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5. Daily Life - West
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| A. Aboriginal Canada →→ 1. Turtle Island → 2. First Nations - East → 3. Daily Life - East → 4. First Nations - West → 5. Daily Life - West → 6. First Nations - North → 7. Daily Life - North →→ B. Early European Explorers |
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Plains Culture
Plains Aboriginal culture before European contact was based on hunting, fishing, plant gathering and inter-tribal trading. The major factor in plains culture was the hunting of buffalo or bison, and a cycle of mobility based on the migration patterns of the herds.
The bison reached their maximum number and range around 1000 BCE. this was the time that Algonkian Ojibway and Cree people began to move onto the plains from the eastern woodlands, joining their Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan, and Gros Ventre cousins, with the Athapascan Sarcee from the north, attracted by an abundant food source. These new arrivals kept certain aspects of their woodland culture such as pottery making, and fishing. The native Blackfoot looked down on the latter practice, since they did not even consider fish a food.
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Plains people used the bow and arrow, spears and snares for hunting bison, pronghorn antelope, whitetail and mule deer, elk, sheep, mountain goat, beaver and small game. They also built buffalo pounds and buffalo jumps where the beasts could be easily taken without danger. Archaeological evidence shows that they also ate wild parsley, bitterroot and berries for needed vitamins.
Plains bands were nomadic, and consisted of small extended families of 50 to 100 members, travelling great distances on hunting and trading expeditions, and living in hide shelters or teepees (tipis) that were portable and easy to assemble. The word from the Siouian "te" for "dwelling" and "pee" for "used for". Plains women made and owned the tepees, and they could put them up in minutes with little help. They also controlled the seating inside.
The teepees were assembled facing east away from the prevailing winds. The shape was like a tilted cone, with the rear slope steeper than the front, and the floor plan egg-shaped, not circular. This allowed the smoke hole to be located under where the poles crossed, so the size of the hole could be varied depending on the temperature and wind directions. A later innovation was two flaps held by external poles that could be moved to regulate the draft. Not all Plains people used the teepee. The Sarcee, Ojibway, and Cree stayed with their traditional wigwam dwellings if they could find enough saplings and bark.
If the Plains people had a successful hunt, they ate fresh meat, then preserved the rest as pemmican. They dried the bison meat in the sun and wind, then pounded it into a powder, before mixing it with rendered fat and bone marrow, and packing it into bison bladders. Two cows or a large bull made about 40 kg of pemmican. Each kilogram of pemmican gave the same nourishment as 8-112 kg of fresh meat. Pemmican could last for years if berries were not added. It was the major calorie source in the winter, and also fed the dogs that pulled the travois. The dogs themselves were sometimes sacrificed for ceremonial feasts.
The Plains people ate all the parts of the buffalo, and prized the heart, liver, kidneys and tongue. But the buffalo also provided a whole range of weapons, tools and goods essential for living on the Prairies.
The hide could be used for shields, clothing, bags, knife sheaths, drums, saddles and bridles, and teepee coverings; the bones and horns for arrow shafts, knives, hide scrapers, shovels, hammers, saddle horns, needles, spoons, drinking cups; the fat and bone marrow for pemmican and fuel; the sinews for threads, bowstrings and children's games; the hair for halters, ropes and saddle padding; the tail as a mosquito brush; the stomach for cooking pots and water buckets; the bladder for pemmican bags; and the dung for fuel. Even the brains were used, for tanning skins.
The spiritual life was important to the people of the Plains, and they would pray or make an offering to the Great Spirit on waking, or starting a hunt, or before eating. Persons seeking guidance would go on a vision quest to a sacred spot, where they would meditate, fast and pray until their spiritual guardian appeared in a dream.
The eight-day midsummer Sun Dance, usually organized by the women, consisted of four days of ritual preparation, four days of building a sacred lodge with a sacred dance pole, and one day of dancing. The Sun-Gaze and Thirst dances often involved piercing, self-torture and exposure to the sun, which brought visions to the young braves.
The Plateau People
The British Columbia, Yukon and Northwest Territories plateau is home to Athapaskan, Salish and Kootenay speaking people.
The Athapaskan (Athabascan) are the third largest aboriginal linguistic group in Canada. Most live in the frontier areas of the NWT, Yukon and Northern BC. The NWT Athapaskans - the Chipewyan, Beaver, Slaveys, Dogrib and Yellowknives call themselves the Dene people. The Yukon Athapaskans consist of the Hare, Kutchin and Nahani tribes, and the Northern BC Athapaskans are the Chilcotin, Carrier, Sekani and Tahltan tribes. The southern plateau of BC is home to tribes of two linguistic groups: the Interior Salish and the Kootenay.
Athapaskans
The Athapaskan tribes shared a common woodlands culture, hunting, fishing, and gathering, with some differences. Those in the northern parts adapted elements of Inuit culture; those in the south adapted elements of Plains culture. They were a people had to be mobile to make sure they had a plentiful food supply during the long winters. They made their summer huts out of poles or lean-tos covered with brush; in winter, they used teepees covered with hides.
The Athapaskans used basic woodland tools such as stone adzes and knives, chisels made of antlers or beaver teeth, plus fishhooks and awls made of bone. They caught game with spears, bows, snares, and willow bark nets. They also used willow to make water-tight baskets. They used toboggans in the winter, but some also adopted Inuit sledges. In summer they travelled by birch bark canoe, and some used dogs as pack animals.
The caribou was the major source of food, tent covering and clothing for the northern groups while buffalo and deer served the same uses for southern groups. Some Athapaskans lived in small one-family pit houses, while others built winter houses of logs roofed with bark.
Many Athapaskans had access to salmon, but the Chilcotin and some Carrier bands did not, and they had to adopt a more migratory lifestyle, hunting, fishing, digging for roots and gathering berries. They also bartered woven split-root coiled baskets to the Secwepemc and Bella Coola, in exchange for eulachon oil and dried salmon. They also prized Dentalium shells from the coast, and wore them as nose and ear ornaments, often redheaded woodpecker feathers. Dentalium was also used for wampum, and became a medium of exchange with Plains tribes to the east.
Athapaskan clothing was simple and loose-fitting - a shirt or dress in summer and a fur robe in winter. They decorated their clothing with porcupine quill and moose hair embroidery, with rabbit and beaver fur trim.
The Athapaskan tribes liked to tattoo themselves by puncturing their skin and pulling a sinew thread, covered with charcoal or red ochre, through the puncture. They also were embroidered headbands and necklaces made of bear claws, bone and antler.
Their social life centred around the extended family. The various tribes were divided into clans, so marriages could occur outside the family group. Hunting and war chiefs were chosen when the need arose, but they had little tribal authority. Warfare was frequent. The northern groups took no captives, while the southern Athapaskans made slaves of their captives, and had a structured social system of nobles, commoners and slaves.
The Athapaskan tribes had similar religious practices, and relied on their medicine men to heal sickness or ward off evil spirits. They also had a burial practice of covering the body with a small hut with the property of the deceased, to help in the afterlife. These tribes worshipped the moon rather than the sun. At puberty, young men fasted in a quest for their guardian spirit, while young girls secluded themselves for up to four years to prepare for marriage.
Athapaskan populations were stable until the 19th and early 20th century, when smallpox epidemics decimated the people.
The Interior Salish
The Interior Salish and Kootenay of south-central BC were both fishing and gathering societies with some coastal influences, but more elements from the plains tribes. The Interior Salish, who numbered over 15,000 in 1800, did not have the same clan system or secret societies as their Coastal Salish cousins. They relied on the extended family with an hereditary chieftainship passed on to the eldest son. Real authority lay with the council of elders.
The Interior Salish could be a warlike people. The Secwepemc in particular sometimes raided the Chilcotin and the Lillooet for slaves and dried salmon. But they rarely kept slaves - only women and children were taken as captives, they were integrated into the tribe by marriage or adoption. In general, they were a peaceful people, and actively traded dried salmon, roots and berries with each other and to neighbouring peoples. They also traded argillite, chert and nephrite for knives, scrapers and arrowheads, to the Kootenay in exchange for buffalo robes.
The salmon run of the late summer and early fall was the most important time of the year for Plateau people, as families came together along the major rivers to net, trap and spear the fish, and to roast, dry and pound the filets to make a salmon pemmican for the winter months ahead. The most productive salmon stations were controlled by the leading families, especially with the Salish along the Fraser River. Lillooet people reserved the best fishing sites for band members, while the poorer sites were open to anyone.
The hereditary band chiefs of the Secwepemc also controlled access to tribal berry grounds. Other hunting areas such as eagle cliffs and deer fences were owned by families and handed down through the generations.
When the Interior Salish travelled in the summer, they built temporary conical huts covered with rush mats. But they were more sedentary than other tribes, and spent much of the year in their pit houses, a design that originated in northeastern Asia. These were underground circular structures made of logs and covered with sod. Some villages had as many as 100 large family pit houses that housed over a thousand people. Some of the oldest of these houses are 3500 years old.
Over the winter, the Plateau people lived primarily on stored foods such as salmon pemmican, although some went ice fishing for whitefish. In the lean Spring months, they hunted for large game such as deer, caribou, and bears, as well as smaller mammals like rabbit and beaver. The men fished for trout and suckers and the women gathered edible roots, berries, and green shoots of fireweed and cow parsnips.
They used birch bark for household vessels, canoes and summer lodges, and were famous for their tightly woven baskets. In winter they travelled by snowshoe and toboggans. All year round, they used dogs as pack animals like the Plains peoples.
The Interior Salish used sweat lodges heated with hot rocks to purify themselves before feasts and religious ceremonies, and for healing rituals. They also would gather in the larger ceremonial pit houses, where the shaman might live, to perform the Ghost Dance, or listen to stories about the Old One or Coyote, the trickster. Coyote had made the world safe for humans by transforming the people-killing monsters, but Old One usually had to finish Coyote's work, which was often incomplete.
Like their Athapaskan neighbours, at puberty, young men isolated themselves in a search for their guardian spirit and young women went into a period of seclusion that could last for up to four years.
The Kootenay Nation
The Kootenay (Kutenai) originated on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. In the early part of the 18th century they were driven westward into BC and Idaho by the Blackfoot and Stoneys. Up until the mid to late 1800s, they regularly crossed back to the prairies to trade at Rocky Mountain House and Bow Fort and to hunt the buffalo in the foothills.
Kootenay culture closely resembled Plains culture, with some Salish influences. They made their clothing from skins and their teepees from buffalo hides or rush mats. Like the Interior Salish they used birch bark for utensils and canoes. Ornamentation consisted of realistic figures painted on tents, garments and their bodies and some tattooing was practised by both males and females.
The lifestyle of the Plateau people remained relatively unchanged until the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1858, which led to intensive contact and disruption of their culture. The Europeans no longer valued the trade goods and assistance of the aboriginal people, but only wanted to grab land. The smallpox epidemic of 1867-63 was perhaps the greatest blow, killing fully one third of the Aboriginal population of British Columbia, and completely wiping out one tribe, the Nicola.
People of the Northwest Pacific Coast
If the Plains people could be called the people of the buffalo, the Pacific Coast people could be called the people of the cedar. The red cedar tree was the major element of their technology, lifestyle and art, and had a special status in their mythology - the Haida even made the red cedar an ancestor of humanity, and the totem poles made of red cedar carried the stories and emblems of their families.
Red cedar was a light, strong wood, that resisted rot and fungus, an important factor in such a rainy coast. Woodworkers easily felled and shaped the huge logs, using tools of bone and shell. The long, straight grain of the tree let the people split large planks for their houses, and dig out warp-free oceangoing canoes. Weavers used the bark, roots and branches to make watertight hats, clothing, baskets, floor mats and ropes.
The Northwest Coast people were also shaped by the sea, and their mastery of the Pacific came from their carved dugout cedar canoes. These seagoing vessels, with carved bow and stern that kept out the waves, let the Haida routinely travel the inside passage from their Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) homeland 1000 km south to Victoria Harbour. They let the Nuu-chah-nulth [Nootka] voyage into sometimes raging Pacific waters to fish for giant halibut and harpoon gray whales. Some of these vessels reached sixteen metres in length by two metres wide. They could hold up to forty people and two tonnes of cargo.
The Pacific Coast cedar culture blossomed in about 1000 BCE. The art consisted of beautifully crafted bentwood boxes, masks, rattles, and feast dishes, as well as carved and painted totem poles, canoes and plank houses. The people maintained cedar homes in both summer and winter villages, sometimes carrying their planks lashed across several canoes, catamaran style, to make a raft. Haida and Tsimshian were usually about 12m sq. in size, smaller than those to the south, with carved house posts and family crest columns or totem poles in front, and oval doorways that led inside. Some Kwakawa ka'wakw houses had a tall, slender pole topped by an eagle or raven figure, which indicated the house of the beach owner or chief. So the houses reflected a society where rank and social order was carefully and elaborately proclaimed through art.
After spending their summers catching and drying fish, and their autumns hunting and gathering wild food and game, the people spent their winters feasting, hosting family gatherings, and meeting for spiritual events.
The potlatch, from the Nuu-chah-nuth word "pachite", meaning "to give", was the most important social ritual in their society, and one which the European newcomers tried to stamp out. A potlatch was held when a chief of one lineage or extended family invited outsiders to a celebration of feasting, dancing, singing, storytelling, and gift giving. Potlatches were a kind of validation feast for a chief and his family, and confirmed the social order of the people and their relations with their neighbours. They were called to celebrate marriages or the dead, bestow titles or names, heal the shame of accidents, recognize succession to ranks and titles. The memory of the potlatches handed down by elders represented the history of the whole people.
Each potlatch ended with the host chief giving presents to his guests according to their rank. All males, except for slaves, inherited their rank, but people could rise or fall in rank depending on their achievements or behaviour. Slaves had no rank or rights - they could be traded, given away or even killed when they were too old to work.
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The more a chief could give away at a potlatch - in the way of canoes, carved dishes, jewelry, bentwood boxes, blankets, eulachon (oolachen or candlefish) oil or slaves - the greater was his prestige. But if a chief impoverished himself through potlatch giving, he could be sure he would get his wealth back, or even increased, at future potlatches given by neighbouring chiefs. A lack of understanding of the social nature of the potlatch by missionaries led to their outlawing by the Canadian government, but the law was struck down in 1951.
Sidelight: 1700 - West Coast People Hit by Tsunami The Thunderbird Battling the Whale What is now called The M9 Cascadia Megathrust Earthquake occurred at about 9:00 pm on January 26, 1700. It was one of the largest earthquakes in history, probably a category 9 quake, and caused great damage on Haida Gwai, Vancouver Island and in Washington State, depositing a blanket of sea sand on top of forest soils many kilometres inland from the shore. It collapsed the houses of the Cowichan people and caused heavy landslides. Elders say the shaking was so violent that people could not stand. The quake lasted so long it made people sick. The resulting tsunami completely destroyed the winter village of the Pachena Bay people on Vancouver Island. There were no survivors. It also swept across the Pacific also causing immense destruction along the Pacific coast of Japan. Scientists are interested in native stories about a great flood, like the tale Makah elder Helma Ward's grandfather passed on to her long ago. Native stories can help researchers learn more about that earthquake and resulting tidal wave, says Ruth Ludwin, a University of Washington earthquake scientist. The tribal stories provide a line of evidence from the only people who were here to witness it... The evidence indicates that we've had seven of these (mega-thrust quakes) in the last 3,500 years, she said. Given this, Ludwin says, it would be a surprise if the tribes didn't have stories about such traumatic events. The Hoh and Quileute tribes talk of a thunderbird-whale battle featuring a trembling of the earth beneath and a rolling up of the great waters. The Makah talk of canoes in trees, homes destroyed and lives lost. The Kwakiutl speak of thunder, flooding and how "the ground was made bad."Image: Many Pacific Northwest tribes depict an epic battle between a thunderbird and a whale that scientists believe describe a massive earthquake and tsunami. A Quileute drawing includes a waxing moon in the center, which would coincide with the lunar phase on the night of the Cascadia quake of Jan. 26, 1700. Note: "The undersea Cascadia thrust fault ruptured along a 1000 km length, from mid Vancouver Island to northern California in a great earthquake, producing tremendous shaking and a huge tsunami that swept across the Pacific. The Cascadia fault is the boundary between two of the Earth's tectonic plates: the smaller offshore Juan de Fuca plate that is sliding under the much larger North American plate.... The January 26, 1700 event was not a unique event, but has repeated many times at irregular intervals of hundreds of years. Geological evidence indicates that 13 great earthquakes have occurred in the last 6000 years. " External Links
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| First Nations - West - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Student Activities | Daily Life | Student Projects |
| A. Aboriginal Canada →→ 1. Turtle Island → 2. First Nations - East → 3. Daily Life - East → 4. First Nations - West → 5. Daily Life - West → 6. First Nations - North → 7. Daily Life - North →→ B. Early European Explorers |
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