty of real-world examples of private ownership of land not stopping that land's overexploitation.However, there are ways to deal with the tragedy of the commons other than assigning private property rights, and Northwest Coast societies demonstrate a couple of ingenious strategies.First is the use of usufruct rights.By assigning the rights to use particular tracts of land to particular family groups, you disperse the population of a town to harvest in different areas, thereby drastically reducing the amount of people trying to harvest on any one parcel.
Likewise, by vesting the usufruct holder with the authority to exclude non-family group members, you've pretty much accomplished the goal of giving some entity regulatory power over the parcel's use while still holding the land in communal ownership.The second strategy is one that is used in pretty much all hunter-gatherer societies that I know of, and a point that I think most Western economists traditionally overlook or at least underestimate.That is that sustainable harvesting practices are a vested value in the culture.These cultures know that they depend on the health of their resource base for their survival.They know that people are capable of taking more than they need, and they know that unchecked overuse like this threatens everyone's livelihoods.Thus, there are strong cultural values enforced through religious tenets and social pressures and communicated from childhood to encourage a sustainable level of harvesting and discourage reckless exploitation.
Title holders who had a bit of authority to regulate harvesting on their land were held personally responsible for ensuring it was done sustainably.Mismanaging and overextending one's land would result in loss of social prestige, among other consequences.Here's one example.I mentioned in the last section that a fish weir could halt the entire salmon run at a single location.Well, that would create quite a problem for everybody upstream since everybody along these rivers relied on the annual salmon migration for their survival, including people in the interior outside of the coastal culture zone.If downstream communities harvested too much salmon and didn't let enough continue upstream, they would both threaten the returns of future runs and risk invasion from their upstream neighbors.Thus, the title holders who operated the weirs had strong social pressures to only permit as much fishing as their community needed.At the beginning of the season, they would first allow the weirs to sit open and the salmon to pass through unobstructed for several days.
Once they'd commenced fishing, they would observe the progress of the catch and call it quits once they'd harvested their fill.Could individuals and elites violate cultural pressures and still over-harvest?Absolutely.But people can also break private property laws, too.The point is it still usually succeeded in providing regulation and enforcement of human behavior.The last strategy ameliorates the issues of both communal and private land ownership.And that is the social requirement of wealth redistribution.Since title holders got rich off the tribute people paid for harvesting on their land, you might assume this would encourage environmentally and socially destructive levels of exploitation.However, we don't see that because the incentive structure actually doesn't incentivize it.If I know that I can only keep my wealth for so long, and that I can only build so much of it before I have to give it all away, then I have no incentive to destroy the health
of my environment, risk conflict with my neighbors, or demand exorbitant labor quotas for my people because I'm not going to keep all that money anyway.Why damage a whole web of relationships to get rich when I can't even keep the money?In fact, the incentive structure actively works against these sorts of antisocial behaviors because I don't get socially rewarded just for having money.I get socially rewarded for giving it away.And what's more, I also get socially punished through embarrassment, shame, or even legal action for hoarding piles of cash without redistributing it.Likewise for damaging my environment and community in the pursuit of wealth.And before anybody says anything in the comments, this system of wealth redistribution does not seem to have created droves of mindlessly lazy welfare leeches sucking off the government teat, air quotes.We have no indication of anything like that anywhere in the written record.
Furthermore, the vibrancy of Northwest Coast material culture obviously demonstrates people putting in work and effort beyond just what they need to survive.All of these strategies, usufruct rights, a cultural value for sustainability, and socially required wealth redistribution enabled the communal ownership of land, the existence of a wealthy elite, and a pretty good quality of life for everybody without over-exploiting theirnatural resources.Maybe these economies are something worth taking lessons from.
The video wraps up with the creator’s personal reflections, a brief support request, and a final thank-you to viewers. It ends the presentation on a warm, appreciative note.
I hope you all enjoyed watching that as much as I enjoyed writing it.I lived in Washington for over a decade, and this region was my introduction to indigenous cultures and affairs as a whole, so I enjoy any chance I get to talk about it.If you like this channel and the stories I tell, please do consider supporting me on Patreon.Even just a few dollars a month from a lot of different people makes a big difference.And if you can't do that, like, subscribe, leave a comment, and hit that notification button to stay in the loop.Thank you all very much for watching, and I will see you next time.